Sharlet: Not that Kennedy. To me the most interesting thing about D. James Kennedy‘s death today is how little attention it’s rating from mainstream media. As of this writing, neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post are frontpaging it on their sites. CNN’s breaking news is the death of Ohio Rep. Paul Gillmor, a Republican little-known beyond wonk circles. Kennedy, meanwhile, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries, was one of the architects of the modern Christian Right, just behind Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in influence. But where Falwell, Robertson, and others tried to build a constituency of young families, Kennedy’s audience of millions tended to be older, its conservatism more seamlessly blended with the caution of age. That made him no less powerful — old people might not make such good copy for young newspaper reporters, but they vote more and give more money — but it did make him a cultural anomaly in a media culture that equates relevance with youth or control of youth. There may be more to his obscurity in death than that — the press wants to move on from fundamentalism, to imagine that it’s a spent force, as if it was never any more than a fat man choking on his necktie (Falwell), or a cornball (a Ph.D. cornball, I should say, with a doctorate from NYU) like Kennedy, his hair shellacked black into his last years.