That was as near as Vidal came to a direct attack on Falwell, and it was taken up again in the question-and-answer period after the talk. Goaded by a journalist in the front row, Vidal confessed that he had always thought of Falwell as ‘the banker for the Lord’. Was there anything to be said for Falwell? ‘Well,’ said Vidal weightily, and paused. ‘I like his choir. I like his fat little smile …’
Poor Jerry. Everyone seems to be getting at him recently, even on his home turf. Eighteen months ago, when I saw Falwell in Dallas, the video pastor had given off a steady glow of beatific anticipation. His awakening of the born-again community, through TV and computer mailing, would surely swing the election for Reagan’s ‘dream platform’. The silent majority had solidified into the Moral Majority: ‘family issues’ would soon be catapulted into the forefront of political life.
It came to pass. But then what happened? Within weeks of his victory, Reagan stopped returning Jerry’s calls. The President, it seemed, had gone cool on the treasured issues of abortion, homosexuality, welfare cutbacks and the teachings of Genesis. Recently Jerry was obliged to join in the orchestrated howls of betrayal and neglect at a New Right rally in Washington. Reagan, said the Conservative bigwigs (Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie), had ‘the right gut-instincts, the right rhetoric’, but had sold out to pragmatism by opting for ‘experience’ in his advisers (instead of the inexperience of Falwell, Weyrich et al.). Some people, you may think, are never satisfied. The New Right had hoped to celebrate Roosevelt’s centenary with the dismantling of the New Deal. Such a position, as Reagan knew, has no support whatever among the American people. In fifty years the only proponent of the Old Deal has been Barry Goldwater, who carried half-a-dozen States in 1964.
In Dallas, Falwell confessed to expectations not only of national power but of global influence. The dream had looked so bright, so fresh. A year later he was back in Lynchburg, cranking out The Old-Time Gospel Hour. And now here was Gore Vidal — an atheist, a Darwinian, an intellectual, and a faggot — goosing Jerry in his own front yard.
Vidal’s address, or history lesson, was given at Lynchburg College, one of the few local establishments of secular education. Falwell himself shepherds a whole string of fundamentalist institutions, from kindergarten schools to postgraduate colleges. His pride is Liberty Baptist College, perched on a dusty tor called Liberty Mountain, just across town.
Up on Liberty Mountain, you get education FalwelPs way. The brochure for LBC is a document of some interest. Its photograph of the school’s business department, for instance, is in fact a cropped snap of a downtown bank; the chapel featured in the brochure also happens to belong to a school several miles away. LBC rules forbid ‘hip-hugging pants-suits’, ‘personal displays of affection’, and sideburns that extend lower than ‘the bottom of the earlobe”. The history and biology teachers are under the impression that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. There have been Falwell-related book-burnings, as chapters of Moral Majority lead search-and-destroy missions into local libraries: Daffy Duck, Slaughterhouse-Five and Fifty True Tales of Terror have all been scorched at Fahrenheit 451. The LBC motto is Knowledge Aflame.
Falwell does not rest from his holy mission, which is to raise lots of money. Jerry’s sanctuary is the Thomas Road Baptist Church, known locally as ‘Jerry Co.’; in its forum, which resembles that of the Empire, Leicester Square, parishioners can help themselves to prayer letters on the open racks. These letters are part of the Faith Partner kit which Jerry will sell you if you pay — or ‘pledge’ — $20 a month. The kit includes a Bible, a concordance, and a badge of a baby’s foot, tastefully scaled to viable-foetus size. You send in your Faith Partner Prayer Request, and fellow parishioners take them home to pray over.
A glance through the requests is as good a way as any of getting the flavour of FalwelPs pitch. ‘This is a lonely time for me, Jerry … wife scheduled for surgery … husband an alcoholic — business reverses … I also need a car … no savings — zero … please accept $5 a widow’s mite …’ Jerry will accept the $5 by the way, but the widow will be demoted on the prayer roster. Mere poverty is no excuse: pay-prayers are supposed to work better if you can’t afford them. Pledge now, live later. Falwell regularly claims that he swung the 1980 election for Ronald Reagan. No one disputes that the 5 to 7 per cent push provided by the mobilisation of the quietist proletariat had a lot to do with the Republican landslide. It is also axiomatic that Falwell’s influence (and his multi-million dollar business) comes down to one thing: the influence of television.