The new Yorker

Frances FitzGerald reported in 1981 on the emergence of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. Here FitzGerald talks with

Blake Eskin about how Falwell transformed American evangelism and national politics.

BLAKE ESKIN: What is the legacy of Jerry Falwell?

FRANCES FITZGERALD: Falwell enfranchised lots of evangelicals and permitted them to succeed in the world and to become a part of this country. He was largely responsible for founding the religious right.
What do you mean by permitting evangelicals to “become a part of this country”?
In the nineteen-twenties, after the Scopes trial, true fundamentalists declared themselves separationists. They would have nothing to do with the larger culture anymore. Some of them wouldn’t even speak with an evangelical who wasn’t a fundamentalist. And, except for local temperance or anti-gambling campaigns in the South, fundamentalists didn’t vote very much. They saw the end times coming, with the Rapture and Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ, so they said, “O.K., our job is to keep ourselves pure and await the Second Coming.” This was their eschatology, but it was also their reaction to the victory of modernist thinking in most Protestant denominations. They withdrew and became invisible, so that many people thought fundamentalism was dying out. Not so.In the seventies, Falwell brought together a group of fundamentalist pastors who had independent churches to discuss what should be done. Then, in the late seventies and early eighties, he preached that Christians—by which he meant evangelical Christians—should engage in the world and save America from moral decline and secularism. He essentially said, “Look, we’ve made this false distinction between the sacred and the secular. In fact, everything is sacred. For too long we’ve left business to Wall Street and politics to the people in Washington. We need to train men of God to become lawyers and businessmen and members of Congress. We have to mobilize our people to turn this country around.” It was this message that permitted fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals, who at that time were moving much more into the middle class, to aspire to “worldly” success and to involve themselves in politics.I learned a great deal about this from an anthropologist, Susan Friend Harding, who wrote an extraordinary book called “The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics,” which goes deeply into the changes Falwell made in fundamentalist attitudes.What was it like writing about Falwell in 1981, when the Moral Majority was emerging as a force?The Moral Majority was supposed to be ecumenical, with conservative believers of all kinds, including Orthodox Jews and Mormons as well as conservative Christians. Falwell attracted a lot of press attention, but, in practice, in the 1980 Presidential election his influence did not go very much beyond the fundamentalist community to which he belonged. There was a larger backlash on social issues in that election, but I don’t think many people thought it would continue or that the religious right would become the phenomenon it has become. Certainly, I didn’t. But Falwell and many others worked extremely hard after that, creating coalitions of conservative Christians around some of the issues that Falwell identified at the time: gay rights, abortion.

What happened to Falwell after you wrote about him?

Falwell quit being a fundamentalist in the strict sense of that word and joined the Southern Baptist Convention.
Politically, he was eclipsed, as Pat Robertson has been. Part of the problem is that both of them have what many people would consider rather exotic theological views; for example, after 9/11, Falwell said that the attacks were a judgment on the American people—or on gays or feminists. It sounds shocking to most people, but he deeply believed that American morality is in decline and God punishes sin. Also, conservative evangelicals tend to interpret all crises or catastrophes as a sign of the beginning of the end times. So he was speaking to his audience when he said this. But then other people overheard him, and he and Robertson often had to retract and say, “We didn’t mean that.” James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who’s now the most powerful figure in the religious right, is not himself a pastor, so he tends to use secular language and avoids these problems.I think that Falwell was not entirely helped by continuing to be so deeply involved in politics. If he had quit in the late eighties, he would probably have been viewed as more of a grand-old-man figure than a contentious one.

In your article, you talk about how fundamentalists demonized or condemned journalists they saw as unfriendly. Did you get that kind of reaction?

I didn’t, actually. Frankly, I don’t know how many of them read The New Yorker. I think he did, but I certainly didn’t get any hostile reaction from him at all.From what I heard from others, only Falwell really understood what I was doing in this article, which was to talk about his strategy as being a way to bring the community to which he belonged as a child—his father bootlegged alcohol, his family flirted with bankruptcy—into the middle class. It was a strategy of upward mobility. I’m not sure he liked the implication.

You devoted a good deal of attention to Liberty Baptist College, the institution of higher education connected with Falwell’s church. What has become of it?

It’s now Liberty University, and it’s probably his lasting contribution to his community. Students go on to all kinds of professions—law, business, filmmaking, and so on. John McCain gave the graduation address last year, and Newt Gingrich is giving this year’s speech.And things there have changed a good deal. In 1980, every girl at Liberty Baptist had to wear dresses down to the mid-calf, and girls never wore pants. Guys had to cut their hair short. Fundamentalists had always held to distinct gender roles: the men were to be the breadwinners and hyper-masculine, the women were to stay home and serve their man.When I was there, that had begun to change. Women were working, and college was preparing women to go to work. I haven’t been to Liberty University in quite a while, but, according to friends who have been there recently, all the girls are in bluejeans, just as they are everywhere else. So superficially, at least, it’s like other colleges.

Your story ended with you following two missionaries around Washington Heights. They strike out with Jews and Hispanics, and then encounter a drunk, mainline Christian who isn’t impressed with their religious knowledge. Is New York still as resistant to the appeal of evangelicalism as it seemed then?

No, there are lots of evangelicals in New York City, and there are some very large churches. Most of them, I think, are Pentecostal. A lot of them serve immigrants from Latin America. There is a very large black evangelical church in Brooklyn that is fairly new. These churches are socially conservative, but African-Americans and Hispanics vote differently from white evangelicals, so they haven’t changed the politics of New York. ♦