Falwell is innocuous in his home pulpit, smiling, sensible, protective: he understands the American spiritual yearning, which is the yearning to belong. But my first reaction when I met and talked to him, back in Dallas, was a momentary squeeze of fear. With his people milling about him in the futuristic foyer of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, he reminded me of the standard villain of recent American fiction and film: the corporation man.
Jerry Falwell (born in 1933; born again in 1956) is six foot and then some, with the squashy-nosed face of the friendly policeman. He wore a suit of some incredibly plush and heavy material (taffeta? theatre curtains? old surplices?), adorned with a small gold brooch in the characters of Jesus Christ, the terminal t stretched into a cross. (The same thing happens to the T in vote on his supporters’ banners.) A huge aide brought us coffee. We began.
Doggedly I began to rehearse the obvious liberal objections to his platform, mentioning that he had called the Equal Rights Amendment ‘a vicious attack on the monogamous Christian home*. ‘That’s right,’ he said blandly. ‘I don’t believe in equal rights for women. I believe in superior rights for women.’ (This is consistent enough: Falwell has always wanted to kick women upstairs.) ‘You know, the Women’s Lib movement? Many of them are lesbians, you know. They’re failures — probably married a man who didn’t treat them like a human being,’ he added, completing the machocentric circle.
‘If you were President,’ I said, eliciting a brief smirk, ‘how would you stop people being homosexual?”
‘Oh, they’ve got to live, have jobs, same as anybody else. We don’t want any Khomeini thing here. It’s the sin not the sinner we revile. It’s anti-family. When God created the first family in that Garden, he created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, ‘Besides, I want influence, not power. But I want global influence. We can’t buy more airtime in America, no way. But we’ll start buying it worldwide. South America, Europe, Asia …’
His aides signalled. I asked my final question.
‘Yes, sir, every word, quite literally, from Genesis to Revelations, which says there will soon be nuclear holy war over Jerusalem, after which Russia will be a fourth-rate power and Israel will astonish the world. Nice talking to you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a radio show to attend.’
Easy prey, perhaps. British liberals enjoy being alarmed by commotion on the American Right; we also tend to indulge our vulgar delight in American vulgarity. I don’t think the Evangelicals will soon be running the country. Although they have made an appeal to something old and fierce in the native character, it will take years to develop this into any kind of consensus. The movement constitutes a genuine revolution from below, however, and will have to be heeded. To dismiss the beliefs of the Evangelicals is to disdain the intimate thoughts of ordinary people.
Nor is their critique of American society contemptible in itself. One of Falwell’s TV specials is called America, You’re Too Young To Die. It shows leathery gays necking in Times Square, sex-aid emporia, child pornography, aborted foetuses in soiled hospital trays. A predictably alarmist collage, certainly. But some of us who have been born only once find plenty that is cheerless here, and fail to buy the ‘humanist package’ entire.
‘AH the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution,’ wrote William Bryan in 1914. ‘It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.’ The anti-intellectual content in Evangelical feeling is, by definition, a source of pride to its leaders. But it will either ruin or deform the movement eventually. No book but the Bible; Genesis or Darwin, one or the other. This is why the movement will have to be contested. This is why the movement is so wide-open, so abjectly vulnerable, to authoritarian thought.
Observer 1980
Vidal v. Falwell
‘I usually start with a prayer. But instead I’ll start with the latest Nancy Reagan joke.’ The perpetrator of this careful irreverence was Mr Gore Vidal; its setting — Lynchburg, Virginia, the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s home town and HQ, the capital of the New Right. ‘Actually,’ drawled Vidal, an old-Virginian aristo himself, ‘it’s the capital of the Old Right. If there’s anything a Virginian hates to be called, it’s new.’