Covenant Brothers by Daniel G. Hummel;

Author:Daniel G. Hummel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Menachem Begin and Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell, who led the Christian right for much of the 1980s, was neither born nor raised in the bosom of postwar evangelicalism. His lifelong home was Lynchburg, Virginia, an emerging middle-class town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Falwell was born in 1933 to a pious mother and an alcoholic father. Uninterested in religion, he had a conversion experience during his sophomore year at Virginia Tech that changed his life’s trajectory. Moving to the unaccredited Baptist Bible College in Missouri, the seminary for the Bible Baptist Fellowship International, Falwell joined a theologically conservative, independent denomination with roots in the fundamentalist movement. In 1956, he returned to Lynchburg and founded Thomas Road Baptist Church. His congregation grew from thirty-five to more than ten thousand in the 1970s, adding a school, a university, social service ministries, and a fleet of buses to transport congregants from the surrounding countryside.41 A pioneer of the televised “electronic church,” Falwell also hosted The Old-Time Gospel Hour, a show mixing preaching and music.42 The program directed millions of dollars and viewers to Falwell’s ministries.

From his pulpit, Falwell preached a fundamentalist, dispensational Christianity.43 Though he denounced liberalizing social movements, including the civil rights movement as a distraction from missions, Falwell became increasingly interested in politics in the 1970s. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision on abortion in Roe v. Wade and the decision by the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the tax-exempt status of segregated and fundamentalist Bob Jones University in 1974 propelled Falwell and many other independent Baptists into political activism. By 1976, Falwell was itching for a national platform to organize conservative Americans from all backgrounds to combat the secular humanism he saw eroding the foundations of American society. In that year, he criticized Jimmy Carter on air, marking the first time he weighed in on a national candidate. He celebrated the bicentennial with a series of “I Love America” rallies in state capitals that featured patriotic music, preaching, and a lament for the secular drift.

Between 1976 and 1979, when he emerged as the leader of the Christian right, Falwell became deeply invested in the state of Israel, as well. There is little evidence that he held anything but a theological interest in Israel before then. In the same vein as other Christian right Zionists, Falwell warmed to the issue after a Holy Land tour in 1970.44 By 1978, Falwell was citing the negative side of Genesis 12:3—“I will curse those who curse you”—to warn that America’s decline—even its existence—hinged on Israel’s survival. In broad strokes, Falwell’s prophetic warnings linked the essential purpose of the United States with America’s treatment of the Jewish people. “God has raised up America in these last days for the cause of world evangelization and for the protection of his people, the Jews,” he explained. “I don’t think America has any other right or reason for existence other than those two purposes.”45 The consequences for straying from these missions were found in the prophet’s warning (e.

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