Lake Neuron

Well, I heard back from my old college chaplain Bill Meenk after dropping him a line, as I said I would in last night’s post. I enjoyed re-connecting with him and getting the chance to thank him.

The editor was asking for opinion page copy today, and I happily wrote up a little column summarizing the whole story, very similar to what you saw in my earlier post. As in that post, I used my smart-aleck convention of referring to Oral Roberts University as Famous Televangelist University.

Now, I’ve asked the editor to pull the column, at least for this week, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was making fun of a different TV evangelist — Jerry Falwell, who passed away this morning.

I disagreed with some of Falwell’s pronouncements and with the ham-handed way in which he and others like him tried to link politics and religion. Yes, anyone’s faith is going to influence their politics, on a personal level, and that’s exactly as it should be. But when religious organizations get into deciding who is the “Christian” candidate and who isn’t, I think it corrupts both religion and politics.

But Falwell sometimes surprised me. I recall reading that he and Sen. Ted Kennedy had become friends, despite their sharply-different political views, and were trying to maintain a dialogue. Falwell also took a lot of undeserved criticism for something a subordinate did in l’affaire Tinky-Winky. A Falwell employee, not Falwell himself, had written the notorious magazine article claiming that the purple Teletubby was a gay propaganda tool. Falwell laughed off the issue at one point when he was first asked about it and said he’d never even seen the show. But it became a sort of urban legend — and grist for comedians — that Falwell himself had outed the children’s character.

Anyway, regardless of my feelings about TV evangelism in general or Falwell in particular, it would be wrong to mock him — or even let people think I was mocking him — at a time like this.