Religion: Jerry Falwell Spreads the Word

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Falwell felt no special urge for the church, although he used to lie in bed Sunday mornings captivated by the robust radio voice of a California evangelist, Charles E. Fuller. The night of Jan. 20, 1952, Falwell sat in the front pew of Park Avenue Church listening to a minister speak Charles Fuller's exact message: It was possible to have a personal relationship with God through Christ. Thrilled by the words, Falwell took the invitation to come forward to the altar and be born again. He bought a Bible the next day. After graduating from a Missouri Bible college as an ordained Baptist minister, he started the Thomas Road Church in Lynchburg and began to broadcast his services on radio. Within a year his membership jumped from 35 to nearly a thousand. Falwell was a smooth storyteller and his blunt, biting tongue gave his Fundamentalist listeners a new sense of confidence. He thundered against adultery, drinking and premarital sex. He built his church audience with a series of stunts, importing Christian karate experts to smash blocks of ice in front of the congregation and exhibiting the "world's tallest Christian," a 7-ft. 8-in. wrestler from the Midwest. Falwell desegregated his church in the mid-'60s but spoke out sharply against clergymen becoming involved in issues like civil rights.

By the '70s Falwell's Thomas Road Church was packing in 20,000 people through five Sunday services. As the money poured in, his financial managers got overambitious and the Securities and Exchange Commission accused them of illegally selling unsecured church bonds out of state. Charged with fraud and deceit, Falwell agreed to sell no more bonds, and the charges were dropped.

Some fellow clergymen viewed his ministry as an entrepreneurial sideshow. One of them, the Rev. John Killinger of Lynchburg's First Presbyterian Church, rose in the pulpit in 1981 and asked his parishioners whether they believed Jesus would ever have appeared on the Old Time Gospel Hour. It was a sharp rebuke from the right side of the tracks. Falwell struck back with typical venom, mispronouncing Killinger's name as Dillinger. Falwell's aggressive tone may have given some of his supporters violent ideas: Killinger and his family began getting death threats.

In those days Falwell took criticism badly. When local reporters questioned his apocalyptic fund-raising letters, he would mount the Thomas Road pulpit the next Sunday and attack them. After one woman with a masculine-sounding first name wrote a critical magazine article, Falwell insinuated from the pulpit that she was a lesbian. "I don't know for sure why she changed her name," he taunted. When the local newspaper did a story about how much church money went to purchase TV time and how little was allotted to outside charities, Falwell was furious. "The day may come," he told his applauding congregation, "when we just have to take away one fourth of (the paper's) subscription list and their advertising."