The Legacy Of Jerry Falwell

Before the rise of Jerry Falwell Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law legalizing abortion for the state of California and nobody thought anything about it. The United States Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 on Roe v. Wade thinking it was just tidying up what had already been decided in the body politic.

You could say that with Roe v. Wade liberals had just about finished up the engraving on their moral get-out-of-jail-free card. Anything that well-born liberals wanted to do was now OK: sex, drugs, art, divorce, abortion, spirit, searching, activism, all no problem, all justified by German philosophy or psychology, and now confirmed by the United States Supreme Court.

Then along came Jerry Falwell and said that it was all wrong. No wonder they hated him.

But to Jerry Falwell his legacy was not the political battle of the Moral Majority but his Liberty University and the 10,000 people he had sent out into the world from there to “plant” the Word of God. What did he mean?

Fortunately we know, because in Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church James M. Ault, Jr. wrote about it. A liberal post-doc sociologist from Harvard he set out in 1983 on a two-year project to study the Shawmut Valley Baptist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, and its pastor Frank Valenti.

Frank had grown up in a rambunctious Italian-Catholic family just outside Worcester, but by the early 1970s he was a disabled Vietnam vet with half a leg shot away, working as an auto mechanic, and his marriage was in trouble. He got Jesus and in 1974 he packed up his wife and two kids to go to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia. He studied to become a pastor.

The curriculum at Liberty was heavy on hands-on education and light on academics, but “its modest reading assignments proved too much for Frank,” a blue-collar kid who had scarcely cracked a book in his life. But still, he graduated and “planted” his own Baptist church in Worcester.

Unlike Jerry Falwell, Frank never got his church membership above 100-150. The church always seemed to split when it got above the 100 member mark. But the members built a church and school, held Bible study, and operated a mutual-aid community where people only had to communicate a need to prompt the church community to pitch in and help. Ault, as a struggling post-doc, owned a Volkswagen Rabbit with worn-out brakes. Came the day when a church member insisted on fixing his brakes for free.

The Shawmut Valley church members came overwhelmingly from the lower-middle and working class. They were down-home people like Frank Valenti, struggling to make it in the city on the cusp of literacy. It is precisely people like them who have been drawn into the enthusiastic Christian experience ever since the Puritans in the seventeenth century and the Great Awakening in the eighteenth century.

For those wobbling on the cusp of literacy the birth into the culture of the written word has been midwifed in enthusiastic Christian sects for three centuries at least by Bible study, and Ault shows how Bible study teaches “the elementary discourses, the language, of fundamentalist Christian life.” In Bible study a traditional oral culture of families and kindred adapts to the modern world through a collective oral discourse mediated through a written text.

Our liberal friends often feel a profound compassion for cultures struggling with the challenge of modernity, and want to help them with government programs. Our academic friends talk about strategies of resistance to the cultural colonialism imposed by western hegemony.

But our liberal friends apply this analysis only to groups likely to serve their political interests and lacking the cultural power to challenge their therapeutic, feminist, communalist and social-scientific schemes. It serves their purpose, of course, to swaddle such groups in the blankets of the liberal-run welfare state. In a generation or two of welfare dependency a minority group becomes pretty well deracinated and domesticated.

But a Christian fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell, son of a bootlegger and murderer, does not want to be domesticated. Proud and independent, fundamentalists want to work out their salvation in a personal relationship with God without the mediation of liberal middle-men. There is only one way to characterize such willful obstinacy, for liberals. It is bigotry and hate.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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