Politics & Power Quote by Jerry Falwell

Falwell’s line is built like a sermon but functions like a political weapon: a theologically dressed verdict delivered at the exact moment Americans were desperate for comfort, not prosecution. “Lift the curtain” casts catastrophe as revelation, turning terror into a divine teaching aid. The phrasing implies there has always been a hidden truth about the nation, and God is now letting us see it. That’s rhetorically potent because it relocates the argument from the messy realm of policy and geopolitics to the cleaner, unanswerable arena of providence.

The most loaded word is “allow.” It preserves God’s sovereignty while granting “enemies of America” agency as mere instruments. The enemies aren’t victorious; they’re permitted. That framing sidesteps contingency and replaces it with moral arithmetic: America sinned, so America is being disciplined. The kicker, “probably what we deserve,” is both hedged and accusatory. “Probably” gives just enough deniability to soften the cruelty, while “deserve” hardens the moral claim. It invites listeners to read national trauma as an indictment of national character.

Context matters: Falwell’s prominence in the Moral Majority era made him a translator between conservative evangelical theology and partisan identity. In that role, “America” is not just a country but a moral project, and blaming the nation becomes a way to target specific internal enemies - secularism, sexual liberalism, pluralism - without naming them in the sentence. The subtext is a demand for cultural repentance as policy: change the country’s behavior, and God might stop “allowing” history to happen to us.