On Falwell

religionandmedia.com
The AEJMC-RMIG Newsletter--Summer 2007

On Falwell: End of an era raises questions about a media legacy

Michael A. Longinow
Chair
Department of Journalism
Biola University

He could do a water slide in a black preacher suit. He could share a talk show desk with a pornographer. And he could mobilize an army of emails, phone calls and letters to Washington, D.C. like few in the late twentieth century. But Jerry Falwell’s legacy as one of the more influential Baptist pastors of his time lies less in his political clout than in his street-smarts with television, radio, print media and the Internet.

Falwell was a conservative Christian the news media loved to hate. The week of his death, National Public Radio, in wrap-up interviews with political and Evangelical leaders, painted Falwell’s legacy as that of a divisive, anti-gay throwback to a time of socio-religious hierarchy — part of a fading regime that had seen its day. Newspapers nationwide played up the language of initial medical reports about Falwell’s being “unresponsive” in his Liberty University chancellor’s office.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper program, on the day Falwell died, called him “controversial to the end.” The program highlighted Falwell’s brutish political agenda on abortion and his posturing Republican politics from the Reagan era to the G.W. Bush re-election controversy. It showed the blustery clip of Falwell linking AIDS, feminism, and cultural immorality in the U.S. — elements he indicated led to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. And it noted Falwell’s “Tinky Winky” warnings to parents about the homosexual suggestiveness of the Teletubbies.

Falwell could be bombastic in front of the cameras. But he wasn’t stupid. It can be argued that things he said that ended up looking most daffy on national network television tended to be edits — clips that belied the larger mind underneath, tid-bits bypassing the continuity of his communication. Falwell, despite news appearances of buffoonery, was shrewd with language and ideas. Even his ideological enemies admitted this, on the record, as Falwell’s funeral arrangements were underway. What few would deny before or after his death, was Falwell’s eagerness for the chance, preferably on TV or radio, to respond to a question, to debate what he believed was true — thickness of the ice on which he stood notwithstanding.

Falwell was a preacher — part of a centuries-old tradition of religious oratory in the Protestant church. He spoke it the way he saw it, and from the vantage point of the Baptist pulpit, had an audience eager to hear not only biblical preaching, but his views on everything from the earth’s origins to peace in the Middle East. With a turn of phrase, a raised eyebrow, a thunderous finish, he could pull crowds by the thousands into an idea, a way of seeing, a moment of decision. Media observers confused this with televangelism because, from the start, Falwell’s preaching from Thomas Road Church made for great television and played well on radio. He was among a host of preachers in the late 1960s and 1970s who bought up Sunday morning time slots to fill what the FCC — in those years — called public service programming. Later, telecasts of his church services became regular fare on cable stations devoted to programming with similar worship services. The Columbia Journalism Review, in 1981, estimated Falwell’s Sunday morning TV audience at 15 million. But if a televangelist can be defined as one whose ministry is essentially limited to a studio set fitted with lights and cameras — perhaps with seats for a studio audience — Falwell did not fit the mold.

Nor was Falwell a politician. Perhaps this is why when he stumbled — more often than not in sound bites on the record — it tended to be over the political implications of Supreme Court restructuring, Islam in international relations, the Roe v. Wade decision more than 40 years after becoming law. His place in media law history as plaintiff in Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell, an action that tested the limits of satire — ending in a 9-0 vote against him by the U.S. Supreme Court — became, in retrospect, an embarrassment, he told Hustler publisher Larry Flynt later. Censorship, as a concept, blurs quickly when one’s day-to-day experience involves tweaking of ghost-written speeches or narratives and editing promotional material.

While Falwell will perhaps always be linked to the Moral Majority — an organization he disbanded publicly some years after it had served its socio-political purpose in the 1980s — Falwell’s essence was as a communicator of conservative Christian teaching, one who infuriated some but had appeal for many across racial and socio-cultural lines, in truck-stops, grocery stores and factories up to the day of his death.

“The media may have misunderstood him, but the people certainly did not,” wrote J.C. Watts, former U.S. Representative from Oklahoma in the Las Vegas Review-Journal shortly after Falwell’s death.

Stuart Hall pointed out the paradox of the people vs. the power bloc in media. Under Hall’s theory, those capable of appealing to the people can bypass the artificial structures and assumptions of established media power. The shrewdness of Falwell’s media appeal was its deftness with the vernacular of a Protestant base — a vast middle American populace that, perhaps since the era of William Jennings Bryan, had been hungry to hear their way of looking at life put into the public sphere. By means of television, radio, printed material, even rudimentary Web media, Falwell could move Americans, and did so in ways that embraced Roman Catholics like Phyllis Schlafly, Jewish-Americans like Michael Medved, and Pentecostals like Jim Bakker. Flynt fought Falwell all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but took his phone calls and shared food and his personal jet with him in later years. Mel White, who ghost-wrote a Falwell autobiography but later went public with his homosexual lifestyle, had kind words for Falwell at his death. Something about this preacher, in his media or outside it, had an odd appeal to those — even if they disagreed with Falwell’s message — who grasped the power of language and rhetoric in American media.

The irony that was Falwell’s media appeal was that while he urged middle-class Americans to be active socio-politically, he called them to a Christian media world that was an alternative—or as Reason magazine editor Jesse Walker put it, “a parallel pop culture”—that demonized and baffled mainstream media.

Susan Friend Harding, in The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2000), notes that the media appeal Falwell carried was his pregnant ambiguity and “gaps.” Audiences filled those gaps in their minds to help Falwell’s message reach its mark. To understand Falwell, then, as a media-driven communicator is to understand Martin Luther King, Jr. and the many other preachers of the last century (and those preceding it) whose messages also carried gaps, but were a kind of back-and-forth call to action with audiences. One way or another, the message got through. Whereas King’s audiences literally talked back to him during his orations, Falwell’s did so silently, or in ways that didn’t show up on TV screens. But like those responding to King’s media image, Falwell’s followers responded in the form of donation envelopes, campaigns for public office, or voting — a connecting of socio-religious, socio-political dots.

In the last years of Falwell’s life, there is little doubt that as a man in his 70s, he had lost the media charisma of his earlier years. It is said that after one network news interview early this year, Robert Schuller called Falwell to tell him he should take better care of himself. Falwell was slowing down and he knew it. He’d been preparing for it perhaps for decades. The real strength of his media legacy, he probably sensed, would be in those much younger — maybe at Liberty University, which he launched as a college in 1971, maybe elsewhere — who could translate his ideas into the vernacular of new generations. Stranger things have happened in a nation unswervingly committed to folk cultures, popular religion, and the tools of media.

“The next Jerry Falwell might be sitting in a church basement right now,” suggested Jesse Walker, “pointing a camcorder at himself and preparing to upload his homilies to YouTube.”