*(A Christian Liberal response):

May 20, 2007*

*Yes, I Knew Jerry Falwell*

*By Harry T. Cook*

**

It stopped me in my tracks, the news on Tuesday afternoon that the Rev. Jerry Falwell had been found unconscious in his office in Lynchburg, Va., and had been pronounced dead soon thereafter in a local hospital. I actually liked the man and will miss his singular contribution to the national discourse.

I found theological, philosophical, ethical and just plain old logical fault with most of what came out of the man’s mouth over the 28 years I knew him. But as I have told many an audience, I couldn’t help but like him. That may be because he treated me fairly in my religion reporting days when I covered him and his nascent Moral Majority for the /Detroit Free Press/. In all those years, he called members of the national religion press by their first names. He always had someone on his staff call me when he was in town.

Falwell was the kind of public figure who seemed never to forget the humble place whence he came to prominence. I think he did not wear well as a national figure, but they loved him at the Thomas Road Baptist Church of Lynchburg, and millions watched and listened to him preach on the “Old Time Gospel Hour” on radio and television for most of a half-century.

His theology was primitive; his reading of the Bible literal, his politics uncompromisingly right-wing and his suffering of fools virtually nonexistent. There was a kind of avuncular unctuousness about him when he spoke in public or preached from the pulpit. In his younger days, when I first knew him, he was slimmer than he was at the end of his life and wore his fame more lightly.

Lately, though, it seemed a kind of heaving effort for him to speak and preach, and his sudden death should have come as no surprise.

The first occasion upon which I met Falwell was in Detroit in 1979 when he came as a guest preacher at Temple Baptist Church, then on Telegraph Road on the city’s far west side. I had just become the religion reporter at the Free Press and requested an assignment to interview him. There was only mild interest among my editors who wondered aloud why this new guy (me) wanted to begin his tenure with what one of them called “a fat-ass Baptist preacher” (him).

That preacher was at that very time on the verge of becoming a national force in the campaign of Ronald Reagan and the Religious Right to “bring America back to Christ.” It seemed like a joke at first, until Falwell began his “I Love America” rallies on the steps of all 50 state capitols. The crowds were huge at every stop, and Falwell was on television seven nights a week, not counting his nationally aired church services.

I caught up with him again at the “I Love America” rally in Indianapolis on a rainy Tuesday morning when he had Nancy Reagan on the platform with him. Detroit’s own Max Fisher – prominent in the Reform Jewish community – had that very day announced his support of Reagan.

Perhaps not knowing that, Falwell declared to his enthusiastic Hoosier audience that “America is not a Muslim nation; it is not an atheist nation; it is not a Jewish nation; it is a CHRISTIAN nation.” All the while he was fixed in the famous wide-eyed stare of Nancy Reagan. Later that day, I got to ask both Falwell and Mrs. Reagan if they thought that Max Fisher might be miffed by the preacher’s remark.

Falwell’s press guy intervened, but not before Mrs. Reagan’s handler threw herself between me and the future First Lady, giving me a look that could curdle cream.

I had the opportunity several more times to interview Falwell on various occasions, including the day he brought Reagan to Liberty University during the last weeks of the 1980 presidential campaign. Falwell was all smiles as he escorted “the next president of the United States” to the podium.

It was a telling moment in American politics, and Falwell, at least, knew it for all it was. Maybe Reagan did, too, for when it came time to replace Justice Lewis Powell on the U.S. Supreme Court, Reagan – by that time president – turned publicly to Falwell for his /imprimatur /on the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor.

The issue was abortion politics, the thing that had brought Falwell into the public arena. The 1973 /Roe v. Wade/ decision galvanized evangelical Christians like Falwell into action. Following on the wild ’60s and the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, government sanction of reproductive rights was the proverbial straw.

On that subject, it is important to remember that, while Falwell was a sworn foe of abortion – legal or otherwise – his 22,000-member church advertised that any woman who had an unwanted pregnancy could apply for funds to travel to Lynchburg where she would be given all the prenatal care she needed with free bed and board and a ticket home after she had given up the baby for adoption.

That, I thought at the time and think today, was a fine example of putting one’s money where one’s mouth was.

Withal, Jerry Falwell, dead now at 73, was an amazing figure at an amazing time in America. It was often said that either one hated him or worshipped him. I did neither. I found him to be in his own way a successor to William Jennings Bryan – utterly sure of himself and his faith, unsparing of those who did not believe as he believed, but more generous of spirit than the common perception of the man allowed.

The conversation will be the more boring without him.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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