Falwell: Alive and kicking in today's GOP

NCR blogger and coloumnist Michael Sean Winters has just had a book published by HarperOne, a biography of Jerry Falwell titled God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right.

NCR will review the book in it's Winter Books in a few weeks. That whole special section is devoted to the nexus of religion and polotics. Until then, if you want a peack at Winters' book, here's a review from The Charlotte Obssever, which I just saw: Falwell’s Moral Majority echoes in today’s GOP

Here's a taste from the review:

A simple man with a bulging dose of self-confidence, Falwell was disgusted with what he saw as America’s libertine habits, including what he regarded as a renunciation of religion. He envisioned a return to an idyllic earlier time that may never have been. Winters speculates that conservative Southerners such as Falwell transferred the racial superiority they had lost in the wake of integration into a national superiority that conflated religious faith with patriotism.

... For his help in bringing evangelicals to the polls, the Republican Party adopted Falwell’s social positions on abortion, Planned Parenthood and homosexuality, to name a few.

Unfortunately, as Winters insightfully points out, in linking Christianity so intimately with politics, Falwell may have succeeded in alienating a younger generation of Americans that may be rejecting his politics as well as his religion.

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