If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.

The line expresses an exclusivist evangelical claim: that “born-again” conversion is not merely a religious preference but the defining criterion of a life’s ultimate worth. Framed in absolute, evaluative language (“failure as a human being”), it collapses moral and existential judgment into a single theological requirement, implying that human flourishing and identity are inseparable from a specific Christian experience of salvation. In Falwell’s public rhetoric, such formulations functioned as boundary-markers—drawing a sharp distinction between the saved and unsaved—and as a pressure tactic aimed at prompting conversion by attaching high stakes (personal value, destiny) to the born-again experience.