The Other Preacher in Lynchburg: My Life Across Town from Jerry Falwell

By John Killinger

After teaching for a number of years, John Killinger, eager to be a pastor, was offered a church in Lynchburg, Virginia. It was in the 1980s when Jerry Falwell had a congregation there. Falwell had just started the Moral Majority movement and had helped to get Ronald Reagan elected president. In 1983, a Good Housekeeping national poll rated Jerry Falwell the second most respected man in America after Reagan.

John Killinger's new book is in part a picture of Falwell and an exploration of his influence from the unique standpoint of a "rival" minister who says that his experience of his Lynchburg years is what soon turned him into one of Fundamentalism's most trenchant and outspoken critics.

This is a fascinating story told with great grace and style about two very different men of faith, both struggling to capture hearts, minds, and souls.

"Swift-moving and engaging." - Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9781429951104

John Killinger

John Killinger has been senior minister of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, distinguished professor of religion and culture at Samford University in Birmingham, and executive minister and theologian at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. He is the author of more than sixty books, one of which, The Changing Shape of Our Salvation, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He lives with his wife in Virginia.

Book preview

Introduction

The day Jerry Falwell died, May 15, 2007, I began being deluged by phone calls and e-mails from friends and acquaintances all over the United States, mostly ministers, reminding me of this or that story I had told them about my years as a pastor in Lynchburg, Virginia, Falwell’s town.

You should write a book about him, many said.

My wife, Anne, and I were sad to hear that he had died. At least Anne was sad. She kept remarking that she thought it strange I was not more sad. Finally I had to explain it to her, and perhaps to myself.

I said, I am sad, but not in the usual way. I think it’s for an era as much as a man—for all the things he did in his lifetime, for the way he was always opening his mouth and putting his foot in it. For what he did to shape the political life of America as we know it. It’s as if a great ship has gone down, or an icon has passed.

I kept thinking of Vachel Lindsay’s poem General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and wondered if Falwell’s entering heaven was anything like that. I know there were some people who thought he wouldn’t go to heaven when he died, but I’m more charitable. Somewhere inside the big, boisterous preacher and disputationist was a little boy who enjoyed Christmas trees and practical jokes and crab-leg sandwiches—he introduced me to crab-leg sandwiches—and I could only imagine him blinking his eyes at all the sights he was likely to be seeing in heaven, like a starry-eyed waif who had a lot to learn but was wide open to doing it. There was no way he was in hell, even if I believed in a traditional hell, which I don’t.

My time in Lynchburg was only six years. Six years in the 1980s, when Falwell was at the top of his form. He had just started the Moral Majority, he had helped to elect President Reagan, his college was in its early days, his buses were hauling in people from large areas of Virginia, his office was a beehive of activity, he was in the news almost daily, he was tasting power and finding it heady, and he was as full of sass and energy as a new pup. In 1983, Good Housekeeping magazine’s national poll rated him the second most respected man in America, just behind President Reagan. If I could have chosen any six years of my life to be there, those were the ones.

On a scale of one to ten, my influence on Falwell, one way or another, was probably only a point-five or less. His influence on me was—well, that’s part of the story I want to tell. I never became one of his followers. That’s clear to anyone who knows me. But running into him at that stage of his career, and at precisely that point in my own, when I had just left fifteen years of teaching in a divinity school to become the pastor of a large church in the city he controlled, certainly made a difference in my trajectory. It didn’t turn me around, but it did knock me a few degrees off course.

As I say in the book, I think it’s what really made a theologian out of me, by forcing me to think about what Falwell was saying and doing and how it was affecting the shape of religion and life in America. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that he was a seminal force. Single-handedly, or at least more than anybody else, he was responsible for forging the religious right into a formidable political bloc in America. He helped to make Ronald Reagan president, and then to elect George H. W. Bush as his successor. He was the Great Polarizer, who bequeathed us the radically divided society we live with today.

I’m not really keen to relive those years in Lynchburg. I’ve always been a fairly passive, noncombative person to have gotten a reputation across the years for being an upstart and a rebel. It offended something deep in my nature to have to stand up to Falwell and his kind of theology. But I was there—I sometimes thought maybe God had planned it that way—and somebody had to do it.

At first, I resisted the idea of taking a stroll down that particular section of memory lane. I preferred to forget it, and let bygones be bygones. The country has moved on, theology has moved on, I have moved on.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I probably knew one aspect of Jerry Falwell as well as anybody alive. I was sitting on the fifty-yard line when he was at the top of his game, and it would be remiss of me not to share what I saw and felt at that time. As a fellow clergyman in Lynchburg, I knew things about Falwell most Americans didn’t know and couldn’t understand if they did. Maybe I had an obligation to talk about those things.

So I decided to write this book as my memoir about a man I would have been glad to have as a friend if he hadn’t been so wary of anybody who had a better education than he did or spoke from a more sophisticated theological position. I liked Jerry Falwell. He had a puckish, bad-boy way about him that made him likable. He was extremely charismatic, and radiated an energy that naturally attracted people. But we got off on the wrong foot—more about that later—and he never really trusted me enough to be friends. So we remained opponents, he in his corner and I in mine.

What I have written, however, is out of respect, not disrespect. Respect for Falwell’s enormous energy. Respect for his unbelievable chutzpah. Respect for the incredible verve that enabled him to build and lead a coalition of conservative forces for enough years to alter America’s history and destiny. Respect for his legacy—a large church and even larger university that are now the economic mainstay of the town that was always his home.

I also feel respect for a core of real faith and belief the man had, and for the blind doggedness that allowed him to go on being who he was, and being happy with that, even after his poll numbers had plummeted and he was ridiculed by sizable numbers of people, especially gays and lesbians and liberal journalists.

I won’t cut the cloth to flatter his figure. On the contrary, I will call things just the way I saw them then and still see them today. But I shall say what I have to say over against the iconic stature of a man who, unlike so many celebrities and public figures, was really who he appeared to be, and, once his course was set, rarely altered it to suit his