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Zigzagging on the Glory Road |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Carl F.H. Henry |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1988 |
| Size: 5,527 Words, 35,760 Characters |
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STRENGTH FOR THE JOURNEY
Jerry Falwell
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987
456 pp., $18.95
No fundamentalist entrepreneur has turned a seemingly wild imagination into as much sober reality as has Jerry Falwell. The son of an agnostic and grandson of an atheist, the indefatigable pastor-promoter has nurtured--almost incredibly--a local church of 22,000 members, gained national prominence as a network televangelist, spearheaded the political lobbying of the Moral Majority, and founded Liberty University, which now enrolls 7,500 students.
Any energetic evangelist's autobiography, ventured at age fifty-four, is unlikely to be his last word. Even so, Jerry Falwell already has much to talk about, even if Strength for the Journey antedates his resignation from an aborted effort to rescue Jim Bakker's collapsing PTL ministry, and from his own project, the Moral Majority. The importance Falwell attaches to his autobiography is evidenced by the fact that, having left the Moral Majority for pastoral priorities, he promptly embarked upon a national book promotion campaign.
Falwell emerges in this account as an embattled figure, bold in his ventures of faith, hostile to government intrusion into religious concerns. He is perhaps more responsible than anyone for the organizational impact of the so-called Religious Right and is learning gradually to cooperate with the law in an effort to rescue the credibility of both fundamentalist and charismatic televangelism. His Moral Majority lobbied vigorously for national restoration of Judeo-Christian values, fought legalized abortion, and promoted public-school prayer. It drew the venom of liberal media commentators, who considered belief in God irrelevant to political history and regarded diversity as the essence of democracy.
Falwell sports notable similarities and dissimilarities to other major televangelists. Although, like Robert Schuller, he preaches regularly to a large local congregation, he differs greatly in substance and style. Schuller stresses "positive thinking" and dismisses the Reformation doctrine of human depravity as too pessimistic; Falwell centers on Christ's propitiatory redemption of man's shameful sin and wickedness. Falwell is an independent Baptist, critical of the theological stance of charismatics (Pat Robertson) and Pentecostals (Swaggart and Bakker) and of Oral Roberts' emphasis on divine healing as a universal option conditioned only on personal faith.
If Robertson was Ivy League-educated at Yale for a career in law, and Schuller is a graduate of a mainline seminary, Falwell's training was in a small Bible college. Whereas Swaggart and Roberts typically have had mass-crusade ministries, Falwell usually speaks to his Lynchburg congregation, Bakker used a talk show and entertainment format, and Robertson was a commentator-evangelist before his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Yet direct and indirect fund-raising cuts prominently into the media time of all televangelists. Each is responsible for his ministry, not to a denomination, but rather to his own board, largely enamored of and influenced by its media star. In the wake of the Bakker debacle, one and all are now under increasing pressure for much stricter financial accountability.
Yet Falwell towers in significant respects above his fellow televangelists. He has salvaged the fundamentalist movement from public isolation and elevated it to national prominence at a time when the broader evangelical movement seemed content to rest on its laurel...
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...atic climax. Were his zigzagging career to embrace as yet unknown political ambitions, he would once again leap into national headlines. For the moment, he seems to have sacrificed both for the conviction that America needs the gospel even more than it needs the political Right. Yet, even if he should retire early, he stands commandingly tall as American fundamentalism's most fabulous achiever.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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