“Right now we are in such a sick condition that there are not going to be any easy routes out. As a matter of fact, I don’t know that America can recover from some of the problems that we have created without going bankrupt …”
Penthouse Interviews The Reverend
A self-styled “noisy Baptist,” the Reverend Jerry Falwell, 46, is also an amazingly successful one — a near-perfect example of the American Dream.
Starting with a handful of communicants in a rented room in Lynchburg, Va., he has built up his Thomas Road Baptist Church until, with 17,000 members, it is the largest in the nation, complete with a private elementary and high school, a college, a seminary, an alcoholic treatment center, a summer camp, and a foreign mission. From its modest beginnings as a local radio and television show, his “Old Time Gospel Hour” has grown to the point where it reaches perhaps as many as 50 million viewers through 324 stations in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.
When he travels, he flies in his own private Commander jet. His choir follows in another. He is an evangelical superstar in a conservative three-piece suit, but he still likes nothing better than a good old practical joke of the stink-bomb and whoopee cushion variety — the same sort of jokes that caused him to be banned from his high-school graduation back in 1950.
But no matter. With 950 employees and an annual operating budget of $56 million tax-free, Jerry Falwell is the biggest thing to happen to Lynchburg since Ulysses S. Grant. He helped write the Republican platform in Detroit last July, he was instrumental in signing up perhaps as many as 3 million new conservative voters, and he is the founder of Moral Majority, the fundamentalist political group that materially contributed to the defeat of more than a dozen liberal and ideologically “suspicious” congressmen and senators in the last election-including Rep. James Buchanan, a conservative Republican and himself a Baptist minister, who was perceived to be unsound on the subject of women’s rights and blacks. Falwell’s followers have taken over the GOP political apparatus in Alaska and have made their influence felt across the country.
“This is apparently an American first,” says Wes McCune, head of a distinguished Right-watching group in Washington. “We have to assume that the Reverend Falwell activated many religious people with his declaration that it is actually a sin not to go out and vote.”
The inspiration for Moral Majority was not, however, entirely the product of Reverend Falwell, whose imagination is fertile but somewhat limited. And while Falwell is the organization’s most conspicuous spokesman and the commander of its day-to-day activities, there is also some question of whose purposes, exactly, ii really serves. It got its start when Ed McAteer, a former soap salesman and field director of a New Right pressure group called the Conservative Caucus, introduced Falwell to his chief, Howard Phillips. Phillips, a Jew who claims to be a Democrat, is the man who dismantled the Office of Economic Opportunity for Richard Nixon, but he is not a strategist. That honor belongs to Paul Weyrich, the New Flight’s principal theoretician, whose own organization is called the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Weyrich was already dreaming of a vast new conservative coalition, one uniting the nation’s fundamentalists with the already established antibusing, antigay, antiabortion groups, and he had already presided over the birth of Christian Voice, a political organization of fundamentalist ministers.
Falwell, with his large television following, was a considerable bag, and when Moral Majority was officially born in the middle of 1979, Weyrich made certain that his close associate, the Reverend Robert Billings, went aboard as executive director. Weyrich and McAteer then went on to implement the third phase of the plan and founded Religious Roundtable, an umbrella organization that during the past campaign saw to it that the activities of the New Right, Christian Voice, Moral Majority, and single-issue groups moved forward in lockstep, rewarding friends and punishing enemies. (Billings moved on to become a religious-affairs adviser to Regan.)
From Weyrich’s point of view, Falwell more than served his purpose; he not only contributed manpower and oratory, but by the end of the campaign his substantial treasury was so depleted — by the liberals, he said, largely because they refused to fall over and play dead the moment the Christian soldiers appeared on the electoral horizon — that he was forced to appeal for an influx of new funds from his television audience.
Given their enormous contribution to the campaign-and their invaluable assistance in helping the Republicans gain control of the Senate-it is no wonder that Weyrich and Falwell have begun to believe that they are entitled to the ear of the new president. Indeed, Weyrich greeted Reagan’s election with a veiled threat about the pernicious liberalism of the new vice-president. And if Mr. Reagan continues to prove himself annoyingly flexible on matters close to the heart of the New Right, it is likely that Weyrich will once again take the wraps off his obedient and wealthy colleague, the Reverend Jerry Falwell.
Like all Protestant fundamentalists, Falwell believes in the literal truth of the Bible, and he pursues his own peculiar interpretation of it with a convert’s zeal. (An accomplished athlete and straight A student as well as a prankster in high school, he did not come to Jesus until he was a sophomore in college.) As he has revealed in his recent book Listen, America! and in countless speeches and sermons across the country in the past year, the Bible proves that God does not approve of ERA, rock music, sex, abortion, welfare, detente, defense cuts, SALT II, homosexuality, liberalism, and secular humanism, a pernicious doctrine that he vaguely defines as covering all the people who either fail to agree with him or refuse to. Falwell calls the furtherance of all these mostly negative goals his “agenda for the eighties,” and he intends to see them enforced before the end of the decade.
This Penthouse interview with the Reverend Falwell incorporates two taped conversations, conducted by two independent journalists, Sasthi Brata and Andrew Duncan, at two different times. Although the interviews were cut for space reasons {these cuts are indicated by ellipses in the text}, neither the questions nor the answers have been altered in any respect.
… Your message seems to be … a very simple message … One has to wonder why it needs such an expense — $50 million a year?
Falwell: Well, the gospel of Christ, which is a very simple message-that is, the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ is as old as the Bible is …. Now the difference, however, in this generation, this age, than, for example, the first generation after Christ, is that there were about 250 million people on the earth during the days of Christ. There are about 18 times that many now. And we’ve long since passed the 4 billion mark, and we’re moving on in a population explosion.
The commission that the Lord gave to the church was to “preach the gospel to every creature,” meaning every living person. Well, if we were to do it as it was done in early New Testament, apostolic days, of two by two knocking on doors-house-to-house evangelism-by pure numerics we would never even keep up with the population explosion. And so, the ultimate answer is, as I see it, God gave you in the past 100 years most of the media that distinguished our world from Paul’s world. The exception is the printed press. I think it’s significant that the first major thing printed on the printing press, 500 years ago, was the English Bible. I think God gave the medium, including the printing press, to the church to make the great commission of preaching the gospel to every creature a possibility.
God is not unreasonable. God does not give commandments that cannot be kept. And so, if we’re going to reach everybody, television, radio, the printed page, automation, computerization, et cetera, et cetera, all of this is essential-particularly to those of us who are living in the last quarter of the twentieth century. If the population of the world goes on to 7 billion, as some say it will be the turn of the century, I see a very real possibility that we can have preached the gospel to every one of them by that time, many times, by simply using what God has made available to us and to industry.
So in order to do that, it costs us this year [1980] $56 million to do it. Next year it will cost more like $75 million to do it. We have to decide whether or not the cost, or the end, justifies the means. If it is worth it-if really obeying God and preaching the gospel to every creature is important, and I feel it’s all-important-then cost should not stand in the way …
What about the show business aspects of your presentation? Doesn’t this tend to diminish and make facile the points you’re putting across?
Falwell: Well, I don’t know if you have watched the “Old Time Gospel Hour” or not, but we are a church service; that is, we actually videotape the 11 :00 A.M.-to-noon Thomas Road Baptist Church worship service… If we were not televising the service, we would probably conduct it just as we do. As a matter of fact, Sundays when we do not tape we don’t make any changes. So we don’t have a television production with the congregation of studio audience. Rather, just the reverse. We have a church service, a traditional church service, with the television cameras allowed to look on. So I don’t look on that as show business, as some do…
I’m thinking more of the rallies…
Falwell: Okay. We are right now on a tour of all 50 states. And it’s going to be next spring before we finish it, because we have a lot of other things going. This morning at 11 :00 [in Montgomery, Ala.] the governor and the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, many of the legislators, will join us on the state steps. There’s a purpose for that. We’ll have thousands of Christian school students here. We’ll have Christian educators. We’ll have several hundred pastors here. And just thousands of Alabamians will join us.
And we’re trying to accomplish a number of things. First of all, there is a phenomenon happening in America: it’s the Christian school movement. So far the media hasn’t picked up on it, but it’s probably the most significant phenomenon of this era… Local churches everywhere… feel that the public school system has completely adopted humanism as its philosophy, which is anti-Christ, as we see it, and antibiblical. The churches have been forced into starting an alternate school system … By a federal U.S. Supreme Court mandate, the public schools cannot teach these children what we want to teach them: cannot teach them the Bible, cannot teach them morality, cannot teach them character-building traits, etc. But we do. So we are developing our own and accepting no tax monies, so that we really are involved in double taxation. We Christian parents — I have three children in a Christian school-pay our regular taxes that would enable us to get free education in the public school system, and then we go pay tuition in a Christian school…
Now we’ve grown from 1,400 schools in 1961 to 16,000. We’re adding a new school every seven hours. We want kids to see government not as their enemy but as their ally. And the imagery, the symbolism of that state capitol, provides for them that setting.
When you say the state schools don’t provide character-building, surely that’s a bit simplistic, because they do provide what they assume is character-building. What you mean is they don’t provide what you see as character-building?
Falwell: Well, if the total vacuum of discipline, if the drug epidemic, if the amoral position of the National Education Association and the teaching profession of this day is building characters, that’s the kind of character we don’t want built in our young people.
…You’ve said the goal of humanism was world socialism… Where is the evidence for that?
Falwell: Well, I think that secular humanism has one thing in mind. First of all, it’s based upon-and there’s no way to question this premise-atheism. Now that doesn’t mean that it automatically becomes equated with communism, et cetera. But it does mean that it has no absolute values. It has an amoral philosophy: nothing is absolutely right or wrong. We used to call it situation ethics: but it’s really worse than that, because it develops a total society based upon what the Book of Judges in the Old Testament describes, during the most horrible time in Israel’s history; Judges 21 :25 says, “In those days there was no king in Israel” — that is, no authority — “and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” And, of course, that is chaos. And that is exactly, as I see it, where the public school system is today… The ultimate end of promoting amorality, atheism, and developing a permissive society where there is no authority for right or wrong is, of course, ultimately going to be the wipeout of the family, the wipeout of all the traditional values that have made the .United States, in my opinion, the greatest free society in the world for many years…
The ultimate goal [of humanism] is internationalism. I’m not an isolationist. I don’t think that we should not be aware of the rest of the world. I preach very strongly that we have an obligation, that America’s only importance to God is as we minister to the world. But I do see that one-world socialism, one-world government-internationalism — is just the opposite of what freedom is all about, what the world is all about. I think the futility of the United Nations at this moment in dealing with, for example, the Iranian situation, is an indication of how totally impotent and helpless and useless they are.
… Surely what you’re advocating is a slight contradiction, because it’s freedom for people who believe in what you believe. Abortion, for instance — your position seems to be absolutely certain and sure, which would not allow freedom to other people who don’t feel the same way as you.
Falwell: Rules and regulations, standards of behavior, are absolutely essential in any civilized society. For example, I believe in freedom of speech, but that does not permit me to stand up in this restaurant and yell “Fire!” when there is no fire, because my freedom of speech is now infringing upon the rights and benefits and wellbeing of the people in this room. And I have no right to use my freedom of speech to libel or slander someone’s character. My freedom of speech ends where someone else’s wellbeing begins.
Now that is likewise true in the matter of abortion… It has always been the position of the Bible that life has dignity; life begins with conception, not birth. And it’s not a Roman Catholic position; abortion is not a Roman Catholic Issue, as the politicians try to make it. It’s a moral issue. And it’s to our discredit, who are not Catholics, that we’ve allowed the Roman Catholics to carry that ball. Now the idea of “freedom of choice,” which is what they prefer to use, rather than “freedom to kill,” to me is an obnoxious statement and a ridiculous statement. It’s like a bank robber saying, “I have freedom to break safes, and I want my freedom.”
Well, we believe that rules, standard regulations-and this is regardless of what anyone thinks about America; it was, indeed, founded upon the Judea-Christian ethic. Our founding fathers were not all committed Christians or committed Jews, but they were committed to biblical principles, which are found written right through the documents — the Constitution, the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, et cetera — on which the nation is founded.
… It’s quite okay for you to have your opinions … but other people may not share those. And yet you are trying to impose, are you not, your attitudes on them? Based on the Bible, which they may not believe in?
Falwell: Well, they can say the same thing about “Thou shall not steal.” If we tell folks, if we write it down and say, “You’re not going to break in this restaurant at night time and steal — ” “Well, where did you get that?” “I got that from the Bible: ‘Thou shall not steal.’” “Well, I don’t believe the Bible.” That doesn’t matter! It’s the matter of law! For example, in this country, homosexuality…
There are those who are saying, “Well, that’s an alternate life-style.” At this present moment, in all 50 states, and that’s been the case since the days of the beginning of this country, is a violation not only of God’s law, of written man’s law. And yet we are trying to make it something other than that when, in fact, ii is not.
Some people would call that progress, of course. Allowing people to live as they want to.
Falwell: Yes, I think it’s perverse, too.
Some people would think it’s progress.
Falwell: Oh, I’m sorry. I misunderstood you. Well, I suppose you could use the word progress to validate almost anything, but I look on it as regression instead.
… Don’t people make the criticism… that it’s a very simplistic doctrine which you’re putting forward which makes people think there are easy answers to very complicated questions? Do you not feel that’s a valid criticism?
Falwell: I really don’t. I think that you could say that science is simplistic because it’s exact. I was studying mechanical engineering before I even became a Christian… You come to exact, simplistic answers if you follow the proper equations and the proper processes… Theology, to me, is an exact science. God is God. The Bible is the inspired, inherent word of God. And if everyone accepts the same theses and the same equations, they will arrive at the same answer.
Yes, but what if everybody doesn’t? And there’s no reason why they should. Are you not… steamrolling, with the money that you generate from television… to push forward a message which, in its way, is… repressive?
Falwell: Well, it is easy for people today who are violating God’s law and man’s law to ridicule those who oppose them by simply saying,” That fellow’s repressive; he is suggesting a return to where America was fifty years ago, morally.” That is exactly what I am proposing, morally. Not technologically. I certainly am very much a progressive person. If you come to our ministry and visit our complex and see the kind of innovative and up-to-date procedures we use in everything we do, you’d never accuse me of being against progress. But there’s a vast difference between technology and theology. And whereas we are progressing in our world today, the science book I used in college is obsolete today. But I use the same Bible I used then.
… I understand that you are against the Equal Rights Amendment. Are you against the whole concept of feminism?
Falwell: Oh, no, just the opposite. I am more for equal rights for women than the true feminists are. What the true feminists are doing is advocating a unisexual society, which I think is demeaning to womanhood. Now in all fairness, many of the persons involved in the effort to pass or ratify the Equal Rights Amendment are very well-meaning, very well-intentioned people who, in my opinion, are misled as to what the ultimate results of that amendment would be.
The reason I oppose the amendment is this: the language is very ambiguous. I’m sure you’ve read it. It simply says that there shall be no discrimination on account of sex, period… If it had been ratified and ever were ratified, it would do a number of things. It would leave open to every jurist, every judge, before whom some singular case appears in the future the right to determine what those words mean. It would put sex in the Constitution, not women. It would say that when, for example, two men applied for a marriage license, or two women applied for a marriage license, and a clerk of the court denied them on the basis one of them was of the wrong sex, somebody in court could prove that’s discrimination on account of sex.
And I think another problem is that women in America, who have never been forced into combat, would, at some point in time, be forced into combat, because some man out there is going to court and say, “This is discrimination… Even financially, men have to support women when they desert them in this country. I think that’s right. I don’t think women should have to support men. There are benefits that women need to have. I think we need to discriminate in favor of women.
During the 1980s, what I plan to work on, and what Governor Reagan has said, and I approve of it, we’ve got to work through the states in every possible way to guarantee that women do, in fact, earn the same dollar for the same work that a man does. That’s not true today. That they have the same opportunity for development and achievement of position in that job as a man. That is not true today. That they lose none of what they have gained. And the amendment, I fear, would do that. So I’m simply saying that we want to lead the vanguard of equal rights for women in this decade, but oppose this amendment.
When you say you’re a fundamentalist, does this actually mean you believe that everything in the Bible is specifically correct?
Falwell: Yes. The reason I use the word fundamentalist in preference to the word evangelical is this: 20 years ago I did not object to the word evangelical, because it meant the same thing that fundamentalist means today. But today there are many who have come in … under the shelter of evangelicalism who in fact are not evangelicals.
The basic tenet of former evangelical Christianity, now what I call fundamentalist Christianity, is that we have one basic document on which we predicate everything we believe, our faith, our practice, our life-style, our homes, et cetera, government — is the inherency of scripture, not only in matters of theology, but science, geography, history, et cetera — totally and entirely, the very word of God.
Do you believe the sort of things [found in the Bible] like Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt?
Falwell: I do.
You must believe in science… The dating of radio carbons says that there were animals here millions of years ago, and obviously there was human civilization in China, Egypt, Sumeria, the Aztecs, whatever, long before the span that the Bible says. How do you reconcile this?
Falwell: No problem at all with that. I thoroughly, totally agree with all of these findings. And the Bible in no way is contradicted, nor does the Bible contradict that. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. If you’ll read the first three chapters of Genesis carefully, there’s a very clear, unlimited time span there. It could have been millions of years; it could have been hundreds of millions of years.
The only thing I reject, of course, and there is not one shred of scientific fact to support it, is the evolution of man from a lower form of animal life. I believe that man never was animal. I don’t believe that there’s a scientific fact to prove it. There are many who support various theories, but not one fact. … I believe that God made man in his own image and that he was as he is today: body, soul, and spirit.
(Do you also believe the Bible when it says that) serpents spoke and things like that?
Falwell: Oh, of course. Absolutely. And so would over half the preachers in America… That is what the Christian church was built upon, and it’s only when we’ve gotten away from that that we’ve gotten in trouble. That’s one reason Pope John Paul today is a hero in some areas and a crude radical in other areas.
A crude radical in what areas?
Falwell: He has demanded that Roman Catholicism come back to their position of absolutism. Which I say “amen” to him. He came to America, and he looked into a very hostile American media on these moral issues and without batting an eye said that “We will not ordain women.” He said that homosexuality is perversion, abortion is murder, and that is where we are and where we will be. Well, 40 years ago that wouldn’t have shocked anybody in America or in the Catholic church. But today it does… He… believes that the Bible is the inherent word of God and therefore is not to be questioned.
And that is where I am… That’s where Dr. Billy Graham is; that’s where at least 110,000 fundamentalist pastors are in America today. And this is where the action is going. If you’ll get the numerics, the churches in America that are growing, really growing, and are filled and running over, are churches that adhere to that position. The main-line denominational churches that are merging are those churches that have decided: “We don’t want an authoritative message; we want rather to create our own religion, do our own thing, and rewrite it and update it as time passes.”
So that is where the nee-evangelicals and the liberals are today, and that is why they are going out of business. People want what people have always wanted: they want a message from God. They don’t want your message; they want God’s message. And there’s a big difference, by the way…
… There are a lot of people in the same business who are not totally respectable, aren’t there?
Falwell: Well, Jim Jones, for instance, yes. The same freedoms that protect us, that protect a journalist-First Amendment rights in America… While I oppose these people like Sun Myung Moon and self-appointed messiahs … I’d die for their right to do what they do… This question of censorship, it is so delicate… It is a fine, fine line. So I say that there’s a vast difference between a cult and fundamental Christianity. In a cult people follow a charismatic personality; whether there’s a written document or not, they will follow him to hell or death, as in the case of Jones. And I think that Moon’s followers would do the same thing… But in the fundamentalist case, the message, the written book, is their creed, their catechism. And if we, the preachers of that message, stop living by it or stop preaching it, they will throw us over for somebody in favor of that book.
This fine line … surely it is you who is trying to draw it?
Falwell: Well, yes and no. [I am] trying to create an awareness of right and wrong because we’re raising up a generation today that doesn’t know right from wrong. They have grown up in that kind of society. We are trying to define the issues so that people know right from wrong. However, on the matter of censorship, the only answer to the removal of what I call pornography from the television screen — I’m more concerned about the television screen than the movie screen because we don’t have to go to that. The television set is in our living room; that’s a different story. And our family may be watching it while we’re out, and there is nobody there to help the children. I object to that. … Now I say we have to be careful, because to make a rule and say, “This will not be seen and that will not be seen.”… The question is, who will decide that? That bothers me.
So I concede there that we have a very delicate problem. However, I think where the problem comes is this: I think there must be men and women at the top of these industries who have personal moral values, who judgmentally decide, “No, we will not do this; yes, we will do this,” and who do it not because they have to do it but because they want to do it. …
[In] an interview I had in Washington recently… someone from ABC said, “Doctor, don’t you think that… we are presenting life the way it really is?” I said, “That’s the problem. You and I, whether we like it or not, we are opinion makers; we are leaders; the way we go, millions will go with us. We have an obligation not to present life the way it is but the way it ought to be.”
The way you think it ought to be?
Falwell: Well, I think that the American tradition — forget the Bible — is the sanctity of the family, the husband, wife, legally married relationship, is unquestionably the cornerstone of this republic. And we need to work towards its preservation, not its destruction. And today the television industry, without any question, is geared towards and directing all of its energies towards the ridicule of that basic institution.
“So I say that television has become a vendor of perniciousness. And I think we need some men and women at the top who are not motivated by the almighty dollar.”
Which sort of programs? Do any spring to mind that you think are pornographic?
Falwell: … A couple of years ago I’d say “Soap” is offensive. But now they’re all… One just opens a door and here’s a bedroom scene, there’s a bedroom scene, here are two young people living together who are not married, here’s a homosexual brought into a very favorable light. These situation comedies really are promoting a cause, developing a theme. And in almost every case the opposite of what I believe to be the Judeo-Christian ethic… Take the soap operas in the afternoon!… They teach women how to run around on their husbands in a very sophisticated fashion and get by with it.
So I say that television has become a vendor of perniciousness. And I think we need some men and women at the top who are not motivated by the gods of the almighty dollar.
There are fairly extensive passages in the Bible which, in less permissive times, could have been considered … pornographic … How do you reconcile that?
Falwell: I think there’s a difference between reportorial writing of what is happening and the graphic, illustrative portrayal of the gory details. For example, I’ve never opposed sex education in schools, as long as it’s taught as biological science. I have no problem with human anatomy being taught; I have no problem with the scientific approach to hygiene, to puberty, adolescence, et cetera.
My problem is when we cheapen, when we take what is sacred — and sex is sacred, marriage is sacred, the marriage act is sacred — when we take what is sacred and cheapen it by making it something less than God intended it to be. Then it becomes pornography… The Song of Solomon tells of a love relationship he had with his love. He told of the kisses and the physical affection that transpired between them. I don’t object to that at all. I’d have no problem reading that, preaching from that, as I do, in a mixed audience. I would certainly object, however, to taking that same story and cheapening it to a Playboy or Penthouse level, where four-letter words, vulgar applications, unholy relationships were applied.
Just before he was elected, [Jimmy Carter] confessed… that he had sometimes lusted after women… Have you ever lusted after other women in your heart? And if you had, would you admit it in public?
Falwell: Well, I never objected to … then-candidate Carter’s comment that he had lusted after women. There is not a man on earth alive today … who was never guilty of lust. Because we are human beings …. My objection was not to what he said but to whom he said it. Giving an interview to Playboy magazine was lending the credence and the dignity of the highest office in the land to a salacious, vulgar magazine that did not even deserve the time of his day …. He should have denied them the interview …. I feel that he was pitching; he was campaigning to an audience that doesn’t read the Baptist Sunday school quarterlies …
A senator asked you when you were going to get out of politics, and you said to him when he gets out of the morality business …
Falwell: Okay. Religion and politics. I think the problem is simply this: that the Founding Fathers did not have in mind separation of God and state, only religion and state. And when you’re dealing with moral issues … that are basically shared by the American populace and the churches in America, you’re talking about something that touches the majority of the people of this nation. And therefore, as part of the electorate, we have not only a right but a responsibility to speak out. … We, what I consider to be the moral majority in America… still believe the Ten Commandments are valid for today. I don’t mean they all live by them; none of us live up to what we believe. But the vast moral majority in America are out speaking loudly and clearly and articulately and getting the attention of the people in the decision-making process in our states and in Washington who can do something about the turning leftward of our nation on moral issues ….
That’s really where the role [of the church] is. If I were going to run for president, that would be bad, that would be wrong. I would be using … If I were going to run for U.S. Senate in my stale, I would be using my influence that I have developed from my ministry to pick up — and I probably could — a majority of voters to go into the U.S. Senate. Okay. That’s the Khomeini approach. That’s wrong. But if I can create a moral climate and consciousness in our state, if we can provide such a moral conscience that It is easier for politicians to do right than to do wrong, which is not the case today, then we have made our contribution.
Dr. Falwell, do you know anything about politics?
Falwell: I think I do.
… There are no easy answers in politics, whereas there are easy answers in what you say …
Falwell: Well, doing right is not easy. It’s always easier, always easier to do wrong than right. When … a little child has done something he shouldn’t do … it’s easier to lie and say, “I didn’t do it.” But though it’s more difficult to say, “Yes, I did,” it’s the right thing to do, and it will ultimately contribute to his betterment and the betterment of the relationship in that home and the development of his character as well. The same thing is true of a nation. Right now we are in such a sick condition that there are not going to be any easy routes out. As a matter of fact, I don’t know that America can recover from some of the problems that we have created without going bankrupt, without literally wiping out economically …
Who could go into office right now, as a presidential candidate or even a senatorial candidate, and say that “I am going to work diligently to eliminate the unnecessary spending of welfare dollars where unworthy people are receiving those dollars. I’m not talking about Social Security tor the aged or the indigent or those who cannot work. We’re talking about the absolutely illicit use of $222 billion proposed budget of this year for HHS.” Well, he couldn’t be elected; it’s a matter of fact. He’d have to go in and … then reverse himself and lie after he got in … I think that really the country may have to go down financially, or that we cannot honor our commitments. And then the next administration start from zero. I’m not saying that’s going to happen …
Morally, I think this is where pastors can make the difference. But the legislators at every level must assist them and work with them. We must come right across the grain, knowing full well that we’re going to make a lot of people mad, and decide, as I’ve said repeatedly, that it’s more important to be right than popular. And do what is right, if it costs us everything, so that our next generation, our children, can once again enjoy what we have known in this country.
Who comprises the Moral Majority?
Falwell: … The Moral Majority is a coalition of “religious people,” and I put that in quotes, of all sorts: Mormons, Catholics, Jews, fundamentalists, you name it. We’ve got 70,000 such pastors and religious leaders in that group right now, and several million lay people … We don’t compromise our theological principles. However, in the matter of survival, the matter of freedom, the matter of Americanism, the matter of moral values, we join hands together without any compromise whatsoever.
It isn’t compromise for us to say, “Hey, let’s put together a coalition. This ship of state is sinking, as we see it. Let’s pull it out together; let’s fight together now so we can fight each other later.” That’s the terminology we use. And it’s the kind of thing that people in all religious persuasions will buy, because we’re not trying to change their religious beliefs, nor can they change ours. And if we allow our difference to keep us from getting together, then we will never accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish — and that is a change in the nation, morally …
This is the first time in 30 to 35 years that the amoral forces in America have had any substantial opposition. They’ve been accustomed to doing their own thing, gaining gradually but surely the support of the government. And hardly anyone on what they call “the Right” speaking against them ….
… Would you say that the people who put forward … points of view opposed to yours … are sincere, or would you categorize them as … malfeasant or [of] bad faith?
Falwell: Oh, many of the people who oppose my moral philosophy are good people. I could name many of them who are religious people. It has nothing to do with their character or my character. It has to do with philosophy.
If a large number of the Moral Majority people get … into the Senate, would you not think of banning pornography?
Falwell: No question we would. That wouldn’t stop it, of course. All we would do is keep it away from children… It’s like Prohibition 40 years ago, 50 years ago; you’re not going to stop people from drinking by preventing it from being sold in the public markets. It’s still going to be sold. And that is an unenforceable law. If I’d lived then, I would not have been a part of it. I do not think it’s an unenforceable thing to restrict the sale of damaging pornographic material on the public newsstands. I think we’ve done that up until 20 years ago…
… You’ve been in trouble with the SEC at one stage, and then there was trouble down in San Diego: campaign funds, illegally giving $31,000, and so on. Do you feel there is some potential for embarrassment?
Falwell: Oh, always. You just named two; I could probably name you a hundred. We obviously are corning down hard. The Securities and Exchange Commission, in 1972, attacked us on the basis of our issuing bonds and borrowing money from our own members to build our national network. They never mentioned that we paid back, as we always have, every dime.
They never mentioned that, first of all, they lost in court and second, we won the court case and everybody, as always, got every penny of interest and principal promised, et cetera. The California situation? I was out there campaigning for Proposition 6, and we raised a lot of money — $60,000 — for the committee that Senator Briggs heads up. And the federal election commission questioned our right to do that. They have a right to question; anybody can question. But that doesn’t stop us: it doesn’t bother us at all… I can mention to you many, many other cases where one person sued us for a million dollars for making a statement on morality. We’ve had stations put us off the air for taking a stand that I take, only to have the station across town take the program, and quickly.
So we have just determined — and it’s going to get worse … that opposition will not scare us or stop us.
“The ERA … would put sex in the Constitution, not women.”
Do you feel embarrassed … in asking for money in the way that you do, when there is a vast amount coming in?
Falwell: No. We’re going to have to raise a great deal more … We’ll have to probably have a 45-to-50-percent increase in giving next year, just to meet the demands of our enlargement and the inflationary problems … We have 3.5 million families who are part of our ministry and who support us to some degree. Some are totally committed to what we’re doing. Some, nominally so. But all somewhat.
And we present all the facts. For example, I believe that a Christian ministry, like a public corporation on the New York Stock Exchange, because of the public nature of its ministry, ought to be required to make public and full disclosure of its finances. Which we do. There is an evangelical council for financial accountability which is a self-policing organization, created by the evangelical leading ministries. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, ours, World Vision … are among the largest ministries of some 80 that have been approved …. It is the Better Business Bureau of evangelical ministries. And it’s voluntary.
… I think that every [church] ought to come forth … offering audited financing by outside auditors, making your books available to any and all, at any time, for any reason; having an outside board with a membership of outside persons who actually have control of the ministry, actually spending the money for the very purpose for which you raised it, and proven by certified auditors. The reason I believe that is because every time a ministry goes wrong — the Pallentine Fathers, that type of thing — it hurts every one of us.
Do you have any doubts that you are right?
Falwell: None whatsoever.
Never?
Falwell: Not once. I’ve been a Christian for 28 years, [since] January 20, 1952.
How can you date it so specifically?
Falwell: I had been listening for years to a radio broadcast while I was going to high school and college, Dr. Charles E. Fuller, the old-fashioned revival hour… He is dead, of course. But he was the pioneer in Christian broadcasting… I didn’t have any religious background at all. But listening to him on radio Sunday mornings in bed, I became convinced that what he was saying was so. But I didn’t know where to find anybody who could help me. And so I began looking for a church that preached what I’d been hearing him preach … And I found such a church … on the twentieth day of January, and that night I went to church to become a Christian. And that night, when the service was over, the pastor gave an open invitation, as Dr. Graham does, to come forward and publicly acknowledge your faith in Christ as your Lord and master. And I did that. I didn’t own a Bible, I didn’t know a verse of scripture, and I explained that to them. I said, “Hey, I am just an ignorant college student. I don’t know the first thing about spiritual matters. But I want to be a Christian, and I have come here not to go part of the way; I want to go all the way.”
So the next day I purchased a Bible. And for the last 28 years I’ve been studying that Bible; I’ve been sitting under, I think, the best scholars of this generation. I’ve been spending … time in prayer and meditation and ministry. And I can honestly say, for that date to this, I have never one time questioned that the word of God is, in fact, the word of God.
If you want to read a contemporary analysis of strange bedfellows spawned from all of this, you may want to reacquaint yourself with the views of Mr. Dershowitz. Should Liberty University be more the area of interest, it actually passed along in the Falwell family, rather famously — or infamously, depending on one’s point of view. Although in fairness, rather than Virginia, many of us consider Lynchburg, Tennessee more worthy of note for its famous exports.
