Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Jerry Falwell dies at 73
The founder of Liberty University and Thomas Road Baptist Church was found unconscious in his Liberty office this morning.
Photo by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times (2006)
The Rev. Jerry Falwell in his office on the campus of Liberty University, just before the June 2006 opening of his 1-million-square-foot Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg.
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The Rev. Jerry Falwell — beloved and despised as a spokesman for conservative American politics and religion for the last quarter-century — died today after being found unconscious in his office at Liberty University.
Falwell, 73, had survived two serious health scares in early 2005. He was hospitalized for two weeks with what was described as a viral infection, and then was hospitalized again a few weeks later after going into respiratory arrest. Later that year, doctors found a 70 percent blockage in an artery, which they opened with stents.
But he’d been actively involved in the aggressive growth of his church and his university over the past year and was scheduled to attend graduation in Lynchburg this weekend.
Falwell was the founder and spiritual leader at both Thomas Road Baptist Church, one of the nation’s largest congregations, and Liberty University, a 30-year-old Christian institution that now boasts a law school and 9,600 students on campus.
He slowly built a national television audience through the Old Time Gospel Hour broadcasts that began just months after he founded Thomas Road church in 1956.
Falwell gained national and international attention, however, as the head of the Moral Majority, a conservative political organizing and lobbying organization he headed from 1979 to 1989.
The organization took some of the credit for the election of conservative Ronald Reagan in 1980 — “my finest hour,” Falwell recalled later — and Reagan’s landslide re-election four years later. Falwell also contended that the Moral Majority helped lead the nation “to the right politically and theologically.”
Even though he disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989, declaring its work done, Falwell remained a popular spokesman for conservative causes. Comfortable on camera and a master of the sound bite, Falwell was a regular on network and cable news and talk shows even though he headed no formal national constituency.
As recently as 2002, his comments on the CBS show “60 Minutes” asserting that the Prophet Muhammad was “a terrorist” caused riotous protests around the globe. He later apologized for offending anyone, but declined to withdraw the comment.
He loved to debate liberals on social and political issues, but frequently counted them as friends. He spoke fondly, for instance, of U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., one of the most liberal members of Congress.
There were exceptions, however, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, who drew nothing but disdain from the Lynchburg preacher. He even helped promote and sell an independently produced video that accused the Clintons of complicity in murder during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The early years
In his 1987 autobiography, “Strength for the Journey,” Falwell recalled a turbulent family history.
He and his twin, Gene, were born on Aug. 11, 1933, to Carey H. and Helen Beasley Falwell. The Falwells were a sometimes wild, but prosperous clan whose ancestors apparently arrived in Virginia in the 1600s.
Carey Falwell was a successful legitimate businessman in Lynchburg with a string of stores and restaurants. He was also one of the area’s leading purveyors of bootleg whiskey — a trade he continued even after Virginia ended Prohibition by allowing the sale of beer and wine in 1933.
He was an alcoholic and an agnostic, but he didn’t interfere with his pious wife’s determination to raise their children in church. Falwell credits his mother — from a poor but loving family — as the guiding light in his own spiritual development.
His father died when Falwell was 15, just two weeks after making a profession of faith in Christ.
Falwell went two years to Lynchburg College, a liberal arts school affiliated with the Disciples of Christ denomination, before an emotional conversion experience in which he became a Christian at Park Avenue Baptist Church in January 1952.
He enthusiastically joined in the church’s youth ministry, going door-to-door to attract converts. It was there that he met Macel Pate, a high-school senior who played piano for the church.
Within a few months, he had decided to transfer to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo. It was a small, unaccredited school affiliated with the independent, fundamentalist Baptist Bible Fellowship.
He graduated with a degree in theology in May 1956, ending up back in Lynchburg to help a group of 35 former members of Park Avenue Baptist start a new church.
They soon began meeting in a building that once housed the Donald Duck Bottling Co. Falwell said he sometimes knocked on more than 500 doors a week inviting people to attend the new Thomas Road Baptist Church. He reached even with radio and TV broadcasts of services that began before the year ended.
On-air pastor
On the church’s first anniversary in June 1957, more than 850 people showed up for the service. It was the first sign of the influence Falwell would have.
He and Macel married in 1958, but starting a family didn’t slow down the industrious Falwell. The church’s first auxiliary ministry was the Elim Home for alcoholic men, founded in 1959. Eight years later, the church would start Lynchburg Christian Academy for grades kindergarten through 12.
Thomas Road church continued to grow and in 1970 built a new 3,200-seat sanctuary. The next year it founded Lynchburg Baptist College — today known as Liberty University — with 154 students and four faculty members.
By 1973, the college’s enrollment had jumped to 1,100, a theological seminary was added, and the church was boasting of 13,000 members.
But financial trouble was brewing, a situation that would haunt the ministry consistently over the years.
The Securities and Exchange Commission that year accused the ministry of “fraud and deceit” in the sale of $6.6 million worth of bonds used to finance construction of the church and its affiliated ministries.
The church had more than $16 million in debt and was facing bankruptcy, but the court decided to let it try to work its way out of the hole. While ruling that the church hadn’t deliberately misled investors, the court placed financial control into the hands of a five-member committee — approved by the church.
Within three years, the congregation’s annual receipts quadrupled to $16 million, enough to cover expenses and make up-to-date payments on its debt.
A political animal
Even though his rapidly growing ministerial empire was showing signs of financial shakiness, Falwell was being increasing drawn to politics.
Dismayed at the growing number of illegitimate births, abortions, the removal of teacher-led prayer in schools, what he considered an explosion of pornography, and the growing acceptance of homosexuality, he decided to do whatever “Jerry Falwell could do to help save America.”
In June 1979, he met with a group of other religious conservatives to discuss how they could become more involved in the political process. The result was the Moral Majority.
Almost instantly, the movement’s positions drew the ire of some. “The Moral Majority is Neither” declared one popular bumper sticker.
But Falwell just as quickly grew a mailing list of 5 million, many of whom were willing to send in donations to support the cause. By 1984 it was raising $11 million a year to use to influence elections and legislation.
Within a year of its founding, the organization was claiming to have helped bring about the election of Ronald Reagan and influence the nation’s political agenda.
But things were about to get rough for the Moral Majority’s leader.
Liberty University was continually operating at a deficit that had to be made up by funds raised through the Old Time Gospel Hour branch of the ministry.
Falwell also was distracted by a satirical “ad” in Hustler magazine, which features racy content and pictures of naked women. The satire portrayed Falwell as a hypocrite and a drunk who had sex with his mother.
He sued Hustler and its publisher, Larry Flynt, for libel in 1983. A federal jury in Roanoke decided the content was not libelous because no one would have taken it seriously, but it did award Falwell $200,000 for “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
Flynt appealed and the case wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1998 reversed that ruling. Falwell ended up being assessed more than $20,000 to cover Flynt’s legal costs.
In the meantime, Falwell had become embroiled in the widespread televangelism scandals in March 1987. That was when he agreed to take over the chairmanship of the Praise The Lord, or PTL, ministry of Jim and Tammy Bakker after they were accused of financial misconduct.
The Bakkers later accused Falwell of trying to steal the ministry, prompting him and other board members to resign abruptly in October of the same year.
All the while, financial pressures were continuing to build on the various parts of Falwell’s ministry — the church, the university and the Old Time Gospel Hour. Contributions dropped by $10 million in fiscal 1987 alone.
By the mid-’80s, Falwell was beginning to spend less time on the Moral Majority and more on the institutions he said were closest to his heart — Thomas Road Baptist and Liberty University.
Worsening money woes
In the spring of 1989, Liberty University was in constant financial crises, sometimes citing worries about meeting its payroll. Falwell laid off 100 of the 2,000 employees of the various ministries.
That summer, Falwell declared the Moral Majority’s mission accomplished and closed down that organization, which had effectively been replaced by a new structure called Liberty Federation several years before anyway.
Critics cited the Moral Majority’s apparent lack of influence in the election of 1988 — which brought George H.W. Bush to office — and its failure to advance its agenda for prayer in schools, fewer abortions, and more presidential power.
The organization represented “a political tide that’s come and gone,” said political analyst Kevin Phillips at the time.
Falwell hunkered down in Lynchburg to try to figure a way out of the growing financial crisis that had been exacerbated by the televangelism debacles.
He was forced to pay more than $1 million in back taxes to Lynchburg, lost a years-long battle to be able to borrow industrial-development bonds whose interest payments would have been tax-free to buyers, and he lost a lawsuit trying to force a big financial company to back a $60 million bond sale.
His long-standing policy of taking out short-term loans and paying them off with new contributions was no longer working.
Threatened with bankruptcy in 1992, the ministries attempted to force creditors to buy into a complex repayment plan to eliminate $73 million in debts. That failed, but in 1997 an anonymous donor paid off most of the creditors — although some bond holders received less than the face value of their investments.
Falwell pledged not to get in such straits again.
Despite the financial distractions, Falwell and Thomas Road Baptist at that same time were reconsidering their denominational relationship. Doggedly independent since its founding, Thomas Road Church quietly joined the ranks of the increasingly conservative Southern Baptist Convention in 1996.
In recent years, Falwell completed the move to a massive new 6,000-seat sanctuary near the university; started a new retirement community; and focused on expansion at Liberty, including the creation of a law school that opened in the fall of 2004.
Falwell signaled a return to politics— and national attention — during the administration of Bill Clinton when he savaged the president for moral lapses and threatened to revive the Moral Majority. He didn’t follow through then, but did create a new Moral Majority Coalition after the 2004 election with a goal of registering 10 million new voters with a goal of ensuring that George W. Bush is not succeeded by a more liberal president.
