I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.

Barry Goldwater’s remark is associated with his late-career denunciations of the growing influence of the Religious Right—especially televangelists such as Jerry Falwell—within the Republican Party. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Goldwater repeatedly warned that “preachers” and “moral crusaders” were trying to turn the GOP into a vehicle for sectarian politics, which he saw as hostile to pluralism and constitutional church–state separation. The quoted line circulates as a particularly blunt, profane formulation of that critique, typically presented as something Goldwater said in conversation or an interview rather than in a formal speech or publication.

The sentence fuses Goldwater’s defense of religious liberty with a libertarian suspicion of clerical power in politics. By invoking “every good Christian,” he frames opposition to Falwell not as anti-Christian but as a defense of Christianity from politicized, coercive moralism. The vulgar imperative (“kick…right in the ass”) functions rhetorically as a shock tactic: it signals moral urgency and contempt for what he viewed as demagoguery and theocratic drift. In quotation databases, the line is often used to epitomize Goldwater’s warning that partisan alignment with religious movements can erode individual freedom and fracture a broad-based political coalition.