Falwell never grasped how to brand faith for pop cultural consumption.
Sarah PosnerMay 16, 2007
Jerry Falwell was not a diminutive man in any sense of the word, but he died yesterday diminished. Falwell's star rose in the 1980s -- he was an anachronism who elbowed his way onto the national stage alongside Gordon Gecko and MTV, showing the rest of America that religious fundamentalism still thrived in a decade more associated with the seven deadly sins than the four Gospels. Falwell's legacy -- the fact that fundamentalist preachers control enough votes for the Republican Party to seem congenitally addicted to them -- is clear enough. But those who seek to walk in Falwell's political footsteps learned something from the decade of greed that Falwell never did: Christianity, like anything else, needs to be packaged, marketed, and consumed.
