Story by Chris Graham

When someone with the Q rating that Jerry Falwell built for himself from his humble beginnings as a small-time Lynchburg pastor to having the ear of the most powerful man in the free world dies, you can almost bet that the words that are said in remembrance are going to be positive, glowing, if not downright reverent.

“Dr. Falwell was a great Virginian and a great American who made significant contributions to our Commonwealth and our nation. He was a man of strong, unwavering faith whose leadership helped advance Christian and conservative values,” Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling said in a statement issued after Falwell, 73, died on May 15 of apparent heart failure.

“Dr. Falwell became a friend to individuals all across the world. Through his strong Christian ministry and his philanthropic efforts, the lives of individuals across the world were improved. His love for our state and nation was extraordinary. He was a man of strong faith and values,” Attorney General Bob McDonnell said in a statement after Falwell’s death.

“As he touched so many lives, the loss of Rev. Falwell will be felt across the globe. But because he focused so much of his effort on improving the lives of young people, his intentions and good works will live on for generations to come. Liberty Christian Academy and Liberty University will continue to serve their students, both current and future. Those institutions, as well as Thomas Road Baptist, will endure in his spiritual image,” said Kathy Byron, a member of the House of Delegates from Central Virginia.

President Bush - a born-again Christian - also made sure to put his feelings on Falwell’s legacy on the public record.

“Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Jerry Falwell, a man who cherished faith, family and freedom,” the president said.

“As the founder of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., Jerry lived a life of faith and called upon men and women of all backgrounds to believe in God and serve their communities. One of his lasting contributions was the establishment of Liberty University, where he taught young people to remain true to their convictions and rely upon God’s word throughout each stage of their lives,” the president said.

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Which brings me to this question - and one that I didn’t see posed all that much in the days following Falwell’s death. Is it possible that we are overstating Falwell?

“It’s hard to overstate the role that Falwell played as a founding father of the modern religious right in this country,” says Mark Rozell, a political-science professor at George Mason University and the editor of Religion and the Bush Presidency and The Values Vote? The Christian Right and the 2004 Elections.

“A number of people were involved. Falwell was certainly right up by the top - if not at the top,” says David Holmes, a religious-studies professor at William & Mary and the author of The Faiths of the Founding Fathers. “He’s generally credited with being the architect of the shift of white evangelicals to the Republican Party. Chuck Colson played a role in that, Pat Robertson played a role in that - every pastor of a megachurch, with a few exceptions, or many pastors in megachurches that were starting to grow at the same time, played a role in that. Billy Graham was a Republican.

“I view Falwell as probably as influential as anyone in that shift,” Holmes says.

“Many will say that his mixing of faith and politics may not be the best legacy to leave,” says the Rev. Doug Smith, the executive director of the Virginia Interfaith Center, a Richmond-based nonpartisan public-policy faith coalition.

“I’m not sure how you say this politely - clearly as a polarizing figure, Jerry Falwell was able to corral and speak with a single voice from the evangelical perspective on politics. And stepping away from the controversy, that has been inspiring enough to lead a whole resurgence of civic engagement by the broader faith community,” Smith says.

“And so I think his legacy is really quite good. We probably would have less civic engagement by the faith community today if it weren’t for Jerry Falwell,” Smith says.

It is well-known that Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 - but Mark Rozell points to political activity that began a year earlier that shaped Falwell and the future of the religious right in American politics.

“He organized a group of pastors from around the state to oppose a parimutuel-betting referendum on the state ballot in 1978. They got a lot of attention. They took out newspaper ads, they used mass media - they became something of the face of the opposition to this proposal,” Rozell says.

“It was defeated by a very narrow margin. And Falwell got the political bug - he saw what he could do. And it’s interesting, because up until that point, he had been preaching to his followers separationism - that evangelicals should stay separate from and outside the political world and let God take care of things in this world. And he changed his mind in a big way, of course,” Rozell says.

“After they had defeated the referendum, and Falwell was kind of the lead guy in that campaign, he gave a newspaper interview - I think it was the Richmond paper - where he said, This is a portent of future endeavors,” Rozell says.

The Moral Majority came about the next year - and the group played a key role in the election of born-again Christian Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. But just as evangelicals were able to get one of their own into the presidency, their hopes for a reversal of what they saw as the excesses of the liberal 1960s and 1970s were put on hold.

“Ronald Reagan gave legitimacy to the religious conservative movement. But he did not do a lot for them in policy,” Rozell says. “People oftentimes misinterpret his legacy in that regard. His conservative agenda focused on the defense buildup, anticommunism, tax cuts - and then he expressed rhetorically a lot of support for the religious right, but he didn’t do much for them.

“What he did do was he embraced them without embarrassment,” Rozell says. “There’s a famous instance where he was giving a speech at the National Association of Evangelicals in 1980, and he said, You can’t endorse me, but I endorse you. Just the notion of that - a major-party presidential candidate standing before these folks and saying, I’m not embarrassed to be with you, I embrace you, I believe what you believe - that was a hugely powerful message. And Jerry Falwell had a lot to do with that. Falwell reached out to Reagan - and they formed a relationship, something of a friendship.”

That relationship aside, the political legacy of Falwell isn’t what he would have thought back in 1979 when he launched the Moral Majority - in that Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, in that there is increasing local, state and federal recognition of the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

His legacy in the political realm is secure, though - because the religious right is now the force above all others to be reckoned with in American politics.

“That’s a long-term legacy of Jerry Falwell,” Rozell says. “He mobilized a lot of previously apolitical people into American politics - and they stayed involved, and they changed the mainstream of the Republican Party dramatically and changed the face of American politics to a large extent as well.”

David Holmes has a slightly different view on this - that while he sees evangelicals remaining involved in the political process in line with the level of interest that Falwell helped encourage, “I’m not sure the percentage of evangelicals in the future will remain Republican that we see now,” Holmes says.

“What would we suggest, that 90 percent of evangelicals would be Republicans? I think that to some small extent the working-class Roosevelt coalition will come back together in terms of a larger number of working-class people voting for the Democratic Party in the future. They seem not to be terribly happy about the Iraq war, for example,” Holmes says.

That said, evangelicals will continue to be a political force, Holmes agrees.

“I think they will stay - because evangelicalism is a sincere movement, and it genuinely believes in the traditional values that it is advocating,” Holmes says.

“I think evangelicals will remain involved in the effort to keep America from becoming a secular nation in the same way that Germany is or France is,” Holmes says.

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A second question comes to mind now - has the change that Falwell engineered been for the common good?
“Your interpretation of Jerry is where you come from yourself. In my view, I think he’s done a great disservice to evangelicalism,” says Joe Barnhart, a professor of philosophy and religion studies at the University of North Texas and the author of The Southern Baptist Holy War, Jim and Tammy: Charismatic Intrigue Inside PTL and The Billy Graham Religion.

“The Bible is filled with all kinds of material that you can use - and what you select to preach or to use tells a lot about the people doing the selecting,” Barnhart says. “And I think in that sense that the Bible functions in some respects as a kind of Rorschach Test - and it tells us what Jerry was interested in and wanted to select and wanted to preach about. It interests me greatly, for example, in that context, to consider that the Apostle Paul did his entire ministry without ever having challenged the Roman government about the abortions taking place in the Roman Empire.”

“I don’t think his views on gays and lesbians will be influential. When we look back, we won’t see him as being predictive of the future on these matters,” David Holmes says.

“I have to ask - in 50 years, will his views on gay and women clergy last? He belonged to a church that ordains neither women nor open gays and lesbians. You have to ask - this is no prediction here - but you have to ask whether that will be the case with that Baptist tradition in 50 years,” Holmes says.

“I think his haranguing about gays is simply his gravitating toward a text in the Bible and highlighting that and moving that toward the center of his belief - and not really, in my opinion, thinking through what a gay marriage is, and why he opposed it. He simply just reacted, found his passage in the Bible, and used it,” Joe Barnhart says.
“I’ve been married 53 years to one woman - but I think I can understand what marriage is. It’s a commitment, it’s a relationship - and the question is, can those qualities be exemplified in gay marriages as well as the traditional marriages? I don’t think Jerry had really thought through this at all,” Barnhart says.

“Unfortunately, what likely has happened is that many people whose voices otherwise have been involved in civic discourse have been turned off. And so sometimes we have myopic or one-sided conversations about policy,” Doug Smith says, picking up on Barnhart’s point.

“If there’s anything that we should learn from Falwell here, it’s that we in the faith community need to create distinctions between politics and policy. And I think as a generation of Falwell and colleagues like him pass on, the faith community will have an opportunity to focus more on creating policies of compassion and hope, rather than being used by political parties for their own gain,” Smith says.

“David Kuo in his book Tempting Faith very clearly lays out how the faith community has been used by politics - and yet at this point we don’t step away from politics without stepping into policy. And those are two very completely different objects for the faith community to fulfill their call,” Smith says.

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Doug Smith was able to get to know Falwell not only as a political “lightning rod,” as he calls him, but also on a personal level - “and the times that I was able to meet with him, and I always found this interesting, but he was the nicest guy in the world,” Smith says.

“And so you wonder why he let his public persona overshadow his whole kind of sense of presence,” Smith says.

“The most telling thing that I read in the newspaper after he passed was that he was having breakfast at Bob Evans the morning that he died, and he looked OK. You know, this guy is a pretty heavy hitter - and he’s sitting at the Bob Evans in Lynchburg eating biscuits?” Smith says.
“I think that his public persona has been painted by his adversaries as well as by his confidants in ways that weren’t consistent with what he was really about. And he simply allowed them to do that because he had an agenda. Of that, there can be no doubt,” Smith says.

“I think he was sincere. Sometimes people who have risen high in any field, including religion, are in it for other reasons than sincerity. But I consider him sincere,” says David Holmes, who also was able to get to know the private Falwell.

“He had a remarkable memory. I’ve been to the church, I’ve heard him preach, I’ve seen him pull names out - he knew his congregation the best he could with 22,000 members, and he remembered a lot of names,” Holmes says.

“He was also likable,” Holmes says. “Few who knew him, even if they disagreed with him, intensely disliked him - even some who broke with him. They didn’t think he was an evil man or a hater - they just didn’t agree with him.”

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Whether or not Falwell made the world a better place, Doug Smith’s faith tells him that Jerry Falwell is himself in a better place today

“I can imagine that Jerry Falwell today is indeed in heaven,” Smith says.

“I can also imagine that he’s quite surprised about who gets to join him there.”

For further reading

Jerry Falwell Ministries - www.falwell.com

Virginia Interfaith Center - www.virginiainterfaithcenter.org

Filed under: 6-July 2007 Issue