May 21, 2007
Religion Department
If You Fall Well That's Okay
So, I hear that Jerry Falwell died.
I was in high school and my early college years during the heyday of the Moral Majority, a bunch of busybodies who seemed terribly worried that people were enjoying themselves in ways they did not approve. In particular, they seemed to dislike recreational sex, and they seemed to dislike popular culture—television, movies, and music—that promoted recreational sex.
(By the way, that link isn't to the Moral Majority I knew, which was disbanded in 1989, but to the Moral Majority Coalition, which is a modern re-creation of the original. The website doesn't even mention that Falwell is dead, so I'm not sure how active it is.)
Naturally, I thought Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority were a bunch of crazy people trying to impose their dreary opinions about morality on the rest of us. I know the Moral Majority stood for other causes important to evangelical Christians, and I know Falwell has done many other things, but the Moral Majority's war on popular culture was all I ever needed to know about him.
I disagreed with his ideas, and I despised his urge to censorship. My youthful philosophical objections to Falwell's moral crusade eventually lead me down the path to social liberalism and then to the broad anti-coercive freedom of libertarianism. Opposition to Falwell's kind of cultural oppression helped make me the libertarian I am today.
However, I never really understood Falwell and his followers. I never understood why the things they wanted were so important to them. Neither, I think, did most other Americans. For most of the last 20 years Falwell's followers have been losing the culture war, becoming less and less relevant as a result.
When he died it came as a shock to me how many people apparently still took him seriously, believed in the values he advocated, and now mourn his passing. Although I disagreed with his views, I'm not one of those people who's glad he's dead. I don't mourn his passing, either.
Jerry Falwell's death is not relevant to me because his views and values are not relevant to me. I'm glad my world turned out that way.
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