Evangelicals on the Rise

MARY MURPHY, Next Billy Graham (1978)

The 1960s cultural wars between conservatives and liberals continued into the 1970s, focused around flashpoint issues like abortion, homosexuality, and feminism. To evangelical conservatives like the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Roe v. Wade, gay pride, and the Equal Rights Amendment were evidence of America’s unmooring from traditional values. His ministry, profiled in this Esquire article, responded to these moral challenges with a mix of faith and media savvy that redefined the rules of electoral politics.

“… Come. Whatever your problems, we have trained counselors to help.… Praise Jesus.… Praise Jesus.… Praise Jesus.…” As he recites the fundamentalist mantra, the faithful make their way to the front of the church.… The repetition is hypnotic.… The organ music swells.…

Brother Jerry, a bootlegger’s grandson who charmed and worked and prayed his way to the head of a multimillion-dollar ministry, is preparing to have enormous impact on the American public through mass communication. Already he can be heard daily on 275 radio stations and seen weekly on 310 television stations across the United States. Already he reaches approximately three million homes. Soon, he expects the number of his radio outlets to jump to 1,000 and his impact through television to increase when he moves one fourth of his broadcasts of the Old-Time Gospel Hour into prime time. By 1983, he hopes to be as powerful as any of the largest producers and packagers of commercial television.…

He intends to carry out this master plan to bend the world’s airwaves to God’s will from his hometown, Lynchburg, Virginia, where he is building a media empire on a lush 3,200-acre mountaintop. Here, construction of a $4-million radio and television studio will begin this year. Here, 2,250 students at the Liberty Baptist College, which Falwell founded in 1971, are being trained in evangelism, liberal arts, and sophisticated broadcasting techniques. Like the early apostles, the students will then be dispatched to spread the word around the world.…

Like country music, Bible Belt fundamentalism is moving out of the South and into the mainstream of American life. Martin Luther King led the way. He took the Baptist religion out of the churches in Montgomery, marched it into the streets, and forced it into courtrooms and legislatures, spawning a whole generation of young preacher/politicians, such as Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson. Jimmy Carter has often said that without King’s efforts, he would never have been able to capture the presidency.

Carter, in fact, may have given us a clue about what is to come. His candidacy showed that Americans are prepared to respond positively to a man who professes personal spiritual regeneration, who embodies what the public takes to be the simpler moral values of simpler times.…

These days, religion mixes as well with business as it does with politics. The evangelical movement, or “The Electric Church,” as The Wall Street Journal called it recently, generates thousands of jobs and brings in an annual cash flow of hundreds of millions of dollars. Evangelical-related products, such as magazines, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and religious records, represent an estimated $2-billion industry in this country and Canada. More than 5,000 evangelical bookstores are now open for business, and the number is growing. About $500 million was spent for religious broadcasting on commercial stations last year, five times the amount in 1972. And Evangelicals claim an average audience of 115 million a week on radio and another 14 million on TV. A total of twenty-five TV stations and 1,200 radio stations are entirely devoted to religious programming. And the number increases monthly.…

It is a typical Sunday morning at the Thomas Road Baptist Church. The parking lot is filled with tour buses and motor homes and Cadillacs. In the lobby, hundreds of visitors are lined up at the registration desk, where they are asked to fill out identification cards, which will be sent to the countinghouse and filed into a computer memory bank. Falwell’s television show, the Old-Time Gospel Hour, will be taped this morning. While the faithful buy books and Bibles, which are on sale in the lobby, Falwell is at the barbershop having his hair washed, razor cut, blown dry, and sprayed. At 10:30 A.M., a half hour before air time, he is standing before the altar raising money.

He needs money to finance four schools. “For anyone who wants to underwrite one of our students for $100, we have free Bibles in the lobby.” The Treasure Island Summer Camp … The Bible Club Ministry … Bus Ministry … Media Ministry, which takes a hefty $13.5 million out of the church’s total revenues … Youth Ministry … and the missionary singing groups who are traveling in Australia, Korea, and Japan. “And while you are filling out those pledge cards,” Falwell says, “don’t forget to ask God for $4 million for our building fund every time you pray.…” As the faithful reach for their pens, the lights for the broadcast go on. It is sixty seconds to air time.

In the control room, a crew of professionally trained technicians moves into action, flipping dials, adjusting headsets, scanning monitors. “We’ve got problems, guys,” says the director. “Camera number one can’t hear me, and camera number four is tearing up the picture. Before the panic sets in, let us pray.” He bows his head. “Our heavenly Father, we thank You for the medium of television. We pray for the technical aspects of this program so we can produce a show worthy of Your son, Jesus Christ.” He looks up, cues the technician to his left, and snaps, “Camera number two ready to pan … roll tape.”

From the pulpit, Falwell launches an attack on abortion, homosexuality, and pornography. He calls it his Clean Up Americna Campaign. … “Homosexuality is a perversion, not an alternative life-style.…” “Abortion on demand is legalized murder.…” “Pornography, particularly in television and literature, is brainwashing the American people into accepting as normal what is abnormal.”

Falwell’s organization has drawn up a questionnaire asking people’s opinions on abortion, homosexuality, and pornography. Fifty million ballots have been mailed to homes and have appeared as advertisements in magazines as diverse as the National Enquirer and TV Guide and in all major newspapers. By this November, they will be catalogued and computerized, and the results will be sent to the Supreme Court, Congress, legislators in all fifty states, and the mayor of every major city. Falwell plans to deliver his findings personally to Jimmy Carter. “I expect,” he says, “that ninety percent of the people will vote no.”

A year ago, a local paper reported that with Anita Bryant1 at his side at the altar, Jerry Falwell called for a return to the “McCarthy era, where we register all Communists.” He went even further, suggesting not only that we should register all Communists “but we should stamp it on their foreheads and send them back to Russia.” He also hit hard at any attempt by the American government to normalize relations with “that murderer Castro in Cuba.”

This morning he paraphrases Leviticus: “If a man also lie with a man as he lieth with a woman, both of them have surely committed an abomination, and they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.”

At the end of the service, I asked Falwell where he draws the line between politics and morality.

“I stay totally on spiritual issues,” he said. “I don’t talk politics.”

I asked him his definition of a political issue.

“The Panama Canal,” he said, “is political.” “The Equal Rights Amendment is moral.” So, evidently, is campaigning in Dade County with Anita Bryant, attacking Jimmy Carter on the air for his interview in Playboy, and planning a trip to California to help state senator John Briggs turn his antihomosexual initiative into law.

Does he think he has political influence over his followers?

“Yes.” He is straightforward. “But I feel that my highest calling is spiritual, and if I’m too political it will dilute my effectiveness. For instance, I’m very much against communism, but I don’t make it my main line.”

Will the American people look to a religious or spiritual person as their next President?

“I think a very spiritual person could rise,” Falwell says. His words are measured, his voice is soft. “Someone who would possess not only political savvy but spiritual consciousness, and I think it is what this country desperately needs.”

Has Carter helped or hurt the cause?

“I didn’t think Carter was the best candidate when he went in, and I think even less of him now. But I don’t think Jimmy Carter has defamed Christianity in any way. His problem is that he hadn’t had the opportunity to become much of a spiritual leader. The burdens of the White House are so complex. For me I think it is better to stay out of that arena to do God’s will.”

Do you talk to God?

“Daily.”

Does he talk to you?

“Daily.”

Can you hear him?

“Daily.”

His voice?

“No. But I know that right now He is here with me.”

The next day I went to a Roman Catholic church in Lynchburg to ask people what they thought of their home-grown prophet.

“No one is safe here anymore,” said a lifelong resident of Lynchburg. “And it’s all because of Jerry Falwell. He sends hundreds of student ministers out to knock on our doors to save souls. And when we turn them away, they go after our children. The kids come home all upset, crying all night because they are afraid that unless they join Jerry’s church they are going to hell. His ego has gotten way out of line, and I’ll tell you what I want to know: Is there anyone who can stop him?”

Mary Murphy, “Next Billy Graham: Jerry Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour,” Esquire 90 (October 10, 1978): 25–28, 30–32.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS