Falwell and followers
The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. By Susan Friend Harding. Princeton University Press, 352 pp., $50.00; paperback, $18.95.
Many of us expect perfection from America's religious leaders and then quickly pounce on them when they are inevitably revealed as no better than human. The discovery of Jesse Jackson's adultery provided the most recent example. His perennial opponents gleefully exulted in having public proof of the preacher's imperfection, and even those who usually support Jackson's efforts wondered aloud at the speed with which his sins were acknowledged and pushed aside. Meanwhile, Jackson's flock rallied around him, eagerly providing a supportive backdrop for the televised melodrama of confession and forgiveness.
The cultural elite is often befuddled and outraged when followers continue to support those involved in scandal. What's wrong with these people? Don't they understand what this hypocrite has done? Only religiously deluded simpletons, some conclude, could be hoodwinked into forgiving and forgetting so quickly and completely. What such critics fail to understand is that the credibility of religious leaders like Jackson does not depend entirely, or even mostly, on their flawlessness. Focusing upon Jackson's missteps and contradictions leads cultural observers to read the story of Jackson's life much as literalists read biblical tales, as stories whose authority and credibility depend upon empirically verifiable moral purity and the absence of contradictions between messenger and message.
