Most of Lynchburg, Virginia, resembles an outsize drive-in shopping-mall. If you ask, with some desperation, to be taken to the centre of town, you end up in a different shopping-mall called Main Street. Moving around on foot, you feel vulnerable and isolated, like the next-to-go in The Amityville Horror. The township was founded by Colonel Charles Lynch — the man who got so memorably carried away when dealing out rough justice to loyalists after the American Revolution. It has a population of sixty-odd thousand, nearly a third of which owes allegiance to the Thomas Road Baptist Church, Jerry Falwell’s home ministry.
Lynchburg is Jerryburg now, more or less. Falwell runs his Old-Time Gospel Hour from here, and his fund-raising computers glisten in the redbrick buildings behind the strapping new church. He also runs a children’s academy, a Bible institute, a correspondence school, a seminary, and Liberty Baptist College itself, where ‘leaders are trained for the generation to come, learning good character traits and how to become good moms and pops’.
Accompanied by Perry, a honey-toned young blonde from Falwell ‘s PR department, I went up to Liberty Mountain to inspect the campus. ‘Are you saved?’ Perry asked me early on. I had grown used to fielding this kind of question over the past week. ‘Well, not exactly,’ I began. Perry was saved all right. ‘I felt the Lord coming into my heart with — such love…” Perry had been born again at the age of four, good going even for these parts.
Liberty Baptist College is a Southern-fried crag lined with bungalow-style lecture halls, the students’ living-quarters situated further up the hill. No smoking, no drinking, no swearing. The fresh-faced pupils stroll peacefully from class to class, or sit reading their Bibles, or chat by the Coke machines. Not all die courses are theological – though I assumed that a lecture on, say, sociology would consist of an hour-long denunciation of die subject. Perry herself had majored here in psychology. ‘How do they teach Freud?’ I asked. ‘Well, you take Freud, and see where he disagreed with the Bible,’ said Perry. ‘I mean, sometimes they agree. But we all know the Bible got there first.’
Thomas Road Baptist Church is more like a cinema than a place of worship, with its scalloped stalls sloping downwards to the stage, and the TV cameras wedged into the balcony. I mingled unobtrusively (I hoped) with the 4,000 Lynchburg faithful; I had Perry’s say-so on this, but still felt uneasy about the imposture… There was a busy, socialising air: clumps of gossiping girls, all with a new dollar-bill on their laps for the collection bowl, and fondly watched by the big-chinned boys further back. Everyone opened their much-thumbed, much-underscored Bibles. It was 7 p.m. The two-hour service began.
This was an untelevised service, and so more down-home and gone-fishing in style dian FalwelPs standard performance. We memorised a verse from the Book of Psalms, slyly invited by a Falwell sidekick to insert the names of Carter and Reagan wherever we thought it appropriate: ‘God is the judge: he putteth down one and setteth up the other.’ We heard a spiritual from an Isley-Brothers-style trio (among the few dark faces in the house) and a squawky ballad from five local sisters on violin. Falwell preached with avuncular cheer — don’t listen to the media, God loves you, my little wife, on Judgment Day we’ll all be bigshots, sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down. Doubters filed up and then filed back, all born again again. Then Falwell asked us to join in little groups of two and three, and pray together, out loud.
Until that moment I had been performing a nervous, if quite passive, imitation of a devout Virginian. When people jotted down apophthegms, I took notes; when they sang hymns, I mimed along; when they prayed for salvation, I prayed for a Winston King Size and a large gin and tonic. But suddenly the young man on my left, who had kindly shared his Bible with me during the readings, turned to me and said, ‘You wanna pray together?’ – and I, for some reason, said, ‘Surely’.
We hunkered down, hands on brows. ‘You wanna go first?’ he asked. ‘No. You go first.’ And as he stuttered on about the Lord helping America in its hour of etc., etc., I thought of the strapping young champions of Christ a!I about me, and of my own blasphemous intrusion. In five minutes, I thought, you’ll be dangling from the rafters — and quite right too. The voice beside me trailed off with some remarks about Sue-Ann’s rheumatism and Joe-Bob’s mortgage; I turned to see his bashful, expectant face. In rocky Virginian I babbled out something about our people in Tehran and the torment they must feel in their hour of etc., etc. My prayermate wished he had thought of this too. We squeezed our frowning foreheads and nodded together for a very long time.