The book of Jerry Falwell: fundamentalist language and politics

Christian Century, Nov 21, 2001 by R. Jonathan Moore, Martin E. Marty

The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.

By Susan Friend Harding. Princeton University Press, 352 pp., $50.00; paperback, $18.95.

MANY OF US expect perfection from America's religious leaders and then quickly pounce on them when they are inevitably revealed as no better than human. The discovery of Jesse Jackson's adultery provided the most recent example. His perennial opponents gleefully exulted in having public proof of the preacher's imperfection, and even those who usually support Jackson's efforts wondered aloud at the speed with which his sins were acknowledged and pushed aside. Meanwhile, Jackson's flock rallied around him, eagerly providing a supportive backdrop for the televised melodrama of confession and forgiveness.

The cultural elite is often befuddled and outraged when followers continue to support those involved in scandal. What's wrong with these people? Don't they understand what this hypocrite has done? Only religiously deluded simpletons, some conclude, could be hoodwinked into forgiving and forgetting so quickly and completely. What such critics fail to understand is that the credibility of religious leaders like Jackson does not depend entirely, or even mostly, on their flawlessness. Focusing upon Jackson's missteps and contradictions leads cultural observers to read the story of Jackson's life much as literalists read biblical tales, as stories whose authority and credibility depend upon empirically verifiable moral purity and the absence of contradictions between messenger and message.

But this is not the reading strategy used by followers of Jackson and other public religious leaders. Through the eyes of Christian adherents, a leader's imperfections--though no less real or upsetting--are viewed against the backdrop of the Bible, a world full of unreliable heroes and morally ambiguous saints. Followers are not indifferent to Jackson's failings or ignorant of the crevasse between his ethical exhortations and his own deeds, but they are able to locate him in a religious tradition that has long taught that God can and does act through the most imperfect of servants.

That same backdrop informs the interpretive landscape for the disciples of another famous, often morally ambiguous Baptist preacher, Jerry Falwell. His longstanding public prominence may suggest that there is nothing new to say about him (and indeed, a weary public may hope this is true), but Susan Friend Harding disagrees. An adviser to the excellent documentary series With God on Our Side and a cultural anthropologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Harding explores the rhetorical world of Falwell and his followers. Those who join this expedition into the heart of American fundamentalism will return with fresh insights and a new map that will prove indispensable for future journeys.

The return of conservative Christians to political activism in the '70s and '80s informs Harding's work, but the author is less concerned with history as such than with the language comprising and creating that history. She ventures into a religious subculture's rhetorical world and returns with a thick description of fundamentalist vernacular. To gather her data, Harding plunged into Falwell's evangelistic empire in Lynchburg, Virginia, by attending worship services, mingling with congregants, visiting Falwell's Liberty Baptist University and interviewing other pastors. She sealed her baptism into conservative Christianity by immersing herself in Falwell's words, from his books and sermons to his pamphlets and public statements. Her field work, she says, allowed her to stand in a liminal place between salvation and damnation, in the fundamentalist world but still not quite of it. "Standing in the gap between conscious belief and willful unbelief, in a place I call `narrative belief,' opens up born-again language and makes available its complexity, its variety and creativity, and its agile force."

She begins her book with a fascinating and lyrical account of her interview with Melvin Campbell, pastor of Lynchburg's Jordan Baptist Church. Harding quickly finds herself smack in the middle of full-bore witnessing. As she reconstructs what happened during her lengthy encounter with Campbell, she tells the story of losing her initial naivete about being able to remain both in and outside of the community she's chosen to study. She learns that there is no such fence-straddling position in the fundamentalist world: one is either born-again or not, saved or lost, with nothing in between.

In her description of her encounter with Campbell, Harding gives us a key to discerning the reasons for, or the mechanics behind, the process of witnessing. The story illustrates one of her strengths: her willingness to let fundamentalists, generously quoted throughout the text, speak for themselves. Campbell isn't threatened by the presence of Harding's tape recorder; in fact, she thinks he's glad she'll have a record of their session "so that I might listen to it again and again should I prove too hard-hearted that afternoon to receive the help he offered me."