The son of an agnostic bootlegger, Jerry Falwell found Jesus at age 18 but didn't find politics until much later--and when he did, he was no fundamentalist. His great American invention was not the marriage of religion and politics, since they hadn't lived apart in the first place. It was that he married political friends with religious enemies in pursuit of a common goal. Falwell, who died May 15, didn't care that Jimmy Carter was a Bible-believing Baptist if he still had the soul of a Democrat or that Ronald Reagan was a divorced cinemactor, as long as he was a...
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