by Zev Chafets
This sort of laundry is not usually hung in the personal museums of university founders, but Jerry Falwell is a born-again Christian and the exhibit is a witness to his belief that nobody—and nobody’s son—is beyond salvation. It is also a slightly boastful reminder that Falwell may be a preacher, but he comes from tough entrepreneurial stock.
On a crisp fall day, bemused visitors wandered through the museum. They had come to campus with their kids to attend College-for-a-Weekend, a chance for prospective students to get a firsthand look at the university, founded by Falwell in 1971, on top of what is now called Liberty Mountain.
I had arrived in Lynchburg the night before and had breakfasted with some of these prospective students and other wayfarers at the Lynchburg Sleep Inn. Some of the customers looked like a rogues gallery of the Jewish imagination: Vietnam vets on the way home from a convention in Branson, Missouri; a couple of tattooed bikers; an old guy in a cowboy hat; and a woman in late middle age dressed like Aunt Bee on The Andy Griffith Show.
The Vietnam vets struck up a nostalgic army conversation with the guy in the cowboy hat, who had served in Korea. When they caught me listening in, I figured it was a good chance to sample local public opinion. “I was in the Israeli army,” I said.
Heads turned. One of the bikers said, “I been there. In Ashdod. I was flying helicopters for the army and we had some dealings there. Y’all are some damn fine soldiers.”
I smiled modestly.
Aunt Bee said, “What I admire most about you is how your girls serve in the army, right along with the boys.”
“My daughter was in the army,” I said. “My son, too.”
“That’s great,” said the guy in the cowboy hat. “I live in San Antonio. You come down that way, I can introduce you to a lot of Jewish friends of mine.”
When I got up to leave, one of the vets extended his hand. “It’s been an honor to meet you,” he said.
“The guys over there are damn good guys,” said the helicopter pilot. I left the dining room in a hail of God-blesses and headed over to Liberty University.
JERRY FALWELL IS every bit the entrepreneur his father was. The school he started as a little Baptist college has grown into a sprawling 4,400-acre campus with around ten thousand students on the premises and thousands more enrolled in long-distance learning programs. Liberty offers fifteen graduate programs, and in 2004 it opened its own law school, which won an accreditation less than two years later. But it is proudest of its undergraduate program.
Liberty consistently scores among the top ten conservative schools in the nation in the Young America’s Foundation rankings, and if its aggregate college board scores don’t threaten Harvard or Stanford, the school projects a definite sense of self-confidence and self-improvement. It now gets about twenty thousand applicants a year for its 3,200 freshman slots. Falwell expects to at least double its capacity in the next fifteen years. If he doesn’t live to see it, his two sons will. Nepotism is common in the evangelical world. Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, and Billy Graham have all positioned their sons to take over the leadership of their ministries. So has Falwell.
THERE WAS A time when Jerry Falwell raised most of his money in the mail, in response to his Old Time Gospel Bible Hour telecasts from the pulpit of the Thomas Road Baptist Church. According to his associates, there were days when the ministry took in $1 million in donations. But that kind of money dried up in the 1980s when one famous televangelist, Jimmy Swaggart, got caught with a hooker and another, Jim Bakker, not only disgraced himself in a sex scandal but defrauded his followers and went to jail. Falwell himself wasn’t implicated—in fact, he played a role in trying to rescue Bakker’s Praise the Lord enterprise—but many people stopped sending in checks to televangelists. “The money just dried up like somebody turned off the faucet,” one of Falwell’s assistants told me. This dire development may have contributed to Falwell’s judgment that Bakker was “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in two thousand years.” It certainly changed his fund-raising strategy. His ministry began to rely on large gifts, some worth tens of millions of dollars. Liberty Mountain reflects that prosperity. Falwell’s church is large enough to have its own mall, called Main Street. He runs a K–12 school whose graduates can attend Liberty University for free. The Liberty campus itself is dotted with construction sites, including the LaHaye Ice Rink, a professional-size hockey arena donated by the author of the Left Behind novels. Considering LaHaye’s apocalyptic beliefs—and Falwell’s own End of Days eschatology—I found this focus on the future reassuring.
ABOUT A THOUSAND prospective students (and almost twice as many parents) were on campus for College-for-a-Weekend. They looked like standard American teenagers, but the mere fact that they were considering Liberty University put them in a special category. The university is governed by a code of conduct called the Liberty Way, and it is not for kids looking for a party. Alcohol, tobacco, and drugs are strictly outlawed, and students are required to submit to random testing. Dancing, or even attending a dance, is forbidden. Movies rated R, NC-17, or X are unacceptable (the Liberty Way makes it clear this is not an automatic endorsement of movies rated PG or PG-13). Having an abortion can be grounds for expulsion. The same goes for “involvement with witchcraft, séances, or other occultic activities.”
Liberty students under the age of twenty-one are required to live in gender-segregated dormitories where they are supervised by “prayer leaders.” The dorms don’t have cable or satellite television, and computers are filtered for pornography. During the week, curfew is midnight.
Political demonstrations of any sort are banned on campus unless they get explicit permission from the administration. Unauthorized written material may not be distributed.
Still, some old grads think that Liberty is going soft. A generation ago, male and female students weren’t allowed to converse after six in the evening. Students couldn’t leave campus without permission. The dress code was strict: ties for the men, modest dresses for the women (only this year have students been allowed to wear jeans to class). “Boys and girls can use the swimming pool together, provided the girls wear one-piece bathing suits,” a Liberty alum in his forties told me. “Back in my time that wasn’t permitted. Of course, back then we didn’t have a swimming pool, either.”
The Liberty Way is enforced not only by the faculty and the dorm leaders, but by the students themselves, in an honor system modeled on the military academies. Every class begins with a prayer. Students attend three mandatory chapel ser vices each week.
Liberty is racially mixed, but not exactly what you’d call diverse. Faculty members are required to be professing Christians. “I’m sure there are some kids here who aren’t saved,” spokesman Don Egle told me. “And there must be some Democrats around, too. During the election I saw a few cars with Kerry stickers.”
FALWELL HIMSELF HAS been a force in the Republican Party since he founded the Moral Majority in 1979. From the start he envisioned it as a political movement, not an ecclesiastical one, and he very much wanted to include Jews. “Critics of my ministry have tried to drive a wedge between me and the Jewish community around the country,” he wrote in his autobiography. “They forgot that my master was a Jewish rabbi.” The rabbi, obviously, was Jesus.
In 1957, when unknown enemies attacked Falwell’s Thomas Road church, Jews came to his aid. The Schewel brothers of Lynchburg, who owned a large furniture business, wrote a check to repair and renovate the church. “They knew from their own Jewish heritage the problem of vandalism and wanted to express immediate and practical sympathy,” writes Falwell. Years later, State Senator Elliot Schewel helped get Liberty University tax-exempt status.
Falwell—a major force in Lynchburg—has reciprocated by helping to make it a very pleasant place for Jews to live. “The philo-Semitism is sometimes over the top,” says Rabbi Tom Gutherz, who was the chief (and only) rabbi of Lynchburg for twelve years. “Did I ever witness or experience any Christian anti-S
emitism in Lynchburg? I can give an unconditional answer: No. Of course there’s some garden variety anti-Semitism, like there is everywhere, but specifically Christian? None. Zero. And the Lynchburg city council and school board have been good about respecting the separation between church and state.” I heard similar sentiments from rabbis and Jews from towns all over the Bible Belt.
Gutherz never had a problem with missionaries, either.
“The whole time I was in Lynchburg, we didn’t have a single Jew who converted to Christianity. The opposite is true; we had Christians who converted to Judaism.”
Rabbi Gutherz is a liberal, and no fan of Jerry Falwell’s politics. But he encountered nothing but religious respect from Liberty University. “Falwell encourages his students to be positive about us,” said Gutherz. “They even came sometimes to our Friday-night ser vices. In some way they saw us as fellow people of God. They didn’t understand the prayers in Hebrew, but they saw us as part of their tradition, something like ‘that old time religion.’”
FALWELL ESTABLISHED THE Moral Majority on four principles: “Pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral and pro-American (including a strong national defense), and support for the State of Israel.” This set the stage for Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to join the Schewel family of Lynchburg in Falwell’s pantheon of Jewish amigos.
Begin had no problem with Falwell’s first three principles—he was all for life (although abortion was never a political issue for him), family (his own campaign ads in 1977 called him a “family man”), and a strong American military posture in the cold war (his experience in a Soviet gulag during World War II had made him strongly anticommunist). And he positively loved point number four.
It is a myth that Begin gave Falwell a private jet. The prime minister of Israel doesn’t have planes to give away. Begin himself flew El Al and he would have gone coach if his security detail had let him. What he gave Falwell was access and friendship.
Falwell reciprocated. In 1981, he invited Begin to speak at Liberty, and he planned a royal reception, complete with the student body lined up along the route to campus, singing the Israeli national anthem. Begin’s wife got sick and the visit was canceled, but Falwell still smiles at the thought of what might have been, a mass of born-again undergraduates filling the Blue Ridge Mountains with the sounds of “HaTikvah.”
Falwell has maintained ties with every Israeli prime minister since Begin. He tried to aid Yitzhak Shamir in the face of George H. W. Bush’s coolness toward the Jewish state, and helped Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu withstand Bill Clinton’s pressure on the extent of Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank.
“We were in Manila,” recalls Duke Westover, Falwell’s longtime major domo. “We got a call from Jerusalem, from Bibi Netanyahu. President Clinton had summoned him to Washington to discuss concessions, and Bibi didn’t want to go, but it was a command performance. He asked if we could put together a meeting with evangelical supporters of Israel before he went to the White House.”
Falwell gave the order and Westover began calling pastors and activists in the United States. “We had three, four days to put it together,” he recalls. “Somehow, we made it. When Bibi got to Washington, we had fifteen hundred evangelicals waiting for him in the ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel. Not just folks, either, pastors and leaders. It was the first time that an Israeli prime minister ever came to the United States and met with Christian supporters before he met with Jewish leaders.”
What happened next is a story Falwell likes to tell. “Next day, Bibi went into the Oval Office and Clinton said, ‘I know who you were with last night.’ But before the meeting went much further, an aide came in, gave Clinton a message, and Clinton turned white. That was the day the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.”
Falwell liked Bibi, and he liked Ariel Sharon. “Sharon was a good man,” he told me. “I personally had a problem with trading land for peace but that’s not our business. If Sharon wanted to say no to a withdrawal, okay, we would have supported him. And if he said yes, well, that’s okay with me, too. Israel operates on very thin margins of error. I trust Israeli leaders to know what they’re doing.”
In 1999, Falwell found another way to express his Zionism. He sent his entire freshman class—fifteen hundred students—to Israel on a ten-day tour. “I want our students to love Israel and to understand why supporting it is sacred,” he told me.
Thanks largely to Falwell and Pat Robertson, this level of evangelical Zionist enthusiasm now seems self-evident. But it is not. “We didn’t talk much about the Jews, or Israel, in the 1950s,” Falwell recalled. “It wasn’t an issue. My kids’ generation has a positive attitude toward Israel and Jews, far more than mine did. And that’s not going to change. Places like Liberty University will see to it.”
THE CENTERPIECE OF College-for-a-Weekend was a giant convocation in the Vines Center, the university’s eleven-thousand-seat cathedral cum basketball arena. I sat in the back, a missionary family from Turkey on one side, an Italian-Catholic from Benson-hurst turned born-again Baptist on the other. Over the stage, a banner proclaiming “God’s Way to Heaven: John 16:4” hung next to a giant KFC sign bearing a likeness of the Colonel. A Christian rock band warmed up the crowd. Once upon a time Baptist preachers like Jerry Falwell denounced rock and roll as Satan’s music, but contemporary evangelical Christianity is nothing if not showbiz savvy.
Falwell took the podium with the electric guitar still reverberating in the auditorium. He opened with reflections on the meaning of November 22, 1963. “Three men died that day,” he said. “John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis.” Huxley, the atheist author of Brave New World, went out, according to Falwell, full of dread and drugs; C. S. Lewis, the Christian novelist and thinker, died peacefully, convinced he was on his way to heaven. Most of the kids barely knew who JFK was, let alone Aldous Huxley. C. S. Lewis they had heard of; one of his Narnia books, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, had been made into a movie and was getting a lot of Hollywood hype.
Falwell preached about Christian values in the midst of a holy war. “Todd Beamer was a hero,” he said. “He fought the terrorists on Flight 93 and maybe saved the White House or the Capitol. And I don’t call these terrorists ‘insurgents’ either. They are barbarians!”
The crowd cheered.
“Todd Beamer was a committed Christian,” said Falwell. “And when he knew he was going to die, he made one phone call. He called home.”
Falwell told the students that God was both their best friend and the creator of the universe. “You have to be unintelligent not to believe in intelligent design. I believe in the Second Coming,” he said. “I am a premillennialist Baptist. In the last part of the Bible, we win. I’ve lived through Naziism, communism, and, now, Islamic terrorism. In Jordan the other day, the barbarians bombed a wedding in a hotel because, they said, they thought there would be Americans and Jews there. Isn’t it terrible to be filled with such hate? But there is no panic button here. God is in control! We win!”
WINNING IS IMPORTANT to Falwell. He is a naturally competitive man, and he revels in victory. The Liberty debate team is his pride and joy.
“Our football program can’t change the culture,” he told me. “Our debate program can, by producing advocates who know how to argue for Judeo-Christian ethics and the American Constitution. We have thirty-two kids on our team this year and they’ll all be lawyers or leaders of some sort. Our goal is to create advocates who know how to make their case. These are brilliant, articulate students. I couldn’t have made the Liberty debate team when I was that age. I couldn’t talk that fast.”
“We’re Doc’s baby,” said debate coach Brett O’Donnell, referring to Falwell by his Liberty nickname. “He follows our schedule. The kids know we matter to him.”
Liberty’s program has five full-time coaches and a budget of half a million dollars—a small fortune in the world of collegiate debate. Falwell doesn’t want just winners, he wants champions for Christ
. O’Donnell produces: Liberty is a perennial debate power. In 2006, it came in first in all three national rankings.
Every year, O’Donnell sends out a flyer to all incoming freshmen with college boards over 1200—about 15 percent of the class. A few dozen reply, and he puts them through a boot camp during the first week of school. Eight or ten novices make it through, and they are treated as an elite.
“We don’t compete against Mount Pisgah College, we debate Harvard,” Falwell told me proudly.
A few years ago, the national debate topic dealt with abortion. Under the rules, teams were required to argue both sides, and this presented a problem. Some evangelical colleges dropped debate. Not Liberty.
“Doc decided that if we wanted to compete, we’d need to accept the rules,” O’Donnell says. That season, by special dispensation, Liberty’s debate practice rooms became the only place on campus where students were free to argue in favor of Roe v. Wade.
According to O’Donnell, one of Liberty’s great advantages is that, despite its success, it is consistently underestimated. “We’re supposed to be dumb,” he said. “People take us lightly. And I won’t lie, that gets the kids motivated. We get a lot of pleasure when we beat a Columbia or a Dartmouth. But the point is not to develop one or two superstars. We want to educate a lot of kids, an army of kids, and instill them with a sense of mission.”