You can’t question God. Next question, sinner.
-Joe
So, not only was his first impulse evil, so was his second. Detestable through and through.
Basically. I should have taken notes. Hopefully Robertson will kick off soon and the era of the Asshole Televangelists will come to an end.
-Joe
We’d still have James Dobson.
Did anyone catch Christopher Hitchens on Anderson Cooper’s show last night? A more honest commentary on the legacy of person has never been seen on television. He tore him to shreds. It was beautiful.
For anyone who didn’t, there’s a clip on YouTube here.
Heh. Good old Hitch. He wouldn’t be capable of pulling a punch if his life depended on it.
I wouldn’t worry about it. A new generation of charismatic, square jawed evangelicals are being groomed for their ascension. Wait, did I say not worry?..
He was a thoroughly evil man, who invented a God in his own deranged image. If there really were a just God, that man would have died one of the slowest, most agonizing deaths in history. Now we have to deal with his odious legacy.
Ddddaayumm… c’mon, Chris, don’t hold back, tell us what’s on your mind…
Oral Roberts is also still around, though not quite as oral as he used to be.
Jimmy Swaggart is also furtively grunting in the shadows.
has the term “douchebag” been mentioned yet? if it has, it bears repeating. if it hasn’t, i do believe it should come up several more times before this thread is done with.
i do offer my condolences to his family, if conditionally - as falwell was one the most hateful persons to have shared time on this planet with myself, i’ll excuse myself for a brief happy-dance on the news of his passing. but i won’t do it in front of those who loved him.
but i do recognize that he was an influential political voice, for all of the wrong reasons.
looking around, i can guess that the world may be, though only slightly so, better off without him.
and good riddance.
if only i could bring myself to believe in the likes of a hell like he could describe… because if anyone deserves that kind of torture, he’s definitely near the top of the list.
Thanks, Argen!
There is a sense, though, that the big guns of right-wing Christianism are mostly pretty old, their time will soon pass, and the next generation of leaders won’t have quite the sweep of influence they did, nor will they be quite as extreme.
In the ‘old’ category, James Dobson is 71 years old, Pat Robertson is 77, and Falwell was 73. James Kennedy is 76. The reason you haven’t heard much from Oral Roberts lately is that he’s 89. Tim LaHaye (of the Left Behind novels) is 80. His wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America, is 78. Phyllis Schlafly, who I’m convinced is one of the undead, is 82. Don Wildmon (of the American Family Association, which once found Cheers too permissive for its tastes) is a mere kid at 69.
I think the current generation of Christianist leaders has 8-10 years at most to rile up our politics, and then they’ll be too old to make an impact. So there’s not going to be a gradual succession of new leaders replacing old; they’re going to have a bit of…not exactly a leadership void, but a situation where all these people are going to die or retire in a fairly short span of time, and the evangelical community won’t see their successors as having the same authority.
Meanwhile, younger evangelicals are blogging and networking, and are less accepting of top-down authority. And they’ve got an overlapping but still very different set of issues that they regard as important. They still consider abortion to be a big issue, but global warming and Third World poverty are too, as they see it. For the past generation, evangelicals have followed the leadership of Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, and so forth as they pushed an agenda that was not only right-wing on social issues, but pro-business and pro-rich as well. I don’t think the pro-business, pro-rich parts of the Christianist agenda will survive the transition very well.
From your lips!