Jerry Falwell And Enthusiastic Christianity

WHAT ARE we to say about Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Christian pastor who founded the Moral Majority? Was he a moral hero, pushing back against a culture of immorality? Or was he a hate-filled bigot? For a lot of heat, but not much light, you can read the comments section after a recollection of Falwell by R. Albert Mohler Jr. here.

The facts of Falwell’s life, as reported by Kristen Gelineau, are these.

Falwell, who started a fundamentalist church in an abandoned bottling plant in Lynchburg in 1956 with just 35 members, built it into a religious empire that included the 24,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, the "Old Time Gospel Hour" carried on TV stations around the country, and 9,600-student Liberty University, which he founded in 1971 as Lynchburg Baptist College.

But what did it all mean? The best place I have found is James M. Ault, Jr’s Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church—as experienced, we should say, by a liberal sociologist at the very apogee of the Moral Majority in 1983-84.

The pastor of the Shawmut River Baptist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, was Frank Valenti, who started out as an Italian Catholic. He’d barely learned to read in school and was badly wounded in Vietnam. It was when lying wounded that he got religion, and ended up studying to be a pastor at Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg.

The curriculum at the college was heavy on hands-on education and light on academics, but “its modest reading assignments proved too much for Frank.” But still, he graduated and founded his own Baptist church in Worcester.

Like Frank, the people drawn to fundamentalist Christianity are people on the cusp of literacy. They are people making the transition from the culture of the spoken word to the culture of the written word. And Bible study is the center of the experience, for it is through reading and discussing the Bible that fundamentalist Christians negotiate the transition from the world of the spoken word (tradition means passing on knowledge with the spoken word) to the world of the written word.

And reading is a challenge for them. “Wow, I skipped a whole bunch of words there,” says one man at Bible study.

Reading itself proved a challenge for others around the table, too, especially the men, whose time and attention at school had often been more limited than the women’s.

But the combination of reading and discussion creates a new culture. Here is one of the church members, Phil Strong.

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us answers. He would open up God’s word and say, ‘OK, here’s what God has for you.’”

It is important to appreciate the radical nature of what has happened to a person who says that. They are living right at the intersection of the traditional world of the spoken word and the newly experience world of the written word. It is an experience that we, who cannot imagine an illiterate world, can barely grasp.

But of course to many the culture of the fundamentalist church is something to be stamped out. As one Newsweek commenter wrote:

Jerry Falwell was a parasite who fed on fear, ignorance, and bigotry.

Well, yes—if you believe that exploration and creativity and tolerance are the most important, maybe the only values. But fundamentalist Christianity is not for people in that kind of mind space.

Fundamentalist or enthusiastic Christianity for people experiencing the “leap in being” from the world of power and powerlessness to the world of rules. That is why it flourishes in the favelas of South America and the slums of southern Africa.

And for millions of people, it is the Bible and the desire to read it and understand it that brings them to literacy.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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