Lynchburg won't be the same without Falwell

Jerry Falwell at Thomas Road Baptist Church, 1980.

By Darrell Laurant
dlaurant@newsadvance.com

The Lynchburg News & Advance
May 16, 2007


LYNCHBURG (Va.) - It’s hard to imagine a Lynchburg without the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

He was more than just the city’s resident celebrity - he was, in many ways, its identity.

Over and over, I’ve used that connection in an offhand way when speaking to someone from another state or country.

“Lynchburg? Where’s that?”

“Jerry Falwell.”

“Oh, yeah.”

My guess is, even some of the local folk who railed against Falwell’s politics and conservative spin on religion (and there were lots of them) secretly felt a certain degree of pride that someone from their city had made it onto the covers of Time and Newsweek and the guest lists of high-end TV talk shows.

In his prime, Falwell became one of those whom New York Times columnist Russell Baker always referred to as “the usual suspects.” Whenever an issue arose even remotely involving Christianity or conservative politics, Falwell was at the top of the list to be called - partly because he had become the face of the national Religious Right and partly because he was never at a loss for a comment.

The man would have made a highly successful politician. Like the most skilled of that breed, he never forgot a name and could speak more or less authoritatively on virtually anything. In a press conference situation, he also had the politician’s natural ability to slip a question without seeming to slip it, a form of verbal judo.

In Rock Hill, S.C., in 1987, I watched Falwell artfully manage a pack of more than a hundred reporters from all over the country (and a few from beyond). The New York Times was there, and the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal, all tracking the story of Jim Bakker’s abrupt fall from grace and the collapse of his PTL empire.

As a member of the PTL Board, Falwell stood on a stage, identified virtually every questioner by name, and answered questions flawlessly for more than 30 minutes. You could tell he was having the time of his life.

The product of a rough-and-tumble childhood, son of a hard-drinking and hard-fisted father, Falwell came into public life wearing the hide of a rhinoceros. Insults ricocheted off him - and if the person doing the insulting was well-known enough, Falwell would gleefully invite them to a debate.



Indeed, he loved juxtaposing his own views with those of famous opponents, inviting the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Sen. Ted Kennedy to his church to speak and developing a curious but apparently sincere friendship with Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt (whom he had once sued for libel).

He also enjoyed the media, despite frequent protestations to the contrary. When his press was good, he basked in it. When it was bad, he used it to his advantage from the pulpit on Sunday morning.

In that sense, and others, Falwell was very different from contemporaries like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson. Although he could match them in biblical knowledge, he was much more in the world than they were, a man who loved fast food and sports and no-holds-barred political arguments. It was telling, I thought, that when Robertson ran for President in 1988, Falwell supported George Bush instead.

Moreover, this son of Fairview Heights never forgot his local roots. Despite all his appearances on “Nightline” and Larry King, he always made it a point to be back in Lynchburg on Sundays. As his national fame swirled around him, he still considered himself the pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church before anything else. He still performed the funerals and the weddings and the hospital visitations.

George Stewart, the former head of First Colony Life, once told of visiting Thomas Road as part of a group struggling to pull Falwell’s ministry out of a financial swamp.

“The parking lot was just jammed with cars,” Stewart said, “but when I went inside, I hardly saw anyone I knew, and no one whom I would call influential in the community.”

They didn’t need to be influential - they had Falwell to do it for them. And like the song Paul Anka wrote and Frank Sinatra made famous, he did it his way.

Falwell had big ideas, big appetites, and big opinions. He took big risks. He often operated on a wing and a prayer (literally), and the gambles he made sometimes came back to haunt him. On at least two occasions, local businessmen had to bail him out of deep financial difficulty.

They did that not because of personal feelings for Falwell, although there may have been that, but rather the knowledge of how intertwined his success had become to the success of the community.

Over the years, Falwell assumed some philosophical positions that he later said he regretted (most notably, a staunch segregationist stance during his early years). A pragmatist above all, he wasn’t afraid to backtrack. When Christian rock music began to emerge, he opposed it. Now, Liberty University stages one of the nation’s leading Christian rock festivals each December.

Even when he stood against the wind, Falwell always knew which way that wind was blowing.

In Lynchburg, it was hard to be neutral about the man. Yet whatever you thought about him, it was hard not to admire his vision.

Jerry Falwell took a handful of fellow members from Park Avenue Baptist Church and started his own church in a discarded soft drink bottling plant. It grew to be one of the most influential congregations in Baptist America.

Later, he started a Christian college in a handful of trailers and a couple of buildings downtown. It became Liberty University, which now has an enrollment of more than 10,000.

In a city known for its caution, where major projects and changes usually take decades. Falwell got things done. Sometimes he went into debt to do it, but he always seemed to emerge unscathed.

This was someone who could discuss an obscure Bible verse, the latest baseball pennant race, or the newest entry into the presidential sweepstakes.

Throughout most of his life, Falwell seemed to juggle a desire to be known as a regular guy from a working class background (just “Jerry” to most of his congregation) and a parallel need to be respected as a cut above that.

The graduate of a small Bible college in Missouri, he liked to be called “Dr. Falwell,” the fruit of an honorary degree bestowed upon him years ago by another small Christian school. He put impressive Jeffersonian pillars on LU’s DeMoss Center, even though he could hardly have agreed with Jefferson’s deist philosophy (perhaps they’ll have that argument now).

There is never a good time to die, but Jerry Falwell lived to see his dream of a “city on the hill” (Candlers Mountain) fulfilled. He lived to see his sons in charge of the family business. He lived long enough to savor a long list of triumphs over adversity.

And whether you like it or not, he lived long enough to put Lynchburg on the map.