For more than three decades, the Rev. Jerry Falwell guided the white evangelical masses of the South into the Republican Party, culminating in the most outwardly pious presidency in modern American history. Having first gained notoriety as a hard-line segregationist in rural Virginia, he won power as the televised prophet of a partisan gospel. Scarcely had he gone to his ultimate reward, however, before his friends and allies threatened to dismantle that legacy -- and the dominance of the party to which he had devoted his ministry.
The late preacher can hardly be blamed for the ruinous condition of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. But with the tandem rise of Rudolph Giuliani, a pro-choice Catholic, and Mitt Romney, a highly flexible Mormon, Falwell's old flock is feeling deeply alienated. Within days after his death, the leaders of the movement he symbolized began to proclaim a message of dissension.
