Scourge of gays, pornographers, and Teletubbies, Reverend Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) reshaped American politics in the 1970s and 1980s by forming a powerful coalition of conservative, religious voters. From his headquarters in Lynchburg, Virginia, Falwell became one of the nation’s most powerful clergymen, building an empire that eventually included books, television broadcasts, and a Christian university that he founded in 1971.
In the process, Falwell became a deeply polarizing cultural figure, denounced by critics as an “agent of intolerance” but celebrated as a moral leader by millions of evangelical Protestants.
After graduating from a Bible college in Missouri, Falwell returned to Lynchburg to found his Thomas Road Baptist Church in 1956. The church, which held its first meetings in an abandoned bottling plant, was Falwell’s launchpad to national fame.
To increase the church’s membership, Falwell started broadcasting his sermons on radio and television in presentations he called the Old-Time Gospel Hour. The shows were enormously successful, and membership in his church skyrocketed.
Initially, Falwell insisted that ministers should stay out of politics, and unlike many pastors, he did not participate in the civil rights movement. But his reluctance to enter the fray ended in the 1970s, when Falwell became alarmed by the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion and by what he saw as increasingly permissive social attitudes about homosexuality, pornography, and moral values.
To critics, Falwell’s aggressive rhetoric—he told his followers not to vote for any candidate who didn’t “stand by” the Bible—blurred the traditional American values of religious pluralism and separation of church and state. He also provoked ridicule for attacking a character in the BBC children’s series Teletubbies (Falwell claimed that the character Tinky Winky was a secret homosexual because he was purple and used a handbag).
Six years before his death, Falwell was embroiled in another round of controversy after claiming that the United States had brought the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks upon itself by allowing abortion and gay rights. Falwell later apologized.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- When Falwell started his Thomas Road Baptist Church in 1956, he had thirty-five congregants. By the time he died, the church had grown to 22,000 members.
- Among the many groups that Falwell antagonized were Jewish groups, especially after he proclaimed that the Antichrist was probably a living, male Jew.
- In 1983, Falwell sued pornographer Larry Flynt (1942–) for publishing a satirical advertisement in Hustler magazine that suggested the minister had committed incest with his mother in an outhouse. The Supreme Court eventually sided with Flynt in a landmark 1988 decision, ruling that the ad was protected free speech. The case was made into a 1996 movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, in which Falwell was played by actor Richard Paul (1940–1998).
