Lynchburg News & Advance
May 15, 2007
With Jerry Falwell, what you saw was what you got.
And what you saw, in the final analysis, was a minister who loved the Lord and took seriously Christ’s admonition to carry the Gospel to the four corners of the globe.
Along with his family and Liberty University, that is how he’d probably most want to be remembered.
It was more than half a century ago that the young Jerry Falwell, just back home to Campbell County from Baptist Bible College in Missouri, and at the urging of a handful of members of Park Avenue Baptist Church, started holding worship services in Lynchburg’s old Donald Duck orange juice plant. The rest, as they say, is history, as Thomas Road Baptist Church has grown into one of the largest churches in the country.
But Thomas Road was just the beginning. From that small congregation in 1956 came the spark for all his future endeavors: Lynchburg Christian Academy (now Liberty Christian Academy), Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University), the Moral Majority of the 1980s and a myriad of social service programs in Central Virginia and across the country.
Falwell was determined to counter what he saw as a coarsening of American culture with a message calling the country back to its faith, the faith of a simpler time from his days growing up in the Brookville section of Campbell County.
It was growing up in Central Virginia that grounded the young Falwell. A graduate of the old Brookville High School, he never forgot where he came from. Friends from high school days were friends the day he died. When his class was having its 50th reunion a couple of years ago, Falwell immediately stepped in to help with the planning and hosting of events. As busy as his days were in later years, whenever a friend called up, he’d put aside everything to take the call.
And those days were very busy indeed.
The 1960s and 1970s were times of building up Thomas Road, reaching out across Central and Southside Virginia for souls in need of saving. But that was merely practice for what was to come.
The election in 1976 of Jimmy Carter, a man open about his Christian faith, as president was an event that set Falwell on a path to the national, indeed global, stage. Carter, a Southern Baptist, disappointed more theologically conservative Christians like Falwell. From abortion to gay rights, the late 1970s represented, to Falwell and his allies, all that was wrong with American politics and American Christianity.
In response to a disappointing Carter presidency, Falwell decided to start up an organization that came to be known as the Moral Majority. With that one step, a political movement was born.
Nothing like it had been seen in modern American politics; almost overnight, the religious right became a political force. No one before had seen conservative Christians as a political reservoir to be tapped. Indeed, many in the popular culture saw Falwell and like-minded believers as simpletons who were woefully out of touch with the modern world.
But Falwell proved them wrong, and in a big way.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination and mounted an underdog campaign against the incumbent, Democrat Jimmy Carter. In Reagan, Falwell saw a leader who could restore America to its former glory, who could help bring the country back to its roots and to its God.
The Moral Majority turned out millions of voters in the 1980 election, sending Reagan to White House in a close contest and helping to oust a dozen liberal Democrats from the U.S. Senate. Thus a movement was born.
Arm in arm, Falwell and Reagan set off at the dawn of the 1980s to confront the ills they saw besetting America: liberalism, communism and a morally corrupt culture that placed no value on human life. By 1989, when Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority, communism was on history’s ash heap, but liberals and what he saw as a decadent culture were still alive and kicking.
It was perhaps at that moment that Falwell and other prominent Christian conservatives began to think that putting their faith in secular politics had been misplaced, that souls aren’t saved by a vote on taxes in the House of Representatives or a court ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.
His focus, slowly but surely, returned to Thomas Road Baptist Church, LU and Central Virginia, but not without a few sidetracks.
The early 1990s were bleak times for Falwell and televangelists in general. The Jim Bakker/PTL scandal took a huge financial toll on them all, and Falwell, Thomas Road and LU almost collapsed. And the Clinton presidency more often than not proved just too much for the old Falwell to resist.
But more and more, he focused like a laser on the church and the university.
Transition planning began in the late 1990s at both institutions, and sons Jerry Jr. and Jonathan began assuming larger roles LU and Thomas Road, respectively. The fruits today are plain to see.
Thomas Road and LCA relocated operations to the former Ericsson building on Candlers Mountain Road in 2006. Congregants pack the 6,000-seat sanctuary each Sunday morning for services, while enrollment at LCA continues to climb.
But all that’s nothing compared to the growth down the street at Liberty University.
LU is set to pass the 10,000-student mark this fall, making it the largest private university in Virginia; the school’s goal is to have 25,000 enrolled students on campus within the next decade. And it was LU that Falwell told The News & Advance several years ago was his greatest accomplishment.
Central Virginia today is experiencing the fruits of that planning, and the benefits will only grow as the years go by.
Falwell, who died Tuesday at the age of 73, was a man larger than life whose very presence in a room immediately garnered the attention of all. He married and buried thousands of Central Virginians in his 51-year ministry, and visited thousands more in their homes and hospital rooms as their minister and friend.
But his most beloved roles were those of husband for 49 years to Macel Pate Falwell; father to Jerry Jr., Jonathan and Jeannie; and grandfather to eight.
To them go our sympathies, condolences and prayers.
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