Another Bomb At Falwell Funeral: Republicans

Amidst the news of the bomb plot at the funeral of Jerry Falwell -- a bomb plot that really wasn't much of a bomb plot -- was a very startling item. It was the very last paragraph of the AP story:

No national Republicans attended Tuesday's funeral, including none of the GOP presidential candidates. All said they were too busy.

No president, no vice president, no senate or house leaders. Is none strong enough to give Falwell a respectful thank you and goodbye for his work to take the GOP to a new level? Were they afraid because of the recent leftist attacks or by the tasteless gaffes that troubled Falwell in his final years?

Cowards, all; more afraid of the criticism in tomorrow's media than respectful of a man who, yes, deserved criticism, but more so, deserved thanks.

No Rudy, Mitt or John. Strange, isn't it, that so few years after the Moral Majority made history not one of the three leading GOP candidates has a personal history as a professed believer (Christian believer in the case of Romney)?

I think it's pretty easy to decipher what's going on here: It's Bush's fault. President Bush pushed public faith not into new areas, but into new areas for our time, carrying his faith in the natural way of Presidents a century or more earlier. To Christian conservatives, that played well enough to secure his elections.

Now in the sixth year of the presidency, no one's rushing to follow the Bush model, and today at the Falwell funeral, we found that that goes for religion, too. Perhaps especially for religion.

We are in the midst of a secular election, it appears, but we are no more a secular nation today than we were when Falwell got rolling in the 1970s. As an evangelical, I'm more than happy to vote in an election that doesn't have religion as a mejor meme, but I'll remember my Moral Majority lessons and my conscience will be intertwined with my selection process.

And, thanks to the man the GOP leadership and candidates all snubbed today, so will quite a lot of my brothers and sisters in Christ.

hat-tip: memeorandum