The real legacy of the Reverend Jerry Falwell.

THE REVEREND JERRY FALWELL, leader of the Moral Majority and a man who for many Americans personified the religious right, died on May 15.

American cultural norms hold that it's wrong to speak ill of the dead--unless the person was truly evil. I wouldn't call Falwell that. He was misguided, to be sure, and his political activism was all too often based on dividing the public and demonizing classes of people because of their political beliefs, sexual orientation, or religious or philosophical views.

Nevertheless, we can't simply paper over Falwell's legacy in the wake of his death. In my view his impact on U.S. politics was wholly negative. It's proper to make a sober assessment of the man who for so many years led the assault on humanists, liberal Christians, gays, feminists, and others whom he perceived to be his enemies.

Religious right leaders were quick to eulogize Falwell as some sort of giant among humankind. "Jerry's passions and convictions changed the course of our country for the better over the last twenty years--and I was proud to call him my friend," said James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council saluted Falwell as a "man of conviction" who will "be missed for his unique ability to speak the truth even in the face of great opposition." The Reverend Rick Scarborough, a Texas pastor who considered Falwell a mentor, said, "In every generation there are men who rise above the rest. Dr. Jerry Falwell was such a man."

Was he? A few days after Falwell died, I spent some time updating a timeline of his life for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. I was reminded that Falwell was little more than a hardcore political operative with extreme views who often embraced a philosophy of "the ends justify the means." This is hardly a Christian worldview. He was also a hypocrite who frequently had only a passing relationship with the truth.

Consider just a few examples:

* In 1978 Falwell blasted the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church in Esquire magazine. "Reverend Sun Myung Moon is like the plague: he exploits boys and girls, and he should be exported," Falwell said. Ten years later Falwell began accepting huge sums from Moon's groups to give speeches.

* In his first book, a collection of his sermons, Falwell called for abolishing the public school system. He spent the next twenty years denying he had ever said that. He even argued that the book was produced without his permission, a clumsy lie that was handily debunked by the book's publisher.

* Falwell spent much of the Bill Clinton presidency hawking a video called The Clinton Chronicles that he helped produce. The video's charges were so scurrilous--it accused Clinton of being a drug addict and of engineering murders--that even some conservatives condemned it.

* Falwell's newspaper, the National Liberty Journal, attacked the popular PBS children's series Teletubbies as a gay front. In a 1999 speech he asserted that the Antichrist would be Jewish. Elsewhere he compared Hillary Clinton to Satan and called lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres "Ellen Degenerate."

* And worst of all: two days after September 11, 2001, Falwell went on national television and blamed the attacks on advocates of church-state separation, gays, and pro-choice groups. He said the attack on the nation was "probably what we deserve."

Pardon me if I don't see a lot to applaud here. Falwell's career was marked by naked partisanship, crude personal attacks against anyone who dared to oppose him, cheap fund-raising stunts, and intolerance.

That is the legacy of Jerry Falwell. That is what future historians will remember about him.

But none of this means he was unimportant. Falwell did for a time lead a movement that has had a profound impact on U.S. politics. (Incidentally, the Moral Majority wasn't his idea. The blueprints for the group were handed to Falwell by a band of right-wing political activists looking for a way to urge white Southern Democrats to join the Republican Party. They decided that an emphasis on social issues like school prayer, gay rights, feminism, and evolution was the key. Falwell didn't even come up with the name "Moral Majority"--conservative activist Paul Weyrich did.)

The Moral Majority existed for just ten years. When Falwell shut it down in 1989, the postmortem showed that the group had largely been a paper tiger. But other religious right leaders learned from Falwell's mistakes and formed more effective grassroots groups like the Christian Coalition.

After shuttering the Moral Majority, Falwell quickly became irrelevant. Although he often appeared on cable news programs, in later years he surrounded himself with an array of organizations with fancy names that existed only on paper. He didn't have an effective political operation. Today his legacy lives on in groups he had nothing to do with, like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and the Alliance Defense Fund.

Falwell's death led to a new round of claims that the religious right is kaput. Falwell may have been a has-been, but the movement he helped birth is now a permanent part of the U.S. political scene. The religious right is firmly ingrained in the GOP and couldn't be removed, even if the party wanted that.

If you doubt the power of the religious right, witness the steady erosion of abortion rights, the Bush veto of stem-cell research, ongoing tax funding of abstinence-only sex education (even though it's been proven ineffective) and faith-based intiatives, and the increasingly right-wing tilt of the federal judiciary. The religious right even played a role in scuttling immigration reform and has supported the Bush administration's refusal to take global climate change seriously.

Based on his antics and extreme statements during his later years, many people view Falwell as a kind of buffoonish character. That view is unfortunate. Falwell didn't invent the concept of mixing religion and politics, but he helped launch a trend that quickly outgrew him and was soon superseded by more effective and sophisticated leaders. We will be dealing with the fallout from that for many years to come.

Every time you fight to keep evolution in your public schools, oppose censorship at the local library, stand up for gay rights, or march in support of legal abortion, you are reacting to forces that seek to control our lives through the imposition of rigid dogma. You are, in a very real way, confronting the legacy of Jerry Falwell.

Rob Boston is assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.