Normally I wouldn’t give Jerry Falwell a thought during the course of a day, but my oldest son sent me a text message and asked me for my thoughts on him. I’m not sure what he has in mind. He said it was not political, so I find myself wondering what caused this interest in Falwell, considering that he has little interest in the Christian faith.

1. Here are my thoughts on Jerry Falwell, for what they are worth: I hope my son knows that I think that Falwell was wrong in what he believed regarding Christianity. I left Falwell’s Fundamental Anabaptist religion a number of years ago and have not looked back. Over the years of my study, discussions, and debates with people in person and on the Internet, I have come to understand the Christian faith in terms of what the first Christians – the Early Fathers of the Church – believed and practiced. The Nicene Creed says, “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.” This catholic (or universal) church and what it believes is not Roman Catholicism, but rather the one, single, universal church which existed in the first thousand years of Christianity. These beliefs of this unified body have been faithfully kept by Eastern Orthodoxy, which is where my fifty-year spiritual journey has finally taken me. Falwell’s chosen religion came some fifteen hundred years later, an invention of men at a time when Europe was turning away from Roman Catholicism.

2. I think that even though he was wrong, he meant well. By that, I mean that Jerry Falwell may have loved Jesus as best he could in the religious setting he was in. I can’t judge his heart or his motives. There are many people who have had experiences of God’s mercy and grace outside the boundaries of the Church which Christ established upon the apostles. I was one of them. The experience of God’s mercy literally saved my life. I was in deep trouble from years of using drugs and other assorted behaviors that had nearly killed me. After my experience of God’s mercy, all I knew was the Protestantism preached by the man who had helped me find Christ and return to the vows of my baptism. Since this man and his beliefs saved my life, I assumed what he taught was correct. I spent a long time thinking this was the right version of Christianity and wouldn’t listen to anyone else who preached anything else. I would give Jerry Falwell the benefit of the doubt. He probably had a similar experience in his life.

3. However, well-meaning as he may have been, his man-made religion hurt people and is a blight upon the Christian faith. I realize this may sound harsh and judgmental, but there are people who have been turned away from Christ because of the way Falwell spoke about certain sins. This is personal for me. Our vision of God affects how we act and how we treat others. For fundamentalists, the God of the Bible is an angry God ever ready to send people to hell for the slightest deviation from truth. This is true of all fundamentalists of all faiths, even Orthodox and Roman Catholic. And since fundamentalists serve an angry and demanding God, they themselves become angry and demanding. My children want nothing to do with the Christian religion because the only dose they got of it was listening every Sunday to angry pastors warning people that God sends everyone but our congregation to hell forever. This kind of preaching is not attractive to any child. What child wants anything to do with a God that will send Grandma to hell because she is a Lutheran instead of a Fundamental Baptist? I have found in Orthodoxy a number of great saints whose approach to sinners was that of love and gentle exhortation to repent rather than the hellfire-and-brimstone preaching so orgasmically embraced by fundamentalists. In our Orthodox prayers, we speak of “God who alone loves mankind.” In the fundamentalist world, while they may speak of “God is love” in a quickly passing moment, the overall tenor of their approach to God is that He is really pissed with everyone, and you are in deep kimchee if you don’t belong to our particular brand of Christianity.

4. His fundamentalist religion hurt my family. I grew up in a dysfunctional family with little experience of unconditional love. I needed to hear about the God who loves all mankind – not just a special group of people. Instead, I was fed a steady dose of warnings that unless I did everything just right, God was not pleased with me. I had to be part of this special group of people – OR ELSE! This, in turn, fed my dysfunctional problems and made me a difficult husband and father to live with. Just ask the wives and children of any Tennessee Windsucker * how much fun they are to live with. I bet if you promise them absolute privacy of their comments, they will roll their eyes and give you a laundry list of issues that come with living with a hard-nosed religious bigot.

My opinion on Jerry Falwell is that he is part of the tragedy of Western Christianity. I think he may have meant well, but he was blind to the problems his kind of preaching caused for people and for Christianity. He is typical of American Christianity, which seems to have a fondness for greed Capitalism, war, and racism. Any man who dies with a net worth of $110 million dollars, as did Jerry, has long since forgotten the Gospel in which Jesus warned us against the accrual of wealth, and that we are supposed to care for the poor, not build our bank accounts. His condemnation of homosexual behavior, which caused tremendous societal backlash, was in many aspects, over the top. One wonders if he had lived long enough, if he would have condemned George W. Bush’s bombing of innocent Iraqi children as being on a par with homosexual activity. Probably not. Homosexuality is a horrible sin. Killing innocent children — meeeeah, not so much!

The Christianity of American southern Baptist believers appears to me to be a belief system rooted in fear: fear of God and going to hell, fear of people who are not like us, fear of other religions, fear of death, poverty, and humility. It is these very things which early Christianity embraced, willingly sharing their goods with others in a communal manner, walking calmly into the coliseum to face death for their faith, and living in humble circumstances instead of boasting of themselves. These are the very things that the Orthodox church encourages us to do today. The monks of Mt. Athos are the apex of such belief and practice, living austerely in prayer and simplicity, eschewing the accumulation of wealth and power which seems so much to be a hallmark of fundamentalist practice.

Overall, I would give his life and ministry a large negative vote.

At the same time, because I was duped into following along with the religion of condemnation which he and his fellow fundamentalists preached, I would say somewhat in his defense that it is easy to be tricked into being a follower. When you are presented with an ever-angry God who will throw you into hell if you don’t believe just the right things, and if you are taught religious error from childhood, with the warning that only this belief is correct and all others are going to hell forever, well, I think you can see the grip of fear that such a religion places on people. It is hard for such people to turn from their fundamentalist mindset when hell is looming over your head like the Sword of Damocles if you dare leave fundamentalism.

Summation: Warped theology produces warped people. I know. I’m warped, I admit it, and it comes from decades of listening to people like Falwell and believing their crappola was the truth about God.

FOOTNOTES:

* The title “Tennessee Windsucker” was coined to describe those fundamentalist preachers from the Deep South who fervently carry on, ranting and raving for ninety seconds, then take enough time to stop and draw in a great big breath – sucking in enough wind for the next round of screaming and shouting at sinners to get right with God. They don’t necessarily have to be preachers either. I’ve met at least one person who fit this description as he berated me over dinner with wide eyes because I questioned his belief of the KJV Bible being God’s Golden Word. I couldn’t get out of his house fast enough!

A fair and balanced outline of Jerry Falwell’s life can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell#Failing_health_and_death

Father +Thomas Hopko on the Orthodox Church regarding homosexual behavior can be found here: https://www.oca.org/reflections/misc-authors/the-homosexual-christian.

This is also a good read on the issue of Orthodoxy and homosexuality from the Antiochian Orthodox Church: http://ww1.antiochian.org/node/17905