The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (14 page)

The Rev. Jerry Falwell is the most powerful, most convincing, most committed — and the least vulgar — of all the electronic Evangelicals. He is without the messianic stridency of James Robison (with
his
talk of 'prophets' and 'new Jeremiahs'), and without the frank hucksterism of Pat Robertson. Falwell will last when the others are too bored, frightened or mad to continue usefully on the political wing. And if you ask
him
about his colonial mansion in Lynchburg, Virginia, his private aeroplane and airport, his tax-avoiding loans within his corporation, his bodyguards and gofers, he will tell you that material wealth is 'God's way of blessing people who put Him first'.

'I known Jerry Falwell since he was knee-high to a duck,' said the old Lynchburger in the bar (which took some finding). 'Knew his daddy too, biggest bootlegger ever hit this state. I seen Jerry Falwell so drunk he couldn't stand up — thirty years back, must be. But don't you trash Jerry now, you hear? Bet he earns more money than
you
ever will.’

Most of Lynchburg, Virginia, resembles an outsize drive-in shopping-mall. If you ask, with some desperation, to be taken to the centre of town, you end up in a different shopping-mall called Main Street. Moving around on foot, you feel vulnerable and isolated, like the next-to-go in
The Amityville Horror.
The township was founded by Colonel Charles Lynch — the man who got so memorably carried away when dealing out rough justice to loyalists after the American Revolution. It has a population of sixty-odd thousand, nearly a third of which owes allegiance to the Thomas Road Baptist Church, Jerry Falwell's home ministry.

Lynchburg is Jerryburg now, more or less. Falwell runs his
Old-Time Gospel Hour
from here, and his fund-raising computers glisten in the redbrick buildings behind the strapping new church. He also runs a children's academy, a Bible institute, a correspondence school, a seminary, and Liberty Baptist College itself, where 'leaders are trained for the generation to come, learning good character traits and how to become good moms and pops'.

Accompanied by Perry, a honey-toned young blonde from Falwell 's PR department, I went up to Liberty Mountain to inspect the campus. 'Are
you
saved?' Perry asked me early on. I had grown used to fielding this kind of question over the past week. 'Well, not exactly,' I began. Perry was saved all right. 'I felt the Lord coming into my heart with — such love..." Perry had been born again at the age of four, good going even for these parts.

Liberty Baptist College is a Southern-fried crag lined with bungalow-style lecture halls, the students' living-quarters situated further up the hill. No smoking, no drinking, no swearing. The fresh-faced pupils stroll peacefully from class to class, or sit reading their Bibles, or chat by the Coke machines. Not all die courses are theological - though I assumed that a lecture on, say, sociology would consist of an hour-long denunciation of die subject. Perry herself had majored here in psychology. 'How do they teach Freud?' I asked. 'Well, you take Freud, and see where he disagreed with the Bible,' said Perry. 'I mean, sometimes they agree. But we all know the Bible got there first.’

Thomas Road Baptist Church is more like a cinema than a place of worship, with its scalloped stalls sloping downwards to the stage, and the TV cameras wedged into the balcony. I mingled unobtrusively (I hoped) with the 4,000 Lynchburg faithful; I had Perry's say-so on this, but still felt uneasy about the imposture... There was a busy, socialising air: clumps of gossiping girls, all with a new dollar-bill on their laps for the collection bowl, and fondly watched by the big-chinned boys further back. Everyone opened their much-thumbed, much-underscored Bibles. It was 7 p.m. The two-hour service began.

This was an untelevised service, and so more down-home and gone-fishing in style dian FalwelPs standard performance. We memorised a verse from the Book of Psalms, slyly invited by a Falwell sidekick to insert the names of Carter and Reagan wherever we thought it appropriate: 'God
is
the judge: he putteth down one and setteth up the other.' We heard a spiritual from an Isley-Brothers-style trio (among the few dark faces in the house) and a squawky ballad from five local sisters on violin. Falwell preached with avuncular cheer — don't listen to the media, God loves you, my little wife, on Judgment Day we'll all be bigshots, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. Doubters filed up and then filed back, all born again again. Then Falwell asked us to join in little groups of two and three, and pray together, out loud.

Until that moment I had been performing a nervous, if quite passive, imitation of a devout Virginian. When people jotted down apophthegms, I took notes; when they sang hymns, I mimed along; when they prayed for salvation, I prayed for a Winston King Size and a large gin and tonic. But suddenly the young man on my left, who had kindly shared his Bible with me during the readings, turned to me and said, 'You wanna pray together?' - and I, for some reason, said, 'Surely'.

We hunkered down, hands on brows. 'You wanna go first?' he asked. 'No. You go first.' And as he stuttered on about the Lord helping America in its hour of etc., etc., I thought of the strapping young champions of Christ a!I about me, and of my own blasphemous intrusion. In five minutes, I thought, you'll be dangling from the rafters — and quite right too. The voice beside me trailed off with some remarks about Sue-Ann's rheumatism and Joe-Bob's mortgage; I turned to see his bashful, expectant face. In rocky Virginian I babbled out something about our people in Tehran and the torment they must feel in their hour of etc., etc. My prayermate wished he had thought of this too. We squeezed our frowning foreheads and nodded together for a very long time.

Falwell is innocuous in his home pulpit, smiling, sensible, protective: he understands the American spiritual yearning, which is the yearning to belong. But my first reaction when I met and talked to him, back in Dallas, was a momentary squeeze of fear. With his people milling about him in the futuristic foyer of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, he reminded me of the standard villain of recent American fiction and film: the corporation man.

Jerry Falwell (born in 1933; born again in 1956) is six foot and then some, with the squashy-nosed face of the friendly policeman. He wore a suit of some incredibly plush and heavy material (taffeta? theatre curtains? old surplices?), adorned with a small gold brooch in the characters of Jesus Christ, the terminal
t
stretched into a cross. (The same thing happens to the T in
vote
on his supporters' banners.) A huge aide brought us coffee. We began.

Doggedly I began to rehearse the obvious liberal objections to his platform, mentioning that he had called the Equal Rights Amendment 'a vicious attack on the monogamous Christian home*. 'That's right,' he said blandly. 'I don't believe in equal rights for women. I believe in superior rights for women.' (This is consistent enough: Falwell has always wanted to kick women upstairs.) 'You know, the Women's Lib movement? Many of them are lesbians, you know. They're failures — probably married a man who didn't treat them like a human being,' he added, completing the machocentric circle.

'If you were President,' I said, eliciting a brief smirk, 'how would you stop people being homosexual?”

'Oh, they've got to live, have jobs, same as anybody else. We don't want any Khomeini thing here. It's the sin not the sinner we revile. It's anti-family. When God created the first family in that Garden, he created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, 'Besides, I want influence, not power. But I want global influence. We can't buy more airtime in America, no way. But we'll start buying it worldwide. South America, Europe, Asia ...’

His aides signalled. I asked my final question.

'Yes, sir, every word, quite literally, from Genesis to Revelations, which says there will soon be nuclear holy war over Jerusalem, after which Russia will be a fourth-rate power and Israel will astonish the world. Nice talking to you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a radio show to attend.’

Easy prey, perhaps. British liberals enjoy being alarmed by commotion on the American Right; we also tend to indulge our vulgar delight in American vulgarity. I don't think the Evangelicals will soon be running the country. Although they have made an appeal to something old and fierce in the native character, it will take years to develop this into any kind of consensus. The movement constitutes a genuine revolution from below, however, and will have to be heeded. To dismiss the beliefs of the Evangelicals is to disdain the intimate thoughts of ordinary people.

Nor is their critique of American society contemptible in itself. One of Falwell's TV specials is called
America, You're Too Young To Die.
It shows leathery gays necking in Times Square, sex-aid emporia, child pornography, aborted foetuses in soiled hospital trays. A predictably alarmist collage, certainly. But some of us who have been born only once find plenty that is cheerless here, and fail to buy the 'humanist package' entire.

'AH the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution,' wrote William Bryan in 1914. 'It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.' The anti-intellectual content in Evangelical feeling is, by definition, a source of pride to its leaders. But it will either ruin or deform the movement eventually. No book but the Bible; Genesis or Darwin, one or the other. This is why the movement will have to be contested. This is why the movement is so wide-open, so abjectly vulnerable, to authoritarian thought.

Observer
1980

'I usually start with a prayer. But instead I'll start with the latest Nancy Reagan joke.' The perpetrator of this careful irreverence was Mr Gore Vidal; its setting — Lynchburg, Virginia, the Rev. Jerry Falwell's home town and HQ, the capital of the New Right. 'Actually,' drawled Vidal, an old-Virginian aristo himself, 'it's the capital of the Old Right. If there's anything a Virginian hates to be called, it's
new.’

i
was one of those curious, fixing moments in the swirling American scene. Gore Vidal, lifelong excoriator of the political circus, is once again donning his tutu for the high trapeze: later this year, he hopes to replace California's S.I. Hayakawa in the US Senate. Vidal has often said that any American who is prepared to run for President should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. Yet he confessed over dinner (or, rather, over a Virginian meat tea, before his speech) that he is intending to go the whole way. And so, last Monday night, Vidal strolled sturdily up to the lectern at Lynchburg College and gave his annual State of the Union address, his mocking echo of the Presidential bulletin of the previous week. But this is no longer Vidal's lecture-circuit, after-dinner oration: it is his stump speech, and it is sweepingly, piercingly radical.

Meanwhile, across town, Jerry Falwell lurked brooding behind the walls of his $300,000 house. Jerry's house is a Doric mansion, but it lies in the wrong end of town: 'among the cracker boxes', in the local parlance. For all his Hugh-Hefner trappings, Jerry remains a rockbottom grass-roots figure, regarded as riff-raff even by petit-bourgeois Lynchburgers. (Jerry minds about this; Vidal's new-Virginian remark was meant to sting.) Asked along that night by the local anti-Falwell group, which arranged Vidal's talk, Jerry had silently declined. Perhaps he was watching the first episode in a new soap-opera about a video evangelist, called — with an appropriate glance at Pay TV —
Pray TV.
Or perhaps, like everyone else in America, he was monitoring the depravities of Charles and Sebastian, in
Brideshead Revisited.

Against this varied opposition, Vidal still attracted a full house. After a few preliminary jokes and jabs (enough to make a few heavy citizens walk from the hall shaking their heads), he kicked off with the proposition that America was run by a single-party system. The party happened to have two factions - Democrats and Republicans. 'It's supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X versus Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.’

Ever since the Bust of 1919, Vidal pursued, the US had been in thrall to the notion that 'war is good for business'. Open or covert, hot or cold, war had been waged for the past fifty years; and now Reagan, 'in the bright springtime of his senility', was busy arranging the next war with Nicaragua, say, or El Salvador ('I lie awake at night worrying about the hordes of El Salvadorans pouring across our border in Greyhound buses'). Reagan's $1
½
trillion five-year defence budget could result only 'in nuclear war or bankruptcy — one or the other'. The CIA, he claimed, was now as active and ubiquitous as the KGB.

Without too much chapter and verse, Vidal switched from the question of global policing to that of domestic enforcement. He estimated that 50 per cent of all police work was taken up with 'victimless crime'. Why do we meekly accept that our private lives should be run by Washington? If people want to kill themselves with drink, drugs, or indeed bullets, then that is their business; ditto with restraints on sexual morality. Released from their patrols of parlour and bedroom, the police would be free to combat the crimes that really etc., etc.

All this may have surprised — and delighted and scandalised — the gathered Lynchburgers; but it was hardly news to anyone who had read Vidal in the
New York Review
or
Esquire
over the years. Indeed, there is practically nothing in his stump speech that isn't to be found in his
Collected Essays, 1952—1972.
But now Vidal moved on to tax reform, acknowledging the help of certain 'advisers', and we began to get a glimpse of a possible platform.

'To govern', Vidal had written ten years ago in
Homage to Daniel
Shays,
'is to choose how the revenue from taxes is to be spent.' Nowadays, though, the question is not how to cut the cake but how to bake it. Vidal's new recipe is simple and direct: lay off the poor, and squeeze the corporations. He further suggested that the corporations would include the electronic ministries of the airwaves, and their tax-exempt revenues. By this means alone, $ioo billion would be raised, 'enough to service the national debt'.

That was as near as Vidal came to a direct attack on Falwell, and it was taken up again in the question-and-answer period after the talk. Goaded by a journalist in the front row, Vidal confessed that he had always thought of Falwell as 'the banker for the Lord'. Was there
anything
to be said for Falwell? 'Well,' said Vidal weightily, and paused. 'I like his choir. I like his fat little smile ...’

Poor Jerry. Everyone seems to be getting at him recently, even on his home turf. Eighteen months ago, when I saw Falwell in Dallas, the video pastor had given off a steady glow of beatific anticipation. His awakening of the born-again community, through TV and computer mailing, would surely swing the election for Reagan's 'dream platform'. The silent majority had solidified into the Moral Majority: 'family issues' would soon be catapulted into the forefront of political life.

It came to pass. But then what happened? Within weeks of his victory, Reagan stopped returning Jerry's calls. The President, it seemed, had gone cool on the treasured issues of abortion, homosexuality, welfare cutbacks and the teachings of Genesis. Recently Jerry was obliged to join in the orchestrated howls of betrayal and neglect at a New Right rally in Washington. Reagan, said the Conservative bigwigs (Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie), had 'the right gut-instincts, the right rhetoric', but had sold out to pragmatism by opting for 'experience' in his advisers (instead of the inexperience of Falwell, Weyrich
et al.).
Some people, you may think, are never satisfied. The New Right had hoped to celebrate Roosevelt's centenary with the dismantling of the New Deal. Such a position, as Reagan knew, has no support whatever among the American people. In fifty years the only proponent of the Old Deal has been Barry Goldwater, who carried half-a-dozen States in 1964.

In Dallas, Falwell confessed to expectations not only of national power but of global influence. The dream had looked so bright, so fresh. A year later he was back in Lynchburg, cranking out
The Old-Time Gospel Hour.
And now here was Gore Vidal — an atheist, a Darwinian, an intellectual, and a faggot — goosing Jerry in his own front yard.

Vidal's address, or history lesson, was given at Lynchburg College, one of the few local establishments of secular education. Falwell himself shepherds a whole string of fundamentalist institutions, from kindergarten schools to postgraduate colleges. His pride is Liberty Baptist College, perched on a dusty tor called Liberty Mountain, just across town.

Up on Liberty Mountain, you get education FalwelPs way. The brochure for LBC is a document of some interest. Its photograph of the school's business department, for instance, is in fact a cropped snap of a downtown bank; the chapel featured in the brochure also happens to belong to a school several miles away. LBC rules forbid 'hip-hugging pants-suits', 'personal displays of affection', and sideburns that extend lower than 'the bottom of the earlobe". The history and biology teachers are under the impression that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. There have been Falwell-related book-burnings, as chapters of Moral Majority lead search-and-destroy missions into local libraries:
Daffy Duck, Slaughterhouse-Five
and
Fifty True Tales of Terror
have all been scorched at Fahrenheit 451. The LBC motto is Knowledge Aflame.

Falwell does not rest from his holy mission, which is to raise lots of money. Jerry's sanctuary is the Thomas Road Baptist Church, known locally as 'Jerry Co.'; in its forum, which resembles that of the Empire, Leicester Square, parishioners can help themselves to prayer letters on the open racks. These letters are part of the Faith Partner kit which Jerry will sell you if you pay — or 'pledge' — $20 a month. The kit includes a Bible, a concordance, and a badge of a baby's foot, tastefully scaled to viable-foetus size. You send in your Faith Partner Prayer Request, and fellow parishioners take them home to pray over.

A glance through the requests is as good a way as any of getting the flavour of FalwelPs pitch. 'This is a lonely time for me, Jerry ... wife scheduled for surgery ... husband an alcoholic — business reverses ... I also need a car ... no savings — zero ... please accept $5 a widow's mite ...' Jerry will accept the $5 by the way, but the widow will be demoted on the prayer roster. Mere poverty is no excuse: pay-prayers are supposed to work better if you can't afford them. Pledge now, live later. Falwell regularly claims that he swung the 1980 election for Ronald Reagan. No one disputes that the 5 to 7 per cent push provided by the mobilisation of the quietist proletariat had a lot to do with the Republican landslide. It is also axiomatic that Falwell's influence (and his multi-million dollar business) comes down to one thing: the influence of television.

'As the age of television progresses, the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception.' This prescient remark was made by Gore Vidal, covering the Republican Convention of 1968. Actually, nowadays the Reagans are not just the rule: they are the President. Ten years later, Vidal said in an interview: 'I am perfect for television. And that's all a President has to be these days.' Vidal is a more solid and dependable" figure now than he was five years ago (greyer in the temples, heavier in the back); but whether his telly-flair will take him far is open to question. He will need to get his smile fixed, for one thing: it is twitchy, furtive, full of childish malevolence. 'Above all, a politician must not sound clever or wise or proud,' he has said. But that is exactly how Vidal sounds. Unpatriotic Gore: this has always been the key to his invigorating contempt.

What can Vidal achieve in the new babel of the airwaves, while staying recognisably himself? It has never been clearer that the trend of American politics is one of attrition, trimming and compromise. In times of recession, everyone huddles towards the neutral warmth of the centre. Reagan is learning this — if 'learning' is quite the word we want. Falwell and the New Right are learning it too. Gore Vidal, more than anyone, surely, has known it all along.

Observer
1982