Updated: 5/25/07
Falwell leaves complex legacy
By Robert Marus
Associated Baptist Press
WASHINGTON (ABP)—Many social observers agree: few figures in the second half of the 20th century proved as polarizing in American popular and political culture as Jerry Falwell, who died May 15 at the age of 73.
But the outspoken preacher and political activist, who preached a black-and-white gospel and described a world of evil versus good in equally stark terms, left behind a legacy far more nuanced and complex.
The media impresario was best known for his blustery public statements on subjects as controversial as homosexuality, the AIDS crisis, the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But, according to allies and opponents alike, Falwell personally had a softer, gentler side that corresponded with some of his less-publicized work on behalf of the downtrodden.
Even pornographer Larry Flynt, who beat Falwell in a landmark 1988 Supreme Court libel case, had kind words to say after the death of his erstwhile enemy.
“My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face-to-face, you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that,” said Flynt, longtime publisher of Hustler magazine. “I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. … I always appreciated his sincerity, even though I knew what he was selling, and he knew what I was selling.”
Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, also said he had warm personal feelings for the man whose views on homosexuality he deplored. Last year, he spoke to students at Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., to challenge the school’s policies toward gay and lesbian students.
“It took courage for him to invite me to speak directly to Liberty University’s 9,000 students. He introduced me to his students with real excitement, and, when it seemed to him that they were acting inappropriately, he stood up and defended my right to speak, even when I was saying things with which I knew he would disagree,” Yoffie said in a statement released shortly after Falwell’s death. “I deeply appreciate the genuine warmth and respect that he demonstrated for me.”
The independent Baptist preacher who built a small church in an out-of-the-way Virginia town into a religious, media and educational empire also played a key role in shaping American politics in the past quarter century. He did it, in part, with statements that often proved controversial.
In the 1950s, Falwell supported legal segregation, and in the 1960s, he publicly opposed the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. and other ministers involved in the Civil Rights Movement— both positions he later disavowed.
Falwell again committed a number of public gaffes in the 1980s. While saying he personally opposed the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa, he also opposed the United States sanctioning the nation’s white-ruled government. Falwell said he feared a revolution that would create a communist state. He even encouraged his followers to invest in South African gold Krugerands when other American religious groups were pushing divestment in the nation.
During the early days of the AIDS crisis, Falwell said the epidemic was “the wrath of a just God against homosexuals.” He later recanted that stance.
During Bill Clinton’s presidency, Falwell used time on his “Old Time Gospel Hour” television show to sell a series of videotapes called the “Clinton Chronicles,” which insinuated Clinton was guilty of all manner of crimes, up to and including orchestrating murders.
And, perhaps most infamously, appearing on Pat Roberton’s “700 Club” television show two days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Falwell said some of his political adversaries were at least partially responsible for the tragedies.
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen,’“ he said.
He later apologized for those remarks, as well as for his 2002 remarks calling the prophet Muhammad a “terrorist.”
Despite his support for a political movement that often emphasized the sexual teachings of traditional Christianity over its anti-poverty and social-justice thrusts, Falwell also quietly built a series of institutions serving the down-and-out. They included a home for pregnant teens who wanted to avoid abortion and a program for alcoholics.
“While most people knew him as the founder of the Moral Majority, the face of the Religious Right, and by some of his more controversial statements, many saw only his opponents’ caricature of the real man,” wrote Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of a Southern Baptist megachurch in Orange County, Calif., on the Washington Post website. “The story was never told about his compassionate heart, his gentle spirit, his enormous sense of humor and the millions he invested in helping the underprivileged.”
Likewise, Chuck Colson—the Watergate criminal turned Christian activist— wrote that Falwell had been “very unfairly caricatured” for his political views.
“Among the great legacies of his life is not only a marvelous church but one of the premier Christian institutions, Liberty University, which he built from the ground up. When the going got tough, Jerry just got stronger,” Colson said.
“He will be remembered not only as the founder of a great university, but as the person who brought the evangelical church out of its fundamentalist isolationism back into the mainstream of American culture.”
Baptist historian Bill Leonard said Falwell’s penchant for rhetoric coupled with personal warmness was a legacy of his independent fundamentalist Baptist background.
The three hallmarks of that tradition, Leonard said, were that Falwell was “an absolute … opponent of liberalism politically and theologically,” that he embraced “an unashamed commitment to church growth, meaning that numbers proved theological orthodoxy” and that he was “a pulpit controversialist who uses rhetoric to encourage an often-fearful constituency that sees the world encroaching and to beat up on—indeed, create—enemies.”
Leonard, dean of the divinity school at Wake Forest University, continued: “I think his modus operandi was … not inconsistent with certain fundamentalist megachurch pastors in that independent Baptist tradition. When you met them, they were good-old-boy pastors. So, they were fun to be with; they were jokesters; they had larger-than-life personalities. But when the issues came down, they took no prisoners.”
Leonard said Falwell struggled throughout his public career to walk a tightrope between his hard-core fundamentalist base and the larger public he was trying to woo to his side.
“His power base is with a group of people who agree with all of those statements—about gays, about Catholics, about abortion, about the Democratic Party and the Clintons,” Leonard said. “So, he’s got to talk that talk to keep them with him. But then that talk that they applaud and think is Christian conviction sounds like bigotry when it its broadcast in the public square, and that is when he had to apologize.”
A new generation of evangelical leaders, Leonard said, has learned how to tread that line more carefully than did Falwell. Many younger evangelicals increasingly are interested in a broader view of the church’s role in encouraging public morality than the sex-related matters that consumed much of the late preacher’s rhetoric.
To one of those leaders, Southern Baptist blogger Benjamin Cole, Falwell left a mixed legacy.
“On the one hand, Jerry Falwell presided over the repatriation of disengaged religious conservatives previously absented the public square,” Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, wrote in a May 15 post on his blog, baptistblog.wordpress.com. “On the other hand, Jerry Falwell emerged as one of the most polarizing public figures of the 20th century.”
Cole continued: “He had sworn on the altar of Almighty God eternal vigilance against every form of communism, liberalism, and atheism that threatened his vision of righteousness and virtue. Yet for a man professing that his battle was not against flesh and blood, he could wield some pretty carnal weapons. He was a man who possessed very definite opinions and about whom many possessed the same. He was both visionary and vicious. He could speak softly when he wanted to, but he always carried a big stick.”
News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.
