Jerry Falwell, the brimstone-and-treacle preacher who died this week , occupied an especially honoured place in the demonology of America’s critics.

He was, let’s be honest, an easy target, the very avatar of almost everything that alarms people about the modern United States. The received version of recent American history will attest that Falwell played a central part in the nation’s rightward lurch towards intolerance and bigotry in the past 30 years, that he was one of the cross-and-microphone-wielding revolutionaries behind the theocratic overthrow of liberal, tolerant American government.

He played his assigned role brilliantly. He could inspire contempt and fear in equal measure, the booming Southern voice that retailed homespun biblical truths, the organisational zeal that built his own highly successful university and channelled the dotty beliefs of millions of Americans into a political force that called itself the Moral Majority.

He liked to lash feminists, gays and, most disgracefully, in an earlier period, civil rights leaders. When he told his fellow model of Christian piety, Pat Robertson, a few days after September 11 2001, that America had brought the tragedy on itself because it had become a nation of abortionists, sodomites and pornographers, the Religious Right’s opponents hugged themselves in joy. What more apposite proof could you have that these Christians are morally indistinguishable from the Islamist jihadists?

Falwell was, in short, for most non-believers and non-Americans, the model American Christian, the perfect antihero who proves the essential evil and bovine stupidity of religious belief. If Falwell hadn’t existed, the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would have had to invent him (although, to be fair, Hitchens doesn’t confine himself to the easy targets: he once wrote a book documenting Mother Teresa’s depravity). Like Mark Antony at Caesar’s obsequies, I come to bury Falwell, not to praise him. Though I call myself Christian, his brand of “I’m saved, you’re not” fundamentalism was not exactly my cup of tea. And for a believer in the unfathomable mysteries of God’s Universe, his bold claims that he somehow knew exactly the Deity’s intentions when it came to pressing matters of domestic politics smacked, ever so slightly, of the charlatan.

But the more important question is not whether Falwell was a good man or a bad one. What really matters is whether there is any basis to the widely believed claims that he helped to transform American society, reversing the permissive revolution of the 1960s so that religious doctrine trumped individual freedom.

And here the truth is that, for all its supposed grip on the Republican Party, for all the apparent transformation of American government into an intolerant theocracy, the Religious Right has been a bit of a failure. If there has indeed been a Moral Majority, it has been heavily outmanoeuvred and roundly defeated by the Immoral Minority.

On just about all the issues on which Falwell and his co-religionists have fulminated for the past three decades, America has moved in a substantially more permissive direction. Take abortion, the central battleground of politics. Although polls suggest that Americans remain divided about the ethics of widely available abortion, for 34 years Roe v Wade, the controversial, semi-literate Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a constitutional right, has not come close to being overturned.

In this country, this Talebanic prison of religious intolerance, it’s still easy for a woman to get an abortion more or less on demand. In this nation of medieval values, until a few weeks ago it was actually perfectly legal, sanctioned by repeated court rulings, for a woman to have her foetus aborted through a charming little procedure in which the legs and most of the torso are delivered, then the skull is punctured in the womb and the brain evacuated, causing the death of the foetus.

I say until a few weeks ago, because that was when the Supreme Court finally upheld a law, passed by large majorities in both Houses of Congress, to outlaw the procedure. And the response was more instructive than the ruling. The decision to allow elected politicians to ban this barbaric method was greeted in much of the media as a terrible defeat for a woman’s right to choose. The Moral Majority, in other words, has been so successful in changing the rules on abortion that this minor restriction is regarded as an intolerable limit on freedom.

Or take school prayer. Unlike abortion, this is one of those issues that non-Americans find hard to understand. Rigid rules on Church-State separation prevent Americans from receiving any public support for the practice of their faith. Whereas in Britain or most of Europe parents are free to send their children to publicly funded religious schools, in America nothing of the sort is available. Nobody has even tried to change this. Christians have merely sought to overturn repeated draconian interpretations of these laws that forbid even the voluntary recital of a short prayer at ceremonies in state schools – to no effect.

Then there’s gay rights. Surely, you will say, the intolerant Christian Right has succeeded in reversing the liberalisation of the 20th century, so that homosexuality is once again the love that dare not speak its name for fear of retribution by evangelical Sharia? Not exactly. In the 30 years since the Moral Majority was founded, American laws on homosexuality have become dramatically more progressive. A few years ago the Supreme Court struck down the last antisodomy laws on a few states’ statute books. But in practice, most states have long since reached a perfectly decent state of tolerant progress in which civil unions are recognised.

In almost all matters of family law, from the transfer of financial benefits such as pensions to access to adoption agencies, gays are treated no differently from straight people. This would have been unimaginable 30 years ago. True, most states have not legalised gay marriage, but this is an example of further radical progress halted, or at least stalled. And, by the way, opposition to changing the institution of marriage in this way goes way beyond Christian conservatives.

So, sorry to disappoint, but America is not really the fundamentalist state its enemies claim and Falwell dreamt about. But there will surely be plenty of other religious conservatives to demonise.

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