[Dialogue] FW: Jerry Falwell gave a kick to progressives

[Jim Rippey]

Thank you, Janice Ulangca, , for Rev. Ron Stief positive comments on
Falwell's life and his passing.  I personally am glad Falwell's hateful
influence is silenced.  But still, I have been taken aback by the vitriol
expressed by some who opposed him.  So I did appreciate Rev. Stief's opening
statement:


"
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-ron-stief/thanks-jerry-falwell-_b_48829.h
tml> Thanks, Jerry Falwell . . . for Making Me Go to Seminary!"   And I
particularly appreciated his summation:


"In a personal, spiritual sense, I will miss him, but, well, I just hope for
the sake of his own soul that he was wrong in believing that the Bible is
the literal word of God. If it is, his period of judgment will be long and
harsh, possibly worse than he ever imagined for the many categories of good
Christians and good non-Christians he vilified and condemned to a life of
eternal damnation. For the one thing the God of the Bible doesn't tolerate,
regardless of who is behind it, is the persecution of the vulnerable and the
marginalization of the innocent."

I also resonated with these two paragraphs of his:  

 

"I abandoned my plans to go to law school and headed to the Pacific School
of Religion in Berkeley to earn my Divinity degree. From the day I arrived
-- and even before on my application -- my purpose in life was now to
organize the counter-force in progressive religion that would stop the Moral
Majority from distorting the Biblical message..."   

 

And later:  

"Poll after poll shows that the conservative Christian movement is losing
the struggle for the hearts and minds of American on key issues like gay
rights, even though they have had a lot of victories in passing anti-gay
marriage initiatives. People are awakening from their long slumber. The
culture is recovering from a dangerous period ushered in by the Moral
Majority of equating Christianity with gay-bashing. The religious right has
splintered, as many, in the National Association of Evangelicals and others,
see the dangers of global warming, Darfur, the global HIV/AIDS crisis, and
poverty in America as Biblical issues that trump the obsession of the far
right of keeping women in their place in the home and the doctor's office. A
contemporary Christian identity is being birthed from both the left and the
right that meets somewhere in the middle on setting a new public policy
agenda that meets the real needs of our society, not some mythological
strategy of gathering personal power by vilifying the most vulnerable."

Personally, in my darkest doubts, I have never abandoned the idea that the
best thing good people could do is work to make the spirit of the Sermon on
the Mount a reality in our social institutions and our personal lives.  Rev.
Ron Stief seems to be living his life very effectively in that spirit.
Thanks for sharing his thoughts with us.

Jim Rippey in Bellevue, NE   

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