More Wisdom from John C Spong

Wednesday May 30, 2007

A lot of folks—many of them Roman Catholics—think John Spong is a bit kookie. In my opinion that should endear him to many of us who are not exactly paradigms of sanity in an insane world. I think his comments on the death of Jerry Falwell have a lot more to say about the abuse human dignity by many religious people. I think Spong’s commentary is fair and balanced. What do ou think?

May 23, 2007

The Death of Jerry Falwell

He represented everything that repels me about religion. He was closed-minded, bigoted and abusive as religious people tend to be when they believe that they possess God’s truth. Yet, I never disliked this man. He tapped into something in the American psyche that, had he not done so, I believe, someone else, perhaps worse, would have. His capacity to adjust to a changing world was limited, but by couching his distress in the language of the Bible and religious piety, he made that limitation appear to be a virtue. Jerry Falwell also showed some evidence of an ability to grow. While being easy to ridicule in learned circles, he nonetheless was able to gain the attention of the nation’s power brokers from his headquarters in Lynchburg, Virginia. That was quite an achievement since Lynchburg is a one TV station town not close to any major highway. It was here in that small city that his life and mine came together.

In August of 1965, at age 34, I moved to Lynchburg to become rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in the Rivermont section of the town… I quickly became aware of the 31 year old pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in the Fort Hill section of Lynchburg. He had not yet achieved a national reputation but he was a force to be reckoned with in local politics. Both of the Lynchburg papers, the morning “Lynchburg News” and the afternoon “Daily Advance” were owned by the Glass family. Carter Glass III was the publisher. The first Carter Glass, his grandfather, had been President Wilson’s Treasury Secretary from 1918-1920 and then served as United States Senator from Virginia from 1920 until his death in 1946. To say that Carter Glass III was a right wing ideologue is too liberal a description to characterize properly his John Birch mentality. To Carter Glass anyone disagreeing with him was “a communist.” That included most of the members of the faculties at local colleges, especially Randolph Macon Women’s College. He was particularly certain that those clergy who were theologically liberal were communists. He thought Eisenhower had sold out the country to the international communist conspiracy and that the Kennedy’s were all Marxists. His newspaper frequently interrupted news articles with heavy black brackets to announce that the person whose name was appearing in that article had “previously been identified with communist or communist front organizations.” In Carter’s mind, these organizations included all labor unions, the Civil Rights movement, all environmentalists, the National Council of Churches and even the Democratic Party.

In the mind of this publisher there was only one trustworthy preacher in Lynchburg and his name was Jerry Falwell. Just as the Hearst Press had earlier built up Billy Graham into a national figure so the Glass press built up Jerry Falwell into being a significant local figure.

Jerry Falwell was an active opponent of integration, supporting the various church-sponsored “segregation academies” that sprang up throughout the south in response to court ordered integration. Liberty Baptist University, the crown jewel of Jerry Falwell’s career, had its roots in this kind of racism. As a super-patriot he was an outspoken enemy of communism that he always interpreted as atheistic materialism. The right wing Lynchburg newspapers cheered him on. He went so far as to condemn all efforts of black people around the world to achieve their own dignity and independence from colonial rule. He referred to the apartheid regime in the Republic of South Africa as the only bulwark against communism on the entire African continent. He called the imprisoned Nelson Mandela a “known communist” and said he ought to be in jail. So the local papers’ support for him grew and both his church and influence expanded.

Jerry Falwell began his ministry by preaching to the town drunks who were picked up routinely in Saturday night sweeps by the Lynchburg police department. After time for sobering, Falwell would threaten them with the literal fires of hell to scare them into salvation. Many of them were in fact helped and in appreciation they joined his church. He was also a showman-promoter of the first order. Large advertisements for his church appeared in each Saturday paper, offering a wide assortment of incentives to bring people to Sunday School and Church at Thomas Road. One week, Miss America would be present in swim suit and gown to give her witness, the next week it would be the Chaplain of Bourbon Street. It was not unlike “marrying Sam,” the preacher in Al Capp’s comic strip “L’il Abner,” who offered to wrestle a bear for a higher wedding fee. These tactics, combined with the popularity of his Old Time Gospel Hour radio program, were the major building blocks in the Falwell rise to national prominence.

While I lived in Lynchburg, Jerry Falwell was a loner who never attended the local ministers’ monthly gatherings. When Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, the local newspapers editorialized that this communist-influenced, racial agitator got what he deserved. The black community was about to explode. The black clergy came to the ministerial association to ask for the support of the white clergy in organizing a joint protest against the paper and memorial service to honor Dr. King, to take place, not accidentally at a World War I Memorial that was next door to the offices of the newspaper. The protest march and the memorial service were held. Lynchburg had no riots, but Falwell was conspicuously absent.

Carter Glass III was actually a member of my church and as I made my views clear in an adult Bible class I taught each week, he began to attack me in his paper as regularly as he praised Jerry Falwell. Finally, however, his obsessive behavior became so extreme that his family removed him as publisher and Falwell’s champion disappeared. By this time, however, Jerry’s national reputation was growing. Nixon carried Lynchburg in the 1968 election with George Wallace running a strong second and Hubert Humphrey a very distant third. That was Falwell’s political world. He both reflected it and helped to create it.

After I left Lynchburg in 1969, our paths still crossed from time to time. In 1991, while on a lecture tour for my book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, I was invited to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America with host Charles Gibson. Jerry Falwell was asked to be the defender of the literal Bible for this 5 ½ minute segment. It must have been good theatre since Charles Gibson canceled his next guest and had us discuss the case for and against the literal Bible for a second 5 ½ minutes. An 11 minute segment on Good Morning America is very rare. Jerry was not a scholar but he made up for his lack of biblical knowledge, as most fundamentalists do, with heat and passion. The audience’s response was terrific.

Inspired by this exchange, I wrote Jerry a public letter urging him to join me in a series of national debates on the Bible. “You and I together, Jerry, could turn America into being a Bible reading nation once again,” I said. Jerry responded through the press with what I always thought was a great self-serving line: “I do not want to lift Mr. Spong out of his anonymity,” he said.

As racial tensions faded Jerry, to his credit, abandoned his overt racism but he always seemed to need a victim. The battle for justice for homosexual persons provided Jerry with his new scapegoat. His attitude toward homosexuals was cruel, vicious and breathtakingly uninformed, but he had lots of company in Bible quoting circles. Homosexuality has been regularly attacked by religious leaders both in the Catholic hierarchy and among Evangelical churches. Indeed it was to defeat “the twin terrors” of abortion and homosexuality that fueled the emergence of “The Moral Majority.” Falwell also backed Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in Orlando. At other low moments in his career, his homophobia distorted his reasoning processes badly. On Pat Robertson’s television program he actually blamed the 9/11 attack on the fact that abortionists, feminists and homosexuals, among others, had destroyed America’s moral fiber and thus brought this retribution on us. Even the Bush White House distanced itself from these comments. When he attacked a children’s television character, “Tinky Winky,” as a “media planned subversive campaign to legitimize homosexuality,” his credibility plummeted.

When Jerry decided to publish his autobiography, he hired a ghost writer named Mel White, who earlier had ghosted Pat Robertson’s autobiography. It was an interesting choice since a ghost writer had to be intimately involved in the life of the subject while the book is being written. When the book came out, Mel White also “came out” as a gay man and later organized something called “Soulforce” to work with churches to overcome ecclesiastical homophobia. He then lobbied Falwell to get him to temper the excessive homophobia in his public rhetoric. Mel White finally got Jerry to agree to meet with a large group of “born again Christians,” who also happened to be gay and lesbian. I don’t think Jerry thought there were such people. The format called for them to eat together after the meeting was completed. As the event got closer, Jerry got cold feet. He may well have been under pressure from his religious constituency to back off from this compromising behavior. He finally agreed to continue with the meeting but he canceled the banquet because, he said, the Bible forbade him “from eating with sinners.” “Who can he eat with,” people wondered. “Jerry, can you even eat alone?”
Religion so often legitimizes hatred. It did for Jerry who called the Prophet Mohammed “a terrorist” and said that the anti-Christ would be a Jewish man. It also legitimizes prejudice against people of color, women and homosexuals who have been regularly victimized by Bible quoting true believers. It relegates its religious enemies to the regions of hell as their just due. Jerry Falwell was a voice for this kind of religion. It is a point of view that is receding in public life in America today, as always happens, the victim of its own excesses. Jerry Falwell did not live to see its full but coming demise, but it is inevitable. Jerry, rest in peace!

John Shelby Spong

Note from the Editor: Bishop Spong’s new book is available now at bookstores everywhere.

Still Available on Paperback! THE SINS OF SCRIPTURE
_Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love “The Sins of Scripture challenges Christians to look beyond the myths of their faith into the heart of the matter.” –Bill O’Reilly, anchor, Fox News Channel

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