My Tribute to Jerry Falwell
16 May 2007
There are few men in modern-history who have been more vilified and caricatured than the Rev. Jerry Falwell. His stance for decency and against debauchery earned him the undying ire of the decadent. Those determined to lead our nation to Shangri-La down sin-strewn pathways demonized Falwell for both speaking out against sin and suggesting that mankind needed a Savior. How dare this Baptist preacher point our nation back to God with a Bible in his hand? Didn’t he know that our society had become way too sophisticated to believe any longer in the superstitions of the ancient Scriptures?
Still, on and on he would go preaching about a Heaven to gain and a Hell to shun. It just drove people nuts, especially those preoccupied with the temporal and indifferent toward the eternal. What’s wrong with preachers like Falwell; don’t they understand how uncomfortable they make people feel? I mean life is tough enough without having to worry about standing before God and answering at the end of it for the way you lived it. So why upset people with such stuff? Why not keep your beliefs to yourself? After all, isn’t religion, unlike homosexuality, a private matter that should be kept in the closet?
Whereas today’s society insists that no gay or lesbian should stay in the closet, it is equally insistent that all Christians remain closeted. While we all need to hear what homosexuals practice in the privacy of their bedrooms, none of us should be subjected to the professed beliefs of Christians. Any Christian, like Falwell, daring to proclaim his beliefs in public is obviously an intolerant bigot trying to impose his ideology on others. Homosexuals, on the other hand, are just spreading love like Teletubbies’ cuddly Tinky Winky whenever they denounce all Christians as hatemongering homophobes.
I didn’t always agree with Jerry Falwell. There were times when I thought he spent too much time politicking and merchandizing and too little time preaching and ministering. Still, “he remained through his career,” as even the New York Times was forced to admit, “a preacher and moralist, a believer in the Bible’s literal truth, with convictions about religious and social issues rooted in his reading of Scripture.” Unlike so many who occupy modern-day pulpits, Falwell fearlessly proclaimed his biblical convictions regardless of cost or consequence to himself. For this, he has my undying admiration and respect.
Many today will undoubtedly fault Falwell for being frequently soiled by his many incursions into the corrupt arena of present-day politics. I, on the other hand, will always think of Luther’s words when remembering Falwell: “If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest expression every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Wherever the battlefield—abortion, same-sex marriage, pornography, stem-cell research, etc.—Falwell never flinched nor hesitated to take up the fight. Unlike most modern-day pulpiteers, whose only concerns are for more and more compliments and congregants, Falwell was ever ready to enter the fray on the side of the truth. So what if he ended up severely wounded in the press and public opinion? He, like the Apostle Paul, proudly bore his scars as proof that he belonged to Christ (Galatians 6:17). If you ask me, today’s smoothed skinned preachers who peer down their noses at the likes of Jerry Falwell, would do well to heed the words of Amy Carmichael:
Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,
I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star,
Hast thou no scar?
Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent,
Leaned me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed me, I swooned:
Hast thou no wound?
No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the master shall the servant be,
And pierced are the feet that follow Me,
But thine are whole; can he have followed far
Who has no wound nor scar?
Don Walton
| 
