The Jerry Falwell Biography

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I finished reading last night the new, “long-awaited” biography of Jerry Falwell, Michael Sean Winters' God's Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right.

Falwell was an important figure in recent U.S. History, particularly with his TV preaching and appearances, his “Moral Majority” organization, his Liberty University and his role in electing U.S. Presidents. Winters' book seems to me to be comprehensive, truthful, objective, balanced – a good book, although perhaps a little dry at times to my own taste. It's an important portrait of an important person in U.S. History.

I remember when Falwell's “Old-Time Gospel Hour” from Thomas Road Baptist Church first appeared on TV. He said some good stuff, no doubt about it. But then something crept into it that increasingly alienated me.

One of my first doubts about Falwell arose from seeing him in a debate at Oxford in the UK, when a young British twit spoke disparagingly of Falwell's “redneck followers.” Falwell, who was a skillful debater, as are his Liberty University debate teams, just destroyed the British twit. He said, for example that he and his followers had given these large amounts of food to starving people in central Europe – Falwell and his followers did a lot of “good works.” And then he says: “And what have you done?”

Yes, yes, Falwell “won” the debate with the British twit, but did he lose the central message of Christ and thereby undercut what was good in himself? Satan tempts Christ during His forty days in the desert with talk about turning stones to bread, which Christ rejects. I know it's a complicated issue, and one that is quite at the center of US historical and cultural life.

But I myself feel Christ more in the following words to Pontius Pilate than I do in winning a debate or eating or surviving:

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

And then there was that time when I heard Falwell say, perhaps on Fox News where he frequently appeared, that if it helped George W. Bush win the election, he, Falwell, would say that he was against Bush. It was clever, personable, self-effacing in that it acknowledged that many people disliked him, and effective – but it was also a minister of Christ promoting deception for political purposes.

Winters writes of this problem, moderately, in several places in the book and notes the paradoxical effects, such as an increase in the US of people rejecting organized “Christianity” and even in political degeneration. Winters quotes impeccable conservative Barry Goldwater as saying that “Every good American ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass” and that he was “sick and tired of political preachers...telling me...that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, or C.”