Good manners tell us not to speak ill of the dead. But my Siddur Sim Shalom also suggests that our memories of the departed be "not falsified by sentimentality."

Not that I was inclined to greet the news of Jerry Falwell's death with much sentimentality. The founder of the Moral Majority left a grim legacy, not so much for the conservative positions he took but for the way he reduced the religious debate in this country to a dogfight over a few narrow and unnecessarily distracting issues.

In saying goodbye, Jewish leaders like Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League had to balance disagreement with menschlichkeit. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, acknowledged that he and Falwell "disagreed often and deeply on the application of religious teachings and traditions to the public sphere." And Yoffie declared that Falwell "too often…used faith to create divisions within our society."

But Yoffie, whose movement's liberal stand on most issues usually puts it on the opposite side from the Religious Right, had a detente with Falwell in recent years after the Baptist preacher invited the rabbi to speak at his Liberty University. Falwell's "commitment to encouraging Americans to express their faith was genuine, unmistakable, and admirable," wrote Yoffie.

I wonder why "commitment" remains such an admirable trait when put in the service of a set of extremely odious ideas. And neither the fact of Falwell's death nor his strong support for Israel should be allowed to obscure how odious some of his ideas were.

It was Falwell who declared publicly and unapologetically that the Antichrist – the embodiment of evil in Falwell's eschatology – "will be male and Jewish, since Jesus was male and Jewish." That may have fit neatly into his theology, to which he was committed and devoted, but it also fit neatly into a set of anti-Semitic attitudes for which Jews paid the price for centuries.

Falwell once described AIDS as "the wrath of a just God against homosexuals." I'll spot Falwell a few points for his traditional views on homosexuality and biblical literalism, but I can't get past the word "just" in that sentence. It is a perverse religious imagination that views as "just" a person's premature death – and one preceded by brain infection, dementia, seizures, and grotesque tumors in the mouth, gastrointestinal tract, and lungs.

The rhetorical flourish for which Falwell will best be remembered were his post-9/11 comments pinning the attacks on "abortionists," pagans, feminists, gays and lesbians, the ACLU, and People For the American Way. Again, I won't quibble with Falwell's theology – the Jewish world is hardly immune from the kind of theodical thinking that finds cause and effect between individual sin and global tragedy. Yet Falwell's laundry list suggests why his influence on both politics and religion will ultimately be judged so harshly by history.

It's one thing to "encourage Americans to express their faith." From Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, great leaders united their fellow Americans behind their deeply felt religious principles. Falwell, by contrast, threw the Christian Right's political strength behind a set of slogans – "pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral, and pro-American" – that drove a wedge between the religious and secular, the Right and the Left, and all the combinations thereof.

Falwell helped make abortion a litmus test, forcing politicians and jurists into a decades-long battle over a single issue at the expense of a series of moral and political challenges facing the country, from war, to health care, to the environment. At a time when Americans were facing stagnant wages, soaring education costs, and a dispiriting war, the Christian Right allowed gay marriage to be the measure of a candidate's moral worthiness. Instead of promoting religious values through good works and philanthropic example, Falwell's followers devoted millions of dollars and buckets of political capital to a campaign to inject religion back into public school classrooms.

Imagine, for example, that Falwell had put the might of the Moral Majority behind access to affordable health care. Instead of railing against pagans and feminists, what if he had made his political support contingent on a politician's plan to extend health coverage to the nation's 45 million uninsured? Imagine if the litmus test for Republican politicians for the past 25 years had not been abortion but whether or not they support policies that guarantee that no child's first medical visit would take place in an emergency room, that no family would have to choose between rent and a much-needed operation, that no one would need costly treatment for a condition that could have been prevented or treated more efficiently with access to routine health care. Imagine if this had been the definition of "pro-life."

If Falwell's legacy was his "commitment to encouraging Americans to express their faith," he doesn't have much to show for it. The divide between religious and secular has only widened. Secularists view religion not as a force for social good – as in King's day – but for repression, sanctimony, and coercion.

Falwell's heirs have apparently recognized this, and there is a new generation of evangelical pastors who hope to broaden their agenda beyond abortion and homophobia. No less conservative than Falwell, megachurch pastors like Frank S. Page, Rick Warren, and William Hybels want religion to have a voice in addressing global poverty, climate change, AIDS in Africa, even predatory lending practices.

Inevitably, these leaders will also clash with Jewish groups like the URJ and ADL. But in tackling broad issues and essential challenges, these debates will restore religion to a place of honor, where a just God demands a just world.