There’s no doubt that Jerry Falwell was controversial. Many remember him as the arch-conservative Moral Majority leader who took to the airwaves after September 11, 2001 and blamed the terrorists attacks on homosexuals, feminists, and the ACLU (among others). Or they remember him as the guy who outed the purple Teletubby.
But when I spent a semester living at Liberty University, I got to see a different side of Rev. Falwell, who founded the school in 1971 to train “Champions for Christ.” I even got to interview him for Liberty’s campus newspaper a few weeks before his death, in what turned out to be the last print interview he ever gave. Here, are my top 8 pieces of Falwell trivia:
1. He Was Friends with Larry Flynt
Rev. Falwell’s most famous interpersonal feud was with Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler. Flynt’s decision to print a piece that described Falwell having sex with his mother led to a long, high-profile Supreme Court case between the two. (The battle was dramatized in the 1996 film “The People vs. Larry Flynt.”) But after settling their case, the two men actually became close friends despite agreeing on absolutely nothing. They traded grandkid photos and diet tips, and late in his life, when Falwell had plane troubles on the way to a speaking engagement, Flynt offered him a ride in the Hustler jet. Falwell accepted.
2. Prankster in the Pulpit
To those who knew him well, Rev. Falwell was known as a consummate prankster. He carried M-80 firecrackers in his pockets, had an extra-loud horn installed on his SUV, and learned to hotwire his associates’ cars, drive them several blocks away, and leave them. When we spoke, Falwell admitted placing a stinkbomb under the chair leg of Bob Jones, Jr., then-president of Bob Jones University, at a conference of pastors. “When he sat down, the bomb broke,” he said, laughing. “And in a crowded auditorium, it got pretty rank pretty quick. Everyone was choking for ten, fifteen minutes.”
3. How He Stole His Wife
When Rev. Falwell first met Macel Pate, who would become his wife of 49 years, she was already engaged – to Falwell’s roommate at Bible college. Undeterred, Falwell wrote her love letters in secret, and when his roommate asked him to mail his own correspondence to Macel, Falwell simply threw the letters away. Within months, Macel had broken off her engagement to the roommate and agreed to marry Falwell instead. Stealing another man’s fiancée isn’t exactly a biblical approach, but all’s fair in love and war.
4. He Almost Played Pro Ball
Before he became the pastor of one of America’s largest churches, Falwell was a star baseball player. After graduating from high school, he received an offer to join the St. Louis Cardinals, but turned it down in order to enroll in Bible college. Until the end of his life, he remained an avid sports fan, and often showed up unannounced to watch various Liberty teams compete.
5. Almost as Loved as Reagan
While many Americans picture Rev. Falwell as a crotchety televangelist who appeared on cable news shows, it’s hard to remember that he was once a civic star, beloved by vast swaths of America. He was the Moral Majority’s golden boy, the man who was almost single-handedly responsible for corralling America’s evangelical population into a motivated political bloc. Time magazine once called him the “force of fundamentalism.” And a 1983 Good Housekeeping poll named him the second most-admired man in the nation, behind Ronald Reagan.
6. His Daily Uniform
In his later years, Rev. Falwell was a famously predictable dresser. Every day was the same: black suit, red tie. When I talked to him in April 2007, he confessed that he had 40 or 50 red ties, enough to avoid repeats for months at a time. When he died, Liberty students came up with a novel twist on the typical black-ribbon mourning symbol: a black ribbon with a red tie dangling from the loop.
7. Armor of the Lord
Rev. Falwell was paranoid about his personal safety, and he had every reason to be. For decades, his outspoken (and often outlandish) views on controversial social issues made him a potential target for violence. During the Moral Majority’s heyday, he had a bulletproof pulpit installed at his Thomas Road Baptist Church, and an FBI file released after his death revealed that one hate letter, sent by a detractor in 1983, contained a live scorpion. Enclosed was a note that read, “Through your self sacrifice and dedication we may one day see this nation ruled by God instead of man. Kind of like Iran. Hoping you will die soon.”
8. A Heart for Alcoholics
Rev. Falwell’s father, Carey Falwell, worked as a bootlegger during the Great Depression and eventually died of liver problems caused by alcoholism. Although Falwell was morally opposed to drinking, he retained a soft spot for people who, like his father, had become trapped in alcoholism, and in 1959, he founded the Elim Home for recovering alcoholics, which exists to this day six miles north of Liberty’s campus
This afternoon, my mom texted me photos she took of bookstore displays in our hometown featuring The Unlikely Disciple.
The first (from Oberlin’s indy bookstore, Mindfair) seems reasonably-sized, but I’m trying to imagine the conversation that led to the second. “Mrs. Roose, we really don’t have space to display 100 copies of your son’s book.” [Death glare.] “Okay, we’ll display them.”
Blog readers: I’m curious about how stores will display their copies of the book, so if you come across an interesting arrangement (or even a not-so-interesting one), e-mail it over with details (name of store, location) and I’ll post it on the blog.
Salon.com is running the first excerpt from The Unlikely Disciple, a chapter about my missionary evangelism trip to Daytona Beach with a group of Liberty students, and the successes and failures (mostly failures) we experienced while trying to convert drunken coeds.
“The Rhode Island School of Design collaborated earlier this year with Gap, the clothing retailer, to produce a series of unique cardigans that sold out hours after they were put on display at the G.A.P. Adventures New York Concept Store, a space adjacent to Gap’s flagship store in New York City,” (”At trendy Gap store, clothing by RISD students,” March 13).
Following the overwhelming success of the Gap cardigan project, RISD administrators have been deluged with requests from major American corporations looking to hire RISD design students as artistic consultants. RISD President John Maeda expressed surprise at the sudden outpouring of interest. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Maeda said. “We’ve heard from Ford, American Express, Delta Air Lines - maybe half of the Fortune 500 companies are calling us, wanting to hire our students.”
Last month, a team of RISD students made a consulting trip to the headquarters of Random House, the venerable New York publishing house whose widely-publicized financial troubles earlier this year required company-wide layoffs. Random House CEO Markus Dohle extended a personal invitation to the students, who were paid a six-figure consulting fee and tasked with “re-energizing Random House’s artistic mission by challenging our notions of creativity in business settings.”
On their first day at Random House, the RISD team - who arrived in Manhattan on blue bicycles, wearing plaid pants and one-shouldered leotards - spent the morning examining the artwork in the offices of several Random House employees. Upon seeing a framed print of Thomas Kinkade’s “The Christmas Cottage” hanging above the desk of senior editor Robert Littrell, RISD senior Megan Lafleur-Ramirez pronounced it “beyond tragic,” and replaced the Kinkade print with “Awareness of Self and Non-Self Entities,” a sculpture consisting of a bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos dipped in honey and tied to a Betamax player. RISD junior David Harrison spent the afternoon replacing many of the Dell computers in the office with cardboard signs reading “COMPUTER + COMP-YOU-TER = THE SIGNIFIED (???)” and sophomore Hannah Benton joined senior Rachel de Compt in the accounts division, where they spent several hours dropping long green threads onto pieces of canvas, attaching them to glass slides and putting the slides in a toaster. The project, de Compt said, was inspired by French surrealist Marcel Duchamp’s “Trois Stoppages Etalon,” and was meant to represent the plight of America’s poor.
“It’s been hard to get any work done since they got here,” said associate publicist Eric Kleiner, whose fourth-floor cubicle was unexpectedly ransacked by a long-haired RISD student wearing a “Kitsch Police” badge. “I mean, I know they’re supposed to be artistic geniuses or whatever. I just hope Markus knows what he’s doing.”
Art consulting for businesses is no new concept, of course. For decades, top American corporations have retained in-house art managers to maintain existing collections and acquire new pieces. But under the pressures of the economic recession, some firms have begun looking to art-scene outsiders - like RISD alumn Shepard Fairey, whose “Hope” poster became an indelible icon of the Obama campaign - for unconventional inspiration.
“I really think this is the wave of the future in the corporate world,” said Maeda, who assumed the top post at RISD in 2008. “Robert Rauschenberg once spoke about inhabiting the space between life and art, and I think that’s what our students are doing.”
Not every consulting effort has been successful, though. Four junior executives at the advertising mega-firm Ogilvy & Mather were injured when RISD freshman Benjamin Marchese ran through the office hallways swinging nunchucks made of human femurs, part of a living installation he titled, “Rapture and Rupture: Towards an Aesthetic of Suffering.” Elizabeth Wilson, a partner at the law firm Latham & Watkins, reported being accosted by RISD senior Amy Goldstein, who attempted to paint her forehead with yellow latex. And one RISD design team was forcibly escorted from the offices of State Farm after they suggested replacing the 85-year-old insurance giant’s logo with a picture of a leprechaun chewing on a syphilitic penis.
“We didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings,” said Jessica Williams, the RISD student who designed the offensive logo. “We just wanted to re-construct a semiotics of stability.” Williams then performed a monologue from David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and renamed herself Coco Fantastico.
Perhaps the biggest test for the RISD design students came last week, when Maeda was contacted by Bank of America, who asked for help re-designing their Charlotte, N.C. headquarters. A 10-student team was dispatched to the beleaguered bank, where they immediately began improving the workspace. Workers stood in disbelief as RISD students removed a conference room table and replaced it with a kiddie pool filled with chinchillas. Aeron desk chairs were fitted with chocolate pinwheels, and a photocopy machine in the bank’s Global Wealth and Investment Management division was turned on its side and covered in Russian dressing.
“I don’t know what these kids are doing here,” said Dick Thornton, a senior analyst at the bank. “I asked one of them - a girl named Francesca - what she thought of my tie, and she did a somersault, faked a seizure and started humming ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ How is this helping?”
Reached for comment in an igloo made of cigarettes, Francesca defended her actions. “I mean, I guess you can’t expect bankers to understand biomorphic symbology. God, this is so Brancusi-at-U.S.-customs of them.”
Kevin Roose ‘09.5 is an English concentrator from Oberlin, Ohio. He can be reached at kevin_roose(at)brown.edu.
In more pleasant news, I just got an e-mail from Johnnie Moore, Liberty’s Campus Pastor and right-hand man to Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. Johnnie, a truly remarkable guy who has become a good friend in recent months, has been updating me regularly on his mission trips around the world.
This latest dispatch comes from Bosnia, where Johnnie and a dozen Liberty students have spent their spring break distributing food to the poor widows of slain soldiers and performing other humanitarian deeds, like holding a luncheon for Muslim women in honor of “Women’s Day” in Europe.
Johnnie writes:
Once a year a team of students pack their bags and sacrifice their spring breaks to distribute food, aid an NGO, and present the Gospel to a nation where professing Christians were guilty of heinous crimes against professing Muslims only a decade ago.
Now, there are myriad shades of professing Christians, but their faith doesn’t move much past their culture. Cultural Christians and Cultural Muslims have fought with their hands and their ideology since long before I was born. They have lost lives and made enemies of friends, and at points lusted over the destruction of each other.
We’re going to serve the Bosnians.
We’re going to distribute food and build relationships. We’re going to live the faith that we profess and hope that it catches on. We’re out to bring healing to this broken people.
This Spring Break, I’m with a dozen Liberty students on a mission to bring the message and the compassion of Christ to one of the last century’s most war-torn nations.
Say what you will about Liberty’s religious outlook, or about the practice of missionary evangelism in general, but it’s hard to overlook the fact that Johnnie and his band of Liberty students are doing what so many of us only talk about doing — leaving the comfort of home to help people in need. When I think about how I’m planning to spend my spring break — playing Guitar Hero in my sweatpants — it certainly puts things into perspective, and makes me wonder why I don’t do more in the way of reaching out. You don’t need a religious mission to do humanitarian work, but it probably doesn’t hurt, either.
The front page of last Wednesday’s Washington Post brings us an enlightening (if predictably condescending) article about a group of Liberty University students going on a field trip to the Smithsonian, under the guidance of their biology professors.
The catch, of course, is that the Smithsonian trip was designed as opposition research — Liberty teaches young-earth creationism, and neither the professors nor the students believe in Darwinian evolution, carbon dating for fossils, or an earth whose age measures in the billions of years.
The full article is available here (free registration required), and here’s a snippet:
Like the Liberty students, avowed creationists across the country are making a practice of challenging the conventional wisdom at zoos (questioning the evolutionary explanation of giraffe necks), the Grand Canyon (dating the rock layers in thousands, not millions, of years), and cave parks (describing the formations as evidence of rapid drainage after the Great Flood).
In the upcoming issue of Answers, a leading magazine of the young-Earth movement, the list of “creation vacations” includes the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, the New England Aquarium in Boston and London’s Natural History Museum.
“Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?” asked Bill Jack, a Christian leadership instructor who leads groups across the country for a company called Biblically Correct Tours. “If Christianity is true, it better be true in the natural history museums and in the zoos.”
I write a lot about Liberty’s Creation Studies department in my book (shipping now from Amazon!), so I won’t spend time picking the article apart. But I have to object to one line in particular, Dr. David Dewitt’s claim that he doesn’t “hold anything back” from his Creation Studies students. I took Creation Studies during my semester at Liberty, and while I did learn a lot about the young-earth creationist worldview (including, in some cases, why we evolutionists should take it more seriously), I don’t remember hearing a balanced presentation of evolutionary biology.
Here, I’m pasting a partial list of the questions I was asked to answer on the first midterm for that class, “CRST 290/History of Life.” You decide if Liberty’s scientists are holding anything back:
1. True or False: Noah’s Ark was large enough to carry various kinds of dinosaurs.
2. True or False: Science is the only way to truly know truth about the world.
3. True or False: Margaret Sanger [the founder of Planned Parenthood] was a promoter of eugenics [selective breeding, a practice commonly associated with the Nazi Party].
4. True or False: Evolution can be proven using the scientific method.
Correct answers (according to Liberty) after the jump!
At long last, the book trailer for THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE is finished! Produced by my friend Davis Jung (an amazing filmmaker at Brown), the 4-minute clip is a brief look at the themes of the book, complete with never-before-seen footage of my time in the Thomas Road Baptist Church choir.
The book comes out in less than two weeks, so keep checking back for exclusive blog content. I’ll be rolling out some “Jerry’s Kids” interviews with Liberty students, some deleted scenes, and (because I’m servicey like that) a series called “How to Publish a Book in College,” as well as the usual panoply of Christian-interest stories.
One more note from my Liberty trip. Since I was last on campus, the Rot — Liberty’s notorious dining hall — has gotten a huge facelift. New seating arrangements, revamped lighting, upgraded food stations. With my Blackberry, I snapped a photo of the rafters, which have been painted with food-related Bible verses.
Unfortunately, the Rot’s food doesn’t seem to have gotten an an upgrade along with its decor. The vegetable medley was grainy and tasteless, and my rib sandwich still tasted like a leather wallet dipped in BBQ sauce. Oh well.
In other news, Devin Olson — the student filmmaker I featured earlier on this blog — has just released the February 2009 episode of his long-running Liberty video blog. Check it out!
I just got back from three days at Liberty, where I met with the school’s administration about the book, spent time with old Liberty friends (who have all known about the book for a while), and met a few new friends. Highlights of the trip, in no particular order:
– Eating Cheesy Westerns (cheeseburgers with fried eggs on top — a Lynchburg classic) with a few guys from my old dorm at the Texas Inn and having a hysterical conversation about Christian colleges and their rules. As it turns out, there are a few colleges out there with stricter rules than Liberty’s. Like Pensacola Christian College, where no physical contact whatsoever is allowed between guys and girls (even high-fives are banned — this place makes Liberty look like Plato’s Retreat). Rumor has it that PCC students, unable to touch each other, are reduced to holding erotic staring contests with their significant others. They call this “optical intercourse” or “making eye babies.”
– Being told by Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty’s president and chancellor, that I look “more like a Liberty student than a Brown student” on account of the khaki/sweater combo I was rocking. I had a great meeting with Chancellor Falwell and his wife Becki, as well as an earlier meeting with Jonathan Falwell (Jerry Sr.’s other son, who pastors the megachurch), and all of them were very gracious about the book once I made it clear that it portrayed Liberty in a (mostly) positive light.
Chancellor Falwell told me a funny story of the summer he spent taking courses at Yale while he was a student at Liberty — sort of the opposite of my book. Apparently, a Yale professor was condemning Jerry Falwell Sr.’s religious views in class one day, and the younger Falwell raised his hand and said, “He doesn’t believe that, sir.” Professor: “How do you know?” Jerry Jr.: “Um, he’s my dad.”
– Taping an interview with Liberty student James Kinney (see his blog here) for Liberty’s student radio station, 90.9 FM (”The Light”). James is a great host, and I’ll be excited to see how the piece turns out.
– Seeing the improvements taking shape on Liberty’s campus since I was there in Spring 2007. It’s amazing how quickly they build things over there. A new bookstore, an indoor soccer stadium, a completely refurbished dining hall. Perhaps the most over-the-top addition is a snowless ski slope, which will operate year-round (yes, even in summer) on Liberty Mountain. Check out the details here — it actually looks pretty sweet.
The best thing about the weekend, of course, was reconnecting with my Liberty friends. I’ll be introducing you to a bunch of them in subsequent “Jerry’s Kids” episodes, but suffice it to say that we had a great time. I’ll be back on campus soon, likely in early April. Next time, I’ll be sure to bring my skis.
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Also, in shameless self-promotion news, Goodreads.com (Facebook for the literati) is running a giveaway for advance copies of THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE. Click here to enter it, and feel free to spread the word! You have to be a member of Goodreads, I believe, but it’s free to join and well worth it.
I'm a Brooklyn resident, a freelance journalist (but I'm repeating myself), and the author of "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University," which is available on Amazon.com , BN.com , and Borders.com , or at your local bookseller.
8 Things You Didn’t Know About Jerry Falwell
