Jerry Falwell blamed America for the attacks of September 11, 2001; favored Christian prayer in public schools, and favored criminalizing all abortion. In other words, we didn’t agree with him on all the issues. He was a staunch supporter of Israel, so much so that Prime Minister Begin awarded him the Jabotinsky Medal. But on the occasion of Falwell’s death yesterday at age 73, what we found ourselves thinking is that his views had a way of resonating with an awful lot of Americans — and we’re not sure whether it matters whether they are a majority or merely a large minority.

The common ground Falwell discovered with a vast audience, whether or not they agreed with him on religious doctrine, on politics, on evolution, on abortion, on homosexuals, was on the proposition that America’s secular elites had gone too far in trying to eradicate religion from the public square and that our universities and even many public schools had gotten too far out of touch with mainstream American values. It was, to put it in journalistic terms, a scoop of enormous significance that he worked with great effect for years.

One doesn’t have to be a right-winger, a fundamentalist or even a Christian like Falwell to comprehend that religion can play a constructive role in American politics. Our history is filled with giants, from such clergymen as Rev. Samuel Cooper, who supported the American Revolution, to abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who helped build support for the end of slavery, to ministers such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who fought for desegregation and civil rights.

If Falwell in his stridency sometimes seemed hostile to American pluralism, it is a tribute to America’s pluralism that it could accommodate his leadership and influence without breaking or abandoning its Constitution and the protection it provides to smaller factions who don’t share his views or who don’t even believe in God. America, through the political process, could adjust itself slightly to the point where the Supreme Court now includes Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Alito, who don’t always hew to what Falwell might have called the ACLU view of the Constiution.

Yet even today abortion remains, for the most part, legal, and mandatory public Christian prayer in public school remains illegal, and none of the Constitutional amendments backed by Falwell gained passage. Falwell’s followers may see that as a sign there is more work to be done, but we view the Falwell phenomenon, finally, as evidence both of the appeal of his message and of the limits of its appeal and of the inspiring resilience of our constitutional system and of the wisdom of our Founders, who understood that freedom could never prosper where religion may not.