Jerry Falwell Jr. in Historical Context: People Leaving Church are not Apostates, They are Idol Destroyers
On August 24, 2020 Jerry Falwell Jr. became the latest high profile evangelical to resign. There were many scandals and controversies over his 13 year presidency at Liberty University. Most recently he made jokes about only wearing a Covid mask if it had a college picture of the Governor of Virginia in blackface on it. This was the last straw for a number of LU administrators, student-athletes and others to resign or transfer. Ultimately, he got caught in sexual entanglements that he had previously shamed and penalized others for. It is likely only Franklin Graham has a higher profile among Trump supporting evangelicals.
How did Falwell’s influence come to be?
His father, Jerry Falwell Sr. came to prominence in the 1950s as a segregationist preacher after the 1954 Brown V. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools. As reported by Max Blumenthal, in a 1958 sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?” he said:
“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made… The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line…”
This invites the question, who is his God? The line between blacks and whites was certainly drawn, but who drew it? Was it a powerful group of men who stood to huge gain by having free labor? Is that what Falwell means when he says “God”?
Falwell tried to remain civil about it by saying:
“The true Negro does not want integration….He realizes his potential is far better among his own race…[integration] will destroy our race eventually”
As he lost the battle on integration, like many white Christians he started a tax-exempt segregation academy, the Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967, and a private university in 1971, Lynchburg Baptist College, later renamed Liberty University.
In the 1971 Green v. Connally Supreme Court case it was decided academies not open to African Americans would no longer receive tax-exempt status. In 1974 the pressure was put on Liberty University, and Falwell Sr. said “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”
There is the crux of my argument: segregation was inseparable for Falwell Sr.’s Christianity and his empire. As it was for the Southern Baptists (formed in 1845 as a block of pro-slavery baptists), he devised a Christianity that was a biblical justification for white supremacy, if whites were not supreme their Christianity would fall apart, moreover they claimed that they were the true Christians. Many of their followers were convinced of their claim of “true Christianity” that when they denied white supremacy, they left it, never to look at it again. What Falwell did is exactly what taking God’s name in vain is.
Their Christianity was based on a powerful group of men, and ignored the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, those in prison. Per Jesus, how you treat these people determines whether or not you have a place in the kingdom to come. Increasingly we are coming to see what this form of Christianity does with its power, and it looks a lot like the prophet Ezekiel’s description of Sodom, whose sin was explicitly not about sexuality but that “she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49)
Since at least the 4th century it has been very profitable to use the words of the Bible to support those with power. It worked for the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, propping up the feudal system and it was very lucrative for the medieval Church to sell salvation in the form of indulgences. Slave Traders and Colonialists gave from their impressive profits to ministers adept in using Christianity to justify their ventures.
In the first half of the 1800s however, there was a group of influential German biblical scholars who began applying historical and literary studies to the Bible and came to the conclusion that the dominant forms of European Christianity, in justifying the powerful, was the opposite of what the biblical authors were advocating. Their methods have various names, I advocate for “biblical criticism” but the most known is “higher criticism”. Most were critics in the way we might use the term “movie critic” — not opposed, but simply looking at things in context, things which were once deemed above criticism (hence the term “higher”). One of the young students going back and forth between Berlin and Copenhagen, Soren Kierkegaard, went so far as to say that “The Christianity of the New Testament simply no longer exists….If anything is to be done one must reintroduce Christianity to Christendom.”
The powerful from the industrial age started getting more critique than they wanted from biblical scholars. Some, like Cyrus McCormick Jr. sponsored non-denominational preachers like DL Moody to advocate for a ‘plain reading of scripture’. That is to say, pick it up, read it, use it, absent of social or historical context. To ask what it meant historically or socially was considered excessive. This ‘plain reading of scripture’ amounted to a return to the Eurocentric Christianity which had justified the powerful for millenia, it conveniently lost some of the rituals, so it was less obvious.
That ‘plain reading of scripture’ came to a head from 1910–1915, when Lyman Stewart, who got rich through his 76/Union Oil, paid RA Torrey to edit a series of essays called “The Fundamentals”. The goal of the fundamentals was to erase the memory of the historical and literary biblical studies coming out of Germany. Stewart had these essays mailed to every pastor and ‘Christian Worker’ in the United States he could find an address for which amounted to 700,000 people. The alliance created by those essays is where we get the term fundamentalist.
J. Gresham Machen was affiliated with many of these fundamentalists and said that any Christianity that did not conform to essentially fundamentalist principles (he was talking about liberal or, modernist Christianity) was not Christianity at all. Per Machen, writing in 1923, these liberal forms of Christianity had left the door open to recent socialism, creeping on the rights of the individual.
As a student of history I had to ask, which individuals? I knew that in 1920 women had recently been given the right to vote, and upon further research it turns out Machen and the fundamentalists were against this. I also knew that a few African Americans were being allowed into colleges at this time, and yes, Machen was also against this.
The fundamentalist movement didn’t last too long, they were thoroughly embarrassed at the internationally-covered 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial” when it became obvious their opposition to modernism had resulted in a pretty thorough resistance to learning about almost any science.
At the same time, wealth inequality was so bad it resulted in the great depression. Public opinion was that we needed an investment in the nation rather than scapegoating less powerful minorities. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected and his New Deal frustrated the wealthy from the “Gilded Age” who were no longer able to get ultra-cheap labor/an attractive return on investment, they were subjected to more taxes to pay for a lot more infrastructure and other programs. This proved popular, FDR won 4 elections, dying a few months into his fourth term in 1945.
However, the wealthy and powerful like William Randolph Hearst and Cecil B. Demille revived the tactics of Lyman Stewart and the fundamentalists and found their new man in Billy Graham. Graham was introduced to big business’ preferred candidate to exit the New Deal era, Dwight Eisenhower who said “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” With the help of Graham, Eisenhower became President in 1953, and was baptised in Graham’s Presbyterianism shortly after that. Graham’s ‘plain reading of scripture’ coupled with no criticism of the powerful got him invited to every White House administration from Eisenhower to Obama. (Billy’s health deteriorating, his son Franklin Graham inherited the blessing and is one of the central evangelical advisors to Trump). Eisenhower was connected enough to Christianity he added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 and “In God We Trust” to all currency in 1956.
But, who is the God? Is it like Falwell Sr.’s God who ordained segregation? Or is it the God that strikes down that God by hearing those unjustly killed and slave women in their distress?
Billy Graham had the ‘plain reading of scripture’ doctrines of a fundamentalist but the conducted himself among elites, crowds and businessmen like a modernist. He used the less aggressive term “evangelical” to describe his coalition of Christians. The term had a longer history, but most of the popular usage in the US comes from his influence. (For more on this history, I recommend Phil Vischer’s video essay).
Returning to Falwell Sr. who worked his way into this coalition of Christians named evangelicals, questioned whether MLK was a communist in the 1960s, and called Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid Anglican Priest, a phony in the 1980s. After MLK and Tutu had been enshrined in public memory as good people Falwell Sr. apologized. His God (a powerful group of men?) had changed his mind. Who/what is God really?
The Christianity espoused by Falwell and Graham was always what the slaveholders, robber barons, segregationists and wealthy businessmen wanted to hear, and never what the hungry, the stranger, or those in prison needed. The escaped slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in an appendix to his autobiography: “What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.”
In all ages, but especially in recent years, many who grew up being told that the Christianity of Falwell and Graham was the only one have rightly rejected it, and they have received the title of apostate from their communities, yet many, like James Baldwin would say “I left the church to preach the Gospel.” Labeled apostate, but, leaving for Christian reasons.
Another early apostate from the era of slaveholding religion, Ralph Waldo Emerson said “‘you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
As Cornel West has said, those who have been wounded by religion whether that be an Evangelical form of Christianity, or similar authoritarian versions of Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah’s witnesses and leave one of these expressions are not apostates, but, like Abraham who left the God(s) of his ancestors, they are idol destroyers.
Kierkegaard said “When Christianity entered into the world, people were not Christians, and the difficulty was to become a Christian. Nowadays the difficulty in becoming a Christian is that one must cease to become a Christian.”
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