Righteous warfare, circa 1980

You may remember, if you're old enough, that it was Jimmy Carter, then President of these United States, who helped fashion what became known as the Camp David Accords, an attempt at creating peace in the Middle East. It was September of 1978. The Schaap family happily welcomed its second child, David Michael, that year, and I'd just begun my third year of teaching at a college I didn't leave until retirement, thirty-some years later. 

I'd been a liberal since 1970 or so, when it seemed to me that the Republican view of the Vietnam War--"we're fighting communism so keep shooting"--seemed long-since ridiculous. It was costing us far too much. 

Chances are, if you can remember that time, you likely remember even more clearly the bitterness with which the nation viewed the hostages being held by Iran and our inability to get them freed--either by force or by negotiation. The hostage horrors bedeviled Carter's Presidency, so much so that anyone who remembers those years likely has an image--as I do--of a rather feckless President, who lacked the courage or the guile or the testosterone to get those 60 hostages  home. Their captivity went on for 444 days.

What I couldn't have known was that Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for President in 1980, long before the election that November, let the Iranians know, by way of a special, secret envoy, that if the Iranians would hold on to the hostages, the Reagan administration would give them a better deal. 

The Iran hostage crisis could well have doomed the Carter Presidency. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 489 electoral college votes to Jimmy Carter's 49. In 1980, I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where a pall fell over the English department I'd just entered. Among the libs, Reagan was not well-thought of.

I have no idea how much I knew about Jerry Falwell back then. I knew there was a Liberty University, an institution the then mega-church showman started on the basis of his popularity, and I knew that he was dipping his righteous fingers in American politics; but he wasn't really my concern. I'd voted for Carter, but I wasn't among those who believed that a Reagan Presidency would be a horror. 

What I didn't know is that this Jerry Falwell was brokering a marriage between politics and Christianity that was not only new, but scary. To do that, Falwell had to take on Jimmy Carter, one Southern Baptist shafting another. So he did. 

Here's how Tim Alberta describes that moment in time in The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, a book that every believer should read: 

In 1980, Falwell assembled a new coalition of voters--fundamentalist, evangelicals, Southern Baptists, Pentecostals, and all manner of vagrant Christians, plus, thanks to the emphasis on abortion, Catholics--around the message that traditional values were being extinguished by Carter and his godless government.

 What Alberda doesn't say--maybe because he doesn't need to--is that it wasn't just ideas that Falwell was peddling in order to bring down Jimmy Carter, it was also heartfelt prayer. He'd beseech the throne of the Lord, asking him to make American strong again and bring on Ronny Reagan as someone who would bring decency and truth to the world we lived in.

Is it just me, or do others see all of this, today, as despicable, as sin? Jimmy Carter is in hospice--he may well leave this world today or this week. His family says he appears to respond to things, even though most of what he was is gone. Any decided look at his legacy today has to include the abundant measure of mercy and grace he left in our world. He was a man who lived love, just didn't talk about it in the Sunday School class he taught in Plains, Georgia.

Jerry Falwell is gone. His legacy includes Liberty University, but it also include graft and mayhem. To think that Falwell prayed fervently for the destruction of the Jimmy Carter's presidency, in the name of politics, seems impossible. Alberta says,

Having already spent millions of dollars pummeling the president on radio stations nationwide, he poured an additional $10 million that fall into ads portraying Carter, as he himself would later recall, as "a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.'"

Is that amazing or just awful--or some combination of the two. 

Falwell is gone, but similar prayers still arise--and in abundance.