University of Virginia Library

Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell grew up listening to Charles E. Fuller's "Old-Fashioned Revival Hour" but had little religious modeling in his youth. His father was a self-made man, successful in a variety of hometown entrepreneurial ventures. He had little interest in religion and little time for his family. A drinking problem resulted in Carey Falwell's premature death at age fifty-five. Helen Falwell, unable to get Jerry and his twin brother to get up and go to church, would leave the radio in their room tuned to the Reverend Fuller's program. Those years of listening to Charles Fuller must have made at least a subliminal impression. After Jerry Falwell became a religious broadcaster in his own right, he called his program "The Old-Time Gospel Hour."

Although something of a hell-raiser in his youth, Falwell experienced a religious conversion at the age of eighteen. Initially it was pretty girls, not religion, that attracted him to the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Several years later the piano player, Macel Pate, would become Mrs. Jerry Falwell. After his conversion, Falwell dropped out of engineering studies, which he was pursuing at Lynchburg College. Upon graduation from Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, in 1956 he returned to Lynchburg and started a church.

The Thomas Road Baptist Church was started with thirty-five members in an abandoned Donald Duck soft-drink bottling plant. The church grew by leaps and bounds almost from the beginning, and today its congregation of 17,000 is the nation's second largest. As a reminder of his modest beginnings, a bookshelf that lines one side of Falwell's office prominently displays a dozen bottles of Donald Duck soda.

One week after organizing his church, Falwell started a radio program. Six months later he went on Lynchburg television. In those early days Falwell's sights were not on the national scene, but on building a solid local church. This he accomplished in a decade. By the end of the 1960s, Falwell began to have more ambitious goals, having already established a Christian academy

and a bus ministry that brought children to church from all over the hinterlands of Virginia, and construction of a new 3,000-seat sanctuary was under way. In 1971 Falwell founded Liberty Baptist College and in 1973, Liberty Baptist Seminary. Also during this period he began a significant expansion of his television ministry.

Today, Liberty Baptist College enrolls 2,900 students, and there are plans for 200 new independent Baptist churches to be founded by graduates of the seminary. But that is just the beginning. During the 1980s Falwell projects that his graduates will found 5,000 new churches, and he envisions that a Liberty Baptist University will one day enroll 50,000 students.

For all the inflamed rhetoric surrounding Falwell's latter-day political activities as leader of the Moral Majority, one might tune into his program expecting to see a fire-eating preacher. But Falwell is far from it. His program is a surprisingly conventional worship service. The music, as the title of the program suggests, is old-time gospel, attractively presented, but not upbeat mod, latter-day music that mimics secular successes. Falwell speaks in measured tones of self-assurance, more like a corporate executive than a thundering, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist preacher.

Nonetheless, Falwell is a self-proclaimed fundamentalist. His doctrine is Baptist, but he is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention or any other denomination. "The Old-Time Gospel Hour" is a bastion of frontier fundamentalism moved uptown. It presents an old-time religion seeking to call a sinful people back to their senses and to their God-inspired beginnings. On his program he may preach about a variety of topics, ranging from "signs of the soon coming of Jesus" to the God-mandated rightness of U.S. support for Israel. Falwell understands Internal Revenue Service rules about political statements made by nonprofit organizations, and he saves his best political rhetoric for other platforms. So also is he careful not to attack certain people or segments of society on the air; to do so might leave him vulnerable to a Fairness Doctrine charge before the Federal Communications Commission.

But make no mistake about it; his regular listeners are aware that Jerry Falwell's Bible is against immorality, liberalism, communism, the welfare state, pornography, abortion, sex education

in the schools, and the Equal Rights Amendment. His message is a call to return to an America that once was, a simpler America that was guided by biblically inspired moral principles and that knew not the agony of moral ambiguity. His apparent certainty about the rightness of that world has caused many thoughtful Americans rather considerable apprehension about the means Jerry Falwell might employ to impose his views on this nation.