Hanna Rosin’s news analysis in The Washington Post strikes an odd note today by comparing Jerry Falwell to… Gorbachev?

Some great figures die at the prime of their movement, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Others, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, live on for years after their movement has morphed into something completely different, and it takes their deaths to make us realize how much things have changed. That is likely to be the case with Falwell.

Not only is the comparison of Christian conservative leader and Soviet communist dictator perverse, but Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University haven’t in any way dissolved into a campus of ACLU atheism.

Has the religious right dissolved like the USSR? Rosin was comparing Falwell with the current crop of evangelicals schmoozing their way into the political center (and ingratiating themselves with the liberal media), like Rich Cizik and Rick Warren. But at this point, at least rhetorically, you can’t pigeonhole those leaders as the “religious right” (especially considering their eagerness not to be pigeonholed there).

The religious right has grown and evolved, and powerful groups have come and gone. Falwell in his later years seemed much more influential in the minds of liberal pundits and direct-mail fundraisers than he might have been among conservative Christians. But Rosin could have just easily looked at the Republican presidential debate last night and noticed the hold that social conservatism still has on the Republican Party mainstream. That movement has hardly “morphed into something completely different.”