Jerry Falwell, Back to Fundamentals

The Evangelist, Taking Stock in Lynchburg After the PTL Deluge

LYNCHBURG, VA. -- The Rev. Jerry Falwell preaches a sermon in this central Virginia town that is guaranteed to bring the church down. It is called "Precipice Living."

But Thomas Road Baptist Church hasn't heard it in a while. Perhaps that's because a weary Falwell has stepped back from life's edge. Earlier this month, he relinquished the presidency of Moral Majority after eight years, and before that he resigned as chairman of PTL, ending his attempt to salvage the empire of defrocked TV evangelist Jim Bakker.

Today he's back attending to his local independent church, his "Old Time Gospel Hour" and several educational institutions: a megaministry that spent $91 million last year and suffered in his absence.

"We've got some digging out to do," Falwell told 4,000 Christians packed into the church sanctuary on a recent Sunday. "We've got some fund raising to do. But I've come home to do it because I believe you and I can be God's instrument to bring revival to America and evangelization to the world."

Those who have watched Falwell come full circle see him as a metaphor for a significant chunk of the Christian right who, sensing that their most visible political victories are over, are puzzling over what their role should be in the post-Reagan era.

When the religious right "came in from the wilderness with the 1980 elections, it was a heady experience," says Richard John Neuhaus, coauthor of "Piety and Politics," a newly released anthology. "A lot of them have begun to say, 'Let's not get too carried away. Maybe we've become tools of the power game itself. We have to think this through.' " Even the presidential candidacy of one of their own -- former TV evangelist Pat Robertson -- elicits ambivalence. A recent poll of 70 evangelical leaders by the National Association of Evangelicals showed that among the Republican candidates, Robertson came in fourth.

Perhaps, some say, Falwell (who long ago endorsed George Bush) is trying to distance himself from Robertson. Perhaps he saw his television donors slipping away and needed to do something dramatic to convince them his heart is in Lynchburg. But these same observers do not believe for a minute that Falwell has abandoned his desire to change the moral fabric of America, and they question whether he can cap his ambition to be at center stage.

More likely, says church historian Martin E. Marty, Falwell has simply changed his theater.

The son of a backwoods Virginia agnostic who made money in oil and bootleg liquor, Falwell has hungered to be a major influence on mainstream America for most of his adult life. Spreading the Gospel, which he came to through his mother, gave him the reason to pursue this ambition. Television and, later, political lobbying provided the means.

But the fundamentalist Christianity he learned at Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo., was shackle as well as incentive. Its view of itself as the one true way, based on a literal reading of the Bible, discouraged compromise. And its disdain for the secular world of politics prevented Falwell from exercising his considerable political acumen to its fullest.

Falwell's friends say he is no longer certain how -- or whether -- he can be both political statesman and preacher.

"Falwell was on the left edge of fundamentalism, and that got me excited," says Nelson Keener, an executive in Falwell's organization for seven years until 1984, when he went to work for born-again Prison Fellowship head Charles Colson. "But he also gave off certain signals that showed he was still a fundamentalist. He wasn't going to go beyond certain points."