The Trials of Televangelism: Jerry Falwell and the Enemy
Wilentz, Sean
In 1987, at the outset of the Pit ("Praise the Lord") scandal, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart solemnly announced that "the gospel of Jesus Christ has never sunk to such a level as it has today."...
...Fundamentalists like Falwell, who believed in a doctrine of pietistic withdrawal, had their backs to the wall...
...He studied for two years to become an engineer before receiving God's call and transferring to a fundamentalist Bible college...
...Twenty years later, Falwell called these events a personal turning point: first, because they began a spiritual journey that led him to reject his racism (he now calls the civil rights workers of the 1960s "courageous...
...In 1980, for example, Falwell appeared sympathetic to banning all homosexuals from public-school teaching, but later he insisted he would not abridge their right to teach "as long as they don't use the classroom to promote homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle...
...Although loyal to fundamentalist doctrine, he also encouraged his congregation to compete successfully in the race of life...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...The result is a situation that has enraged fundamentalist purists, who in 1988 cast their lot with Pat Robertson's campaign...
...Within the churches, meanwhile, Falwell's activities bolstered the fundamentalists' efforts to recapture the leadership of various major fellowships...
...At the heart of the nation's problems, Falwell declared—the main cause of America's loss of prestige, the decline of patriotism, and the triumph of pervasive liberalism—was a moral rot that derived from the breakdown of sexual rules and of the "traditional family...
...Where they converged was in their willingness to take words or symbols (the Bible, long hair, dirty pictures) as a transparent text with a meaning that would impel people to act, either for good or ill...
...Falwell tapped into the deeply sexualized anxieties that followed from the social upheavals of the last twenty years...
...But he has failed to secure the long-term political initiative...
...Early on, he said nice things about Israel, which, to many people's surprise, turned out to be perfectly consistent with his fundamentalist beliefs...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...But Falwell and untold thousands were already too much in the world for that...
...The fundamentalist uprisings of the 1920s involved a reaction against the New Woman and against the alleged effeminacy of the liberal, modern man whom Billy Sunday called "a wishy-washy sissified sort of galoot that let everybody make a doormat out of him...
...By mid-decade it was common for rock-ribbed Presbyterians to sing evangelical hymns (not in the approved hymnal), to touch and squeeze each other, to attend workshops on glossolalia...
...He approached religion, including televised religion, as a growth industry with room for everyone...
...His mounting belligerence, for example, shaped as it was by his Manichean faith, violated what the sociologist James Davison Hunter calls an "ethic of civility" in American politics, a shared unspoken scruple that compels people not only to tolerate others' beliefs but to be tolerable to others...
...Just as they began to climb out from behind the walls of social inferiority and cultural isolation, fundamentalists felt attacked on all sides...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...While he was learning it, he contributed mightily to the political dreariness of the Reaganite Gilded Age and won his share of victories...
...With his methods of "saturation evangelism" — equal parts Christian stewardship and relentless door-to-door salesmanship—Falwell reached out to these people and built his Thomas Road Baptist Church into one of the largest "super churches" in the nation...
...The trouble was, the world was rapidly changing in ways that deeply wounded fundamentalist sensibilities...
...But the jeremiads now came in passing...
...But his political pronouncements did often slide off the edge of Christian moralism, "free enterprise" economics, and hard-line anticommunism into tropes reminiscent of the right-wing zealots of the 1930s and the McCarthyites of the 1950s...
...By 1980 fundamentalist conservatives, spearheaded by Bailey Smith, had taken command of the SBC's national offices and done all they could to root out moderate influences...
...Jerry Falwell had to learn this lesson the hard way...
...Even evangelical Christians hardly formed a moral and political bloc...
...In the mid-1980s, he did, however, begin to soften his public posture...
...We are only beginning to recover...
...Rarely in modern times has a movement of such reputed magnitude self-destructed so suddenly...
...We must be careful here about grouping him with others who came on the public scene with moral and cultural prescriptions...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...By 1980 fundamentalists like Falwell's colleague Tim LaHaye had picked up the term and invested it with conspiratorial powers—the many-horned beast of modern liberalism, with its pornography, homosexuality, feminism, and big government...
...At Thomas Road Baptist, these distinctions are reinforced less in the liturgy (though Falwell always projects a beefy ex-jock presence) than in the visual imagery of Falwell's sermons...
...He quickly learned to apply his masterful door-to-door hucksterism to the airwaves, raising millions of dollars while cultivating an appealing image...
...On the national level the Reagan White House kept up its rhetorical support of the Moral Majority (and made the necessary appointments), but fairly quickly backed away from the evangelical legislative program...
...It was not the first time that American religion and politics had become entangled with profound changes in sexual norms...
...Growing portions of the Republican party now predict a political disaster unless the party finally loses its identification with the religious right...
...But by the 1970s the sense of frustration and panic returned...
...Very quickly the Moral Majority, along with its sibling organizations the Christian Voice and the Religious Roundtable, attracted attention, raised planeloads of money, and added conservative Protestants to the election rolls...
...Conservatives might have missed them altogether if Justice Hugo Black, in a celebrated 1961 decision, hadn't mentioned secular humanism, along with Buddhism, Taoism, and Ethical Culture, as one of several atheistic religions to be guaranteed full First Amendment rights...
...The whole operation strove for a touch of class...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...No doubt he was prejudged in some quarters...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...A storm of protest, particularly from Jews, forced Falwell to reshape himself into an unswerving advocate of Judeo-Christian pluralism...
...What is clear is that Swaggart's disgrace (and the Bakkers'), along with Pat Robertson's cranky presidential crusade in 1988, made a mockery of what was supposed to be the great awakening of conservative evangelicalism...
...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms —the mails aren't always reliable...
...Israel plays a significant and heroic role in 46 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money fundamentalist eschatology, as derived from the Book of Ezekiel...
...For Falwell and other fundamentalists, as well as millions of Americans, the qualities of maleness and femaleness are not malleable...
...Falwell has cited the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling as his moment of awakening...
...In the end, though, it was Falwell's politics that evoked the most negative reactions—the widespread suspicion, even among conservative believers, that he and the evangelical right represented a dark, antidemocratic strain in modern American politics...
...The invention of secular humanism helped Falwell and the Moral Majority open lines of communication to politically important conservative and neoconservative Jews...
...Although polls showed that a large number of Americans—perhaps one-third—said they supported all of Falwell's key positions on homosexuality, school prayer, abortion, and the "traditional family," they also showed that the rest held to more liberal positions...
...But as far as consolidating a national political base and changing America's views on other important issues, Falwell's achievement is much cloudier...
...By the 1980s, however, domestic anticommunism was an inauspicious rallying point for building a broad consensus on moral conservatism...
...It might even undermine the traditional subordination of a preacher to his own congregation...
...Satan had mobilized his own forces," he reflected in his 1987 autobiography, "to WINTER • 1990 • 47 Culture in an Age of Money destroy America by negating the JudeoChristian ethic...
...Although viewed by liberals as a loudmouth bullyboy, Falwell came as close as someone in the conservative fundamentalist fold could to a generic panProtestantism...
...On the one occasion when his pastoral leadership and personal integrity came under serious question—a 1973 SEC investigation involving improper bond issues—Falwell was able to plead inexperience and save face...
...He was most emphatically not a charismatic or holiness ranter...
...Emboldened by a 1960 FCC directive allowing paid religious broadcasts to be considered part of the public-service programming required of all affiliates, Falwell and other ministers expanded their outreach, taking advantage of the latest breakthroughs in video technology...
...Most of these center on specific aspects of Falwell's fundamentalist background— which, for all his aspirations to ecumenicism, he could never quite shake...
...By the end of the 1970s, the cumulative effects of fundamentalism's encounters with the postwar world had raised the possibility of launching a conservative Christian crusade around moral and sexual issues unlike any seen for half a century...
...But like other fundamentalists, Falwell still believed America had been founded "by godly men upon godly principles to be a Christian nation...
...During Reagan's second term Falwell could still launch into fire-and-brimstone oratory...
...But in the 1960s no such calming perspective was possible...
...For many, the 1962 and 1963 Supreme Court decisions banning prayer in public schools were the first of these troubling changes...
...The actions undertaken by pious conservatives to uproot secular humanism in the schools—notably the suit that led to a 1987 decision barring forty-four "secular humanist" texts from Alabama public schools—seemed at odds with Falwell's announced opposition to censorship...
...Being called a fascist, a bigot, and a warmonger clearly stung Falwell, and he has devoted a good deal of energy to settling scores with the liberal press for allegedly misrepresenting his views...
...But who then was "the Enemy...
...By the early 1970s it had a splendid new sanctuary, a Christian academy and elementary school, a syndicated television ministry, a rehabilitation center for 42 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money alcoholics, and a membership of thousands...
...Male lust, the flip side of androgyny, showed its face everywhere from the porno houses to the divorce courts...
...By 1985 candidates discovered that direct endorsement by political evangelicals could lead to a net loss in votes...
...Every day they witnessed horrifying spectacles of libertinism, permissiveness, and disorder...
...But demonizing secular humanism also had disastrous costs...
...In Falwell's case his television mask turned him into the kind of "hot" personality that leaves the public cold...
...Television became the critical instrument in this perception of the world, and in Falwell's hands it would also be the critical instrument in rallying the faithful...
...Falwell's rise also contributed to the literalminded, absolutist temper that permeated public discussion in the 1980s...
...His delivery, if not particularly stirring, was recognizably avuncular and downtoearth...
...Nobody could have guessed that a year later it would be the Reverend Jimmy's turn to cry, once his sexual carryings-on came to light...
...This organization helped the group grow quickly (by 1981 there were an estimated 400,000 Moral Majoritarians), but it also hindered any coordinated effort on political issues outside of presidential elections...
...And here a new political line could also be drawn between the Judeo-Christians who acknowledged that the United States had been founded on Holy Writ and the heathen who did not...
...There was the duplicity of Watergate, the disgrace of America's defeat in Vietnam, the waning of patriotic anticommunism, the gay rights movement, Jimmy Carter's "betrayal" of his evangelical heritage once in office, and a shaky economy, as seen in the ascendency of OPEC...
...Falwell and his followers are in some ways better off than they were when he began the Moral Majority...
...Christ was a he-man...
...The image was crucial...
...THE EDITORS q 48 • DISSENT...
...Yet, as with everything connected to evangelical politics, appearances were deceiving...
...second, because they taught him that religion and politics need not be kept separate...
...Better than most, Falwell was able to finesse these problems...
...It will take future historians to determine just how much of a role Falwell and his friends played in Reagan appointments to the bench, but by the end of the 1980s, they certainly had every reason to be pleased with the results...
...Falwell's Lynchburg congregation consisted not of the amorphous rural classes, so commonly invoked as the mainstay of postwar fundamentalism, but of city people, many of them on the way up, with hardscrabble rural backgrounds...
...Earlier generations of fundamentalists might have been able to distance themselves from such changes, shrug their shoulders, and wait for the Second Coming...
...By the mid-1980s American discourse was full of in-your-face affirmations about duty, flag, and family —no questions asked...
...One had to listen awhile to catch Falwell's message...
...He is now free to devote himself to institution building (in particular to his dream of turning Liberty University into a fundamentalist Notre Dame), knowing that the new conservative Supreme Court may yet overturn Roe v. Wade and that he has secured for fundamentalist believers a national respectability that was unimaginable twenty years ago...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...Fundamentalist and charismatic precepts also began to seep into mainline churches and the popular culture...
...The Moral Majority emerged from a very different part of the forest than the pop Platonism of Allan Bloom or the curdled feminism of Women Against Pornography...
...In 1982, despite some mild boasts by Falwell, the religious right made little difference in the congressional vote nationWINTER • 1990 • 45 Culture in an Age of Money wide...
...Falwell was not blind to such ecumenicism...
...The payback for this loyalty was a combination of rhetorical support for the fundamentalist cause and the appointment of friendly federal officials, especially in the courts...
...When Falwell began his crusade, he underestimated the importance of grounding it in one of the great shibboleths of postwar American life—the "Judeo-Christian tradition" that supposedly forms the nation's ethical foundation...
...An electronic church whose "congregants" tuned in to Falwell was a financial threat to local churches...
...If not quite of the mainstream secular world, Falwell and his congregation were certainly in it in a way their parents and grandparents never were...
...The new vote was solidly behind the man who endorsed the evangelical revolt, Ronald Reagan...
...Explanations abound for why the Moral Majority so soon reached the limits of its power...
...they entailed elemental distinctions between order and chaos, cleanliness and pollution...
...Rarely, however, was it necessary for him to make excuses...
...As it happened, the crisis atmosphere abated in Lynchburg over the next few years...
...In some states Moral Majority chapters gained control of seats on local school boards and Republican committees, but generally they failed to capture the political machinery...
...As Falwell himself admitted, some of the sharpest attacks on him came from such bastions of determined ultrafundamentalist separatism as the Fundamentalist Baptist Fellowship and Bob Jones University...
...So beholden to White House friends had Falwell become that well before the 1988 campaign, he endorsed George Bush, a man who had waffled on the abortion issue and who, for all his protestations about being born again, couldn't seem to get straight the simplest biblical reference...
...Yet everywhere they looked in the late 1960s and 1970s, Falwell and his congregation saw a mainstream culture hell-bent on androgyny (and with it the destruction of the American family and the loss of national virility...
...The key to this change lies in the career of Jerry Falwell...
...The Enemy" was godless totalitarianism, specifically international communism, including its American adherents and fellow travelers...
...The term was so capacious as to suggest that everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Madonna shared the same basic beliefs...
...It is one thing to affect the nation's cultural tone, quite another to translate that into enduring political power...
...A television ministry threatened to undercut the fiercely independent communal autonomy that had long been a pillar of American evangelical Protestantism...
...In 1965, at the time of the Selma marches, Falwell used his pulpit to blast activist clergymen, especially Martin Luther King, Jr., for getting mixed up in politics and ignoring their duties as servants of Jesus Christ...
...Falwell and his congregation found ways to make their peace with civil rights while preserving their church as an overwhelmingly white community...
...Although mired in continuing controversy—above all, the PTL fiasco— Falwell ended the decade with more dignity than virtually all the other high-profile televangelists...
...Back in the 1950s both liberal and conservative JudeoChristians thought they knew the answer...
...The more Falwell and his allies tried to build a coalition atop their fundamentalist following, the more they confirmed that they were out of touch with the prevailing ideas about democracy...
...For Falwell, the decisive challenge was the civil rights movement...
...Until 1970, only a few thousand Americans had even heard of the secular humanists, that hearty little band of atheists and worldgovernment types...
...It seemed impossible to watch a sporting event without hearing the winner credit his or her victory to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ...
...America, awash in bad symbols, had to exorcize the devil behind them—be he Nietzsche, Larry Flynt, or Satan himself— and bring back good standards and good symbols...
...Fully mature persons are either completely masculine or completely feminine, qualities that Falwell attaches to his long-suffering mother and his tragically doomed father, as well as to his own "Christian marriage...
...A hideous vision unfolded before fundamentalists' eyes: sexual and mental abuse of women and children, babies slain in their mothers' wombs— all in the name of sexual freedoms that did more to oppress women than to liberate them...
...The man who lived on this earth was a man with muscles...
...During most of the Reagan years, Falwell seemed to be everywhere An earlier version of this essay appeared as "God and Man at Lynchburg" in The New Republic...
...There were, of course, problems with this success...
...These anxieties didn't just involve fears of androgyny and male lust...
...So the religious began talking about a new enemy—secular humanism...
...The next day they were touting legislation that would make homosexuals a 44 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Mann legally protected minority, thereby thrusting perverts on unwilling Christian employers and school boards...
...A successful television preacher could have a huge audience and at the same time minimal pastoral obligations...
...In actuality the whole operation resembled a national fundamentalist parachurch with its base in the local congregations...
...If he chose, he could WINTER • 1990 • 43 Whom in an Ago of Money simply turn church government over to the little oligarchy surrounding him...
...At the outset, what became known as televangelism was a natural continuation of the older evangelical radio ministries (one of which, Charles Fuller's "Old Fashioned Revival Hour," Falwell credits for his conversion...
...Although the evangelical right failed to turn itself into a successful Christian party (or fully convert the GOP), it nonetheless changed the nation's cultural and political life during the 1980s...
...It took secular right-wing organizers like Paul Weyrich to suggest the contours (and the name) for the Moral Majority and complete Falwell's entry into politics...
...On one occasion, Falwell instructed his congregation to reject the prevailing depiction of Jesus Christ as a meek, diaphanous hippie-type with long hair and a billowing robe: "Christ wasn't effeminate...
...Unless something was done, "the Enemy" —Falwell's term for the forces of Satan—would destroy America and prevent it from being the providential nation that would help usher in the millennium...
...Such actions also raised a dilemma: If conservative evangelicals could remove works of secular humanism from public institutions, what was to stop secular humanists from demanding the exclusion of Judeo-Christian materials as prejudicial to their religion...
...Here a line could be drawn, not between Christian and non-Christian, but between Judeo-Christianity and "the Enemy," secular humanism...
...How much of this Falwell understood at the time is unclear...
...In 1989, politicians who had supported Falwellian and New Right positions on abortion stammered and stumbled, surprised by the public's reaction to the Webster decision...
...Exact figures are hard to come by, but estimates put the number of voters registered by the Moral Majority and the other religious groups at two million...
...There was something safe and reassuring about his broadcasts...
...Even athletics were now affected by religion...
...Falwell even took pride in the fact that his Liberty University trained men and women for professional careers, thus raising the question of what his idea of the "traditional" family and the "traditional" wife now meant...
...Although Falwell claimed that his organization represented a broad spectrum of conservative Protestants, Jews, and Roman Catholics, its foundations were far narrower...
...In his tasteful, postmodern colonial church, Falwell rarely raised his voice for long...
...Lessons in worldly success," Frances FitzGerald has called his early sermons, "howtodo-it manuals in the mainstream tradition of Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale...
...Aware of the importance of tradition in his native Virginia, Falwell even modeled his church's buildings on Thomas Jefferson's architectural designs...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...By 1971 more than three hundred stations carried Falwell's services from Thomas Road Baptist Church...
...There was no faith healing or talking in tongues at Thomas Road Baptist...
...Before he disbanded the Moral Majority and beat a strategic retreat to his church and university in Lynchburg, Virginia, Falwell gave the country a sense of what it would be like to have an American mullah...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Born in 1933 to a pious, dutiful homemaker and a successful Lynchburg bootleggerbusinessman ruined by drink, Falwell was less the dour backwoods Bible thumper than a middle-class striver...
...In 1984 the historian Martin Marty concluded that the fundamentalists could succeed on their own terms only in the event of an utter political and economic collapse, leading to "a state religion, compulsory in character, authoritarian in tone, and 'traditional' in outlook...
...To an uninitiated viewer, it all might have looked like nothing more than, well . . . church...
...The most dramatic and wrenching shift came within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant fellowship in the United States...
...Worse still, they saw politicians going along with it all...
...He did, after all, have his Thomas Road Church (administered by a close-knit group of local advisers...
...More important, the calls for equality by ERA feminists, prochoice groups, and other proponents of women's rights promised to let men evade their responsibilities, prey upon women's bodies, and deny women the legal and moral protections they deserved...
...Most of secular humanism's presumed tenets—the vaunting of personal freedom, the toleration of different personal beliefs—were so deeply enshrined in American culture that it was hard for most Americans to see where they ran afoul of basic American principles...
...Abortion did not stand alone, however...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...The notion that there really was an absolute moral majority in the country that thought the same way Falwell did and was ready to fight for its vision also turned out to be a myth...
...Their continued abstention from politics meant acquiescing to the elimination of structures of white supremacy that were deeply embedded in Southern fundamentalist life...
...They are divinely ordered essences, "intimately woven," as Falwell wrote in 1980, "in the overall fabric of personality...
...One day the sissified galoots in Washington were proposing constitutional amendments that would force Christian women to be drafted for combat duty...
...Similarly, he kept repeating that abortion is murder but added that abortions are permissible in cases of rape or incest...
...The irony is that some of his nastiest rhetoric accompanied his early efforts to make his movement more pluralistic...
...They had come to Lynchburg with the arrival of major national corporations during the 1950s, and they formed the boundary of a rapidly growing middle class...
...The evangelical outbursts of the 1820s and 1830s helped legitimate the very model of bourgeois family life and domestic bliss that Falwell and others mythologize as the biblically inspired nuclear unit established for eternity...
...As Mark Silk detailed in an illuminating little book, Spiritual Politics, Judeo-Christianity emerged after 1945 as the latest in a series of American adhesional faiths—an attempt to provide everyone with a common religious cause and a "quasi-spiritual alliance to the religiously impartial state...
...Other developments also fed the simmering revolt...
...It disguised the unevenness of the Moral Majority's development state by state, all but ensuring that Falwell would be continually embarrassed by the outrageousness of an independent spokesman or chapter...
...We may never know if Swaggart's denunciation of the Bakkers projected his still-secret guilt upon a pair of vulnerable rivals...
...So too for others who wound up in the Moral Majority...
...In 1976 two-thirds of the combined evangelicalfundamentalist vote went to the born-again Jimmy Carter...
...Never mind the Inquisition: it had taken Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker to drag Christianity to the very depths of depravity...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...Four months later, when a band of civil rights demonstrators targeted his church for nonviolent protests, they were evicted and arrested...
...The Moral Majority's organizational structure also displayed some of the weaknesses of Falwell's fundamentalist background...
...From that moment on, opposition to abortion became a key element in the rise of evangelical political fervor...
...But Falwell also proved himself an enormously capable organizer...
...at once—standing up for Star Wars, denouncing sodomy, fighting secular humanism, and urging patriotic Americans to buy all the Kruggerands they could afford...
...Eight years later, the ReaganBush ticket garnered an astounding 81 percent...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
