Jerry Falwell is dead. Conservative Protestants will need to
draw straws to see who will take on the brunt of the hatred and
contempt members of the fashionable class reserved primarily for
the former head of the Moral Majority.
As the years accumulated, Jerry Falwell became the American
media’s go-to guy for incendiary quotes on a variety of stories
both because he was always happy to give them and because he
occasionally left the encounters with self-inflicted wounds. After
such moments the nation’s morning disk jockeys and office cooler
comics had material for a week. The famed gay teletubby flare-up
(it was the purple one!) and his blunt statement that God’s
judgment for our mass moral failings was behind 9-11 stand as the
most recent examples.
To remember Jerry Falwell as nothing more than a stock preacher
character prone to gaffes would be a serious mistake, though. A
mistake and an injustice. Because once upon a time, Jerry Falwell
was a prophet and a crusader for social justice. He was also, in
his way, a champion of Christianity as a worldview that affects all
aspects of life.
Back in the 1960s Falwell was a standard issue fundamentalist
preacher in Virginia. He training told him he was supposed to
preach how to get saved. He didn’t care about ending segregation.
Presumably, black folks could get saved somewhere else. In time,
however, like legions of southerners, like Strom Thurmond, like
Robert Byrd, Falwell publicly repented of his segregationist
ways.
He kept preaching at that Thomas Road church that started so
small and grew so large. Then, Roe v. Wade happened.
Catholics were outraged. They’d been fighting for years to prevent
the coming of just such an event. Protestants were out to lunch.
The mainline clergy were too enlightened to think abortion wrong.
Many of the more conservative Protestants tended toward
indifference or acceptance based on notions about the separation of
church and state. Few remember that such notions hid many a
segregationist in the past. Church and state separation, you see,
is just a dodge employed to get around facing implications of right
and wrong. Truth be told, many of them probably found abortion more
appealing than the public shame of a birth out of wedlock.
Christians like Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop understood
the injustice of abortion. They didn’t need the 3-D ultrasounds we
have today in order to castigate “utilitarian ugliness.” Jerry
Falwell was one of the first of the mega-church preachers to hear
that message and to act. His Moral Majority took on a wide variety
of issues, but abortion was always the driving force behind
Christian political activism and remains so today. Few possess the
historical acumen to know the early church was similarly concerned
with the protection of unborn and newly born life.
There’s another key component to Jerry Falwell’s memory. The
pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church and the host of “The Old Time
Gospel Hour” was also the founder and longtime chancellor of
Liberty University. Against all odds, Falwell scraped and scrapped
and kept the place together. Running a college is expensive and
there’s no telling how many pastors and missionaries sent their
children there for free or at deep discounts. Today, Liberty
University has 9,600 students and a successful division 1 NCAA
sports program. Though Liberty has often been discounted nationally
because of its controversial founder, it will continue to train
students, will continue to send them on to government service, will
continue to send others on to advanced degrees. Falwell was a
movement builder. It’ll take another 50 years before we have a fair
idea of what he accomplished with Liberty University. William
Martin of Rice University, a critic of Falwell’s, told
Christianity Today that Liberty will stand as his greatest
accomplishment.
Jerry Falwell’s legacy was that even though he failed to heed
the cries of the oppressed African Americans, he did not continue
his indifference in the face of exploding abortion statistics. It
was that call to social justice, not tax cuts, not even the Cold
War, that drew Christians into the Reagan coalition after so many
had embraced the born-again Carter just four years earlier. Falwell
was a relentless organizer and advocate. Though he began with ideas
of a corseted Christianity ignoring temporal injustices all around,
he ended insisting on the importance of the Christian faith for
everything. The believer couldn’t hide from the world. At a time
when many newsreels will replay his famous miscues, this is a call
for some to remember that he was once a great champion of the
unborn and for bringing the faith into the marketplace of ideas.
Jerry Falwell was far from perfect. But what he had, he
offered.
