Religion: Jerry Falwell's Crusade

In the unique ministry of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, a press conference is as comfortable a setting as a church service. There he was last week at New York City's Kennedy Airport, smiling out at television crews and slightly incredulous reporters. His mission: to offer optimistic words of moral assurance about South Africa's embattled white regime, whose leaders he had just met during a whirlwind five-day visit. He urged the good Christian folk of America to buy up gold Krugerrands and push U.S. "reinvestment" in South Africa.

The words provoked a nationwide furor, but Falwell persevered at a follow-up press conference in Washington and then on a series of TV shows. Through it all, the trademark Falwell manner was on public display: the presentation of disputatious and highly debatable assertions in tones of sweet reason, congeniality in the face of bitter attacks, an almost eerie confidence that he possessed insights his countrymen needed to hear about.

Falwell, 52, did not need to depend only on journalists to transmit his revelations. There would be opportunity later for a few comments on his Old Time Gospel Hour, and for a fuller report on Jerry Falwell Live, which is transmitted to 34 million homes on Ted Turner's WTBS cable-TV system each Sunday night.

Nor was South Africa Falwell's only political concern last week. In an unlikely alliance with Civil Rights Leader Joseph Lowery and other clergy, he joined another press conference in Washington to decry alleged U.S. Government interference in religious freedoms. The group also contended that Cult Leader Sun Myung Moon had been railroaded in his tax-fraud conviction.

There was important work to do as well back home in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell met with the associate pastors who operate the huge Thomas Road Baptist Church during his many absences. He appeared as usual in his church's octagonal sanctuary to preach at the Wednesday-night prayer meeting. His message, | "Live Unto Him," was loosely based upon II Corinthians 5: 14-15. The week concluded with a particularly pleasant chore: mingling amiably with the 3,500 en- tering freshmen at Liberty University, his proudest creation.

In addition to filling his roles at the Thomas Road Church, at the university and on TV, Falwell is the founder of Moral Majority, an organization of conservative Americans who lobby for such causes as school prayer and antiabortion legislation. This national political movement engenders passionate enthusiasm among its followers and a large measure of trepidation among many opponents.

Another aspect of Falwell's crusade has received less attention but is at least as important in its implications. He is mobilizing and altering the consciousness of that once insular component of American religion known as Fundamentalism. Before Falwell, Fundamentalist preachers denounced evil in "the world" in order to compel their flocks into strict isolation from it. Nowadays those same jeremiads are a stern call to social action. "When I was growing up," recalls Fundamentalist Pastor Keith Gephart of Alameda, Calif., "I always heard that churches should stay out of politics. Now it seems almost a sin not to get involved."