Jewett Scholar  Michael Novak

Back in 1967 and '68, when I was on the antiwar Left, on the board of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, I often found myself giving lectures around the country, and feeling uncomfortable with the contempt of elements of the Left for the United States--and for policemen and firemen, "the pigs," as the radicals called them with laughter. Radicals in those days screamed, "Power to the People!" One wanted to warn them: "The people that I at least grew up with, the people in most parts of the country, the vast majority who did not go to college (and even the large majority on campuses), are not where you are."

So be careful what you wish for.

"Power to the people," indeed. You can insult people only so many times, before they mobilize themselves in self-defense, to express their own self-confidence.

That is where Jerry Falwell burst upon the national stage. Years before, the disgusting H. L. Mencken had goaded three generations of journalists into the superior habit of spewing contempt upon ordinary Americans--the "Bozos of the Sahara," the "knuckle-dragging" baboons, the "Neanderthals of the hinterlands." Whereas since Jefferson's time the left-leaning elite had championed the yeomen of the countryside, the good, decent, and true citizens that made democracy work, Mencken more than any other American taught our elites to sneer.

Well, Jerry Falwell had had enough of it. It was time, he judged, to stop cowering, and to take on the leftist elites hand to hand, face to face. And to win.

Beyond the fact that both of us were Christians, and both felt close to the people among whom we had been raised, intellectually and theologically Falwell ought to have been suspicious of me, simply in virtue of my being a professor and a writer (given the probabilities), even before shrinking back from my credentials in radical politics. Yet on the one occasion when I met him, on his own university campus, he could hardly have been more cordial--wary, but cordial.

But I have long been grateful to Falwell for helping to pull back the drapes behind which our elites had hidden the vast majority of Americans, and cheerfully making their presence known.

That is one of the qualities that Falwell shared with Ronald Reagan, that permanent cheerfulness. Many of us admired it in both.

Of course, those for whom Falwell spoke directly--mostly, the evangelicals of southern Virginia and other localities like it all across the nation, even in Massachusetts, New York, and the Pacific northwest--were not really a majority, only a very big minority. And, while personally some may not have been quite so moral as their name suggested, they were at least willing to defend in public the public standards by which they would be judged. Still, many were in fact extremely decent, kind, dependable, and very brave people.

Jerry Falwell also made it fun to recall that the main reason our nation has a First Amendment is that his Baptist forebears in southern Virginia, constituents of James Madison in the toughest congressional race of Madison's life, refused to promise him their votes until he pledged that he would return to Congress and fight for passage of a religious-liberty amendment. Madison was reluctant (he argued that such rights were already protected in the Constitution as written), but he gave his word and he kept it.

It is a nice irony, isn't it, that Jerry Falwell's Baptist forebears led the charge for that very First Amendment, which our secularists today try to turn against them, and without even a word of gratitude to them, for getting it enacted in the first place?

Jerry Falwell, thanks a lot! Thanks a lot for helping America to be America again, by revealing to all of us a crucial part of our national diversity. Your folks were Jefferson's folks, and Madison's folks. And we salute you for reminding us of that.

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.