If there was an Olympic gold medal for venality, Jerry Falwell Jr. would be one of America’s best hopes. And I say that without even considering the hypocrisy of the situation that led him to give gobs of money to a “pool boy” he and his wife met at the Fontaineblue Hotel in Miami (I’ve attended a few conferences there, can’t say I’ve ever had reason to have personal interactions with the pool staff.)
No, Falwell deserves a medal for his Olympian attempt to ruin a religion. Given his profile and famous lineage, many associate him as a leader of sorts in evangelical Christianity. That he is the head of a so-called educational institution might lead people to think he has some intellectual standing. And when he discusses the Bible, many might think he represents a faith tradition.
That he does, if grifting is a tradition. Much in the same vein as Franklin Graham, another famous son-of-a-preacher who is determined to reverse-evangelize the globe – that is, to preach to the converted in a way that makes Christianity as unpalatable to non-believers as possible.
I try to avoid paying attention to Falwell, but this week he gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he talks about Christianity and culture in a way that’s so confused and so disgustingly immoral that I’m compelled to use my Christian college education to unpack it.
Social Gospel
For one thing, Falwell basically said that virtually every preacher who has talked about politics since this country has been founded is lying. He says: “It’s such a distortion of the teachings of Jesus to say that what he taught us to do personally — to love our neighbors as ourselves, help the poor — can somehow be imputed on a nation. Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome.”
From the time of the early colonies that were based on religious laws, to Jonathan Edwards to the Great Awakening to Prohibition to the Moral Majority (which he no doubt has heard of), religion has purposely been a major factor shaping American politics and policy. Falwell and his father were enthusiastic supporters of Ronald Reagan, citing the former president’s inspiring words that America was to be a shining beacon to the world of how a nation should act. Reagan’s famous “city on a hill” speech was deliberately quoted from Jesus in the book of Matthew: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” It was a public call to change the national behavior that the Falwells wielded as a club at the time.
But that was then, this is now, because Falwell says: “It’s a distortion of the teaching of Christ to say Jesus taught love and forgiveness and therefore the United States as a nation should be loving and forgiving.”
In Falwell’s new line of thinking, Jesus taught that love and forgiveness should be discarded when it conflicts with the national interest. Now there’s some logic to that — we really don’t want U.S. policy run on the content of the Bible — but it is hard to square with the obscure teachings in a little-known Bible passage referred to by pointy-headed scholars as the “Sermon on the Mount” (sarcasm intended).
In the sermon, Jesus tells the crowd: “What You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[a] and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven … If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”
What Jesus is saying is that people should be loving and forgiving even when it conflicts with individual AND public interest. Tax collection and persecution were a form of oppression by the Roman state, they weren’t merely personal matters.
The social implications of Christianity have been subject of debate for more than 1900 years, pretty much since the religion was founded, even before there was a Bible. Quite honestly, the stakes are relatively low these days. We’re not debating whether to kneel before idols or face execution, whether to convert conquered nations by force or whether to burn heretics. But what hasn’t changed is that people struggle to determine how we should live based on writings from people in a different time and with wildly different world views.
Talking about social justice, Falwell says: “That’s not what Jesus taught. You almost have to believe that this is a theocracy to think that way, to think that public policy should be dictated by the teachings of Jesus.” It’s predictable that Falwell’s interview demonstrates very little depth of two Millennia of thinking on the subject, but what’s more appalling is that it’s almost the opposite of the actual teachings of the Bible that he pretends to revere.
NPR did a story recently about a Christian Bible that British missionaries used in the 1800s to teach slaves. They took out all the passages about social justice so not to incite them to riot. As a result, about 90% of the Old Testament and 50% of the New Testament was removed. The fact is that large portions of the Bible teach a form of social justice. (The irony is that if you similarly created a Bible that removed the issues that are the focus of modern evangelicals – sexual orientation, abortion, the Trinity, souls going to heaven at death, for example – few people would notice changes because those topics represent almost none of the text. Many theological and social concepts/issues that we focus on today did not exist when the Bible was written.)
Jesus Was a Theocrat
One reason it is hard to pin the teachings of Jesus to modern politics is because democracy and human rights were foreign concepts in his day. If you tried to pick a modern system of government closest to the teachings of Jesus, it would unquestionably be theocracy. When Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of Heaven, he basically meant a kingdom on earth managed righteously by Yahweh’s appointed representatives (some combination of Jewish king/priest).
Predictably, Falwell is off base in his mention of theocracy. He says: “Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome. He went out of his way to say that’s the earthly kingdom, I’m about the heavenly kingdom…”
If only there were a way we could test that ... say by reading the words of Jesus in the Bible? How about Jesus’ first public lesson? One would think that a gospel writer would emphasize the first teaching of his protagonist as being of key importance to the narrative. This is the passage with the first teaching of Jesus in the New Testament:
“And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ “
Whatever anybody believes about the truth or current relevance of Jesus’ message, clearly the Bible sees him as a prophet whose ministry would lead to changes in the way the world is governed. Also clearly, there’s very little about Donald Trump’s behavior as a human being or his policies that can be justified on Christian grounds. That has forced his defenders to spit on centuries of Christian doctrine – and more importantly, basic human decency.
Inevitably this topic gives rise to the question of what makes a true Christian — Falwell’s charlatanism is shamelessly transparent and self-serving — but I don’t think that’s relevant. If people give themselves that label, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s what they are. Identity politics is not a modern thing, all politics has always been about identity and always will, it’s human nature.
All this said, I think Falwell deserves credit for exposing the lie at the heart of Republican religion, much in the way that Trump ripped the dog whistle from Republican racism. The church of GOP so obviously lacks any positive human benefit and now one of its leaders demonstrates how impossible it is to defend it on the grounds that its adherents are only following Scripture.