evanmorris.com

Jerry Falwell’s (real) life flashes before our eyes.

Wow. It’s clear this wasn’t written by the US media:

US evangelist Jerry Falwell dies - Financial Times - MSNBC.com

The Rev Jerry Falwell, whose evangelical convictions and organisational abilities, including as a founder in 1979 of the Moral Majority movement, did much to place religious conservatives in a role of great influence in American politics, died on Tuesday in Lynchburg, Virginia, of apparent heart failure at the age of 73.

He was a figure of immense controversy over the last 40 years, outspoken to the point that his apologies appeared almost as regularly as his thundering denunciations. To him the three great scourges afflicting his country were “atheism, secularism and humanism,” and nothing would deter him from defeating his evil trinity.

Most notoriously, he laid the blame for the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, at the feet of his domestic opponents. “I really believe,” he said at the time, “that the pagans, the abortionists and the lesbians … and all those who have tried to secularise America helped this happen.” His subsequent recantation attracted less attention.

Early in his career he was an avowed segregationist, frequently featuring the likes of Lester Maddox and George Wallace, the diehard southern governors, on his tele-evangelical programmes. He often spoke scathingly of what he called the Civil Wrongs Movement, a position from which, in later years, he again retreated

He strongly supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, once dismissing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize laureate, as “a phony”. He was an equally ardent backer of Israel, believing that turmoil in the Middle East was the precursor of the Second Coming of Christ, with the stipulation that “the Anti-Christ must be, of necessity, a Jewish male.”

[more at link, unless MSNBC has pulled it]

Update: Of course they pulled it. You can find it here.

Last updated on Tuesday, May 15, 2007