by Martin Amis
Money is the two-way traffic of the religious TV industry: money is taken from the viewers in the form of sacramental contributions; money is 'returned' to them in the form of celestial jackpots. The tax-free status of American religions (including the Californian cults) is constantly assailed. But all challenges are repulsed by the First Amendment — and by the age-old analogy between sectarian competition and free enterprise. Furthermore, Americans don't feel the same way about money as we feel about it. They are not embarrassable on the subject. Money is its own vindication; money is its own just cause.
By no means all of the uplift shows are consciously political. Some electronic preachers do nothing more sinister with their millions than aggrandise themselves and their sanctuaries. Oral Roberts (yes, Oral Roberts), whose programme is centred on mere semi-hysterical folksiness, is going ahead with a $200-million City of Faith in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robert Schuller, who has a drive-in ministry one exit past Disneyland in Southern California, is building a twenty-two-acre Shopping Centre for Jesus Christ, featuring an all-glass Crystal Cathedral.
Styles vary. Some preachers tout health instead of money, which in America often means the same thing. Gene Profeta, who looks like Frankie Vaughan at the London Palladium, stands surrounded by the remnants of slum families who have found togetherness again with the Lord. 'Yeah, Gene, since I been praying and everything, I ain't had no seizures.' Gene grabs the mike: 'Oh praise Jesus.' Dr W.V. Grant's televisual pantheon looks like a field hospital at Gettysburg. Grant interrupts a spiritual to solace a crippled negro. 'The name's Jim, right?' 'Yeah.' 'You don't know me, do you, Jim?' 'No.' 'Jim, how long you been crippled up like that? Long time?' 'Yeah.' 'Jim, I want you to throw down these crutches and walk!' 'Okay.' Jim gets lithely to his feet, without looking pleased or grateful or even mildly surprised, and troops morosely up the aisle. 'Oh, hallelujah, praise that Lord!' sings Brother Grant. 'The Lord has healed him!' At this point, you begin to wonder Who crippled him. But Grant does not tarry with points of theodicy; he has his sales pitch to make.
Pat Robertson, chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, the great Sanctimoney genius of Portsmouth, Virginia, goes one further: he heals and rewards his flock over the airwaves. In the miracle-facility section of his show, the kneeling Robertson is granted visions of various recoveries, reunions and windfalls throughout the land. Robertson describes the miracles, and people ring in to claim them. His poorer viewers send him their rent cheques and disability allowances — because the gamble works better 'if you give out of your need'. Like all the TV preachers, Robertson also does big business in what the trade calls 'the pretty-pretties': sacred key-rings, beatified pen-clips and whatnot. CBN takes in over $1 million a week.
Robert Schuller's line typifies the logic of the holy sting, and he articulates it with all the unction of sweet reason. Gently waving his arms about and baring his practised false smile, Schuller explains that 'the major decision' in his life was 'tithing' — 'or the giving of 10 per cent of one's income back to the Church". This of course means the giving of 10 per cent of one's income back to Robert Schuller. 'And it turned me into a very good business manager,' he adds, without a blush. 'If you can't live on the 90 per cent, you couldn't live on the 100 per cent. No way — ' And, in return, 'God will give you management skills.’
Schuller's show is entitled, candidly enough, Hour of Power. Of course, there is nothing peculiarly American, or peculiarly Western, about the religious emphasis on material reward. Present-day Hinduism, for example, is very largely structured on the principle of worldly success. However, the Midas tradition in Ame'rican worship has little to do with modern laxity. It shocked de Tocqueville in 1831. A century later it effloresced in a host of how-to books on harmonial and self-bettering themes, under a thin shine of gnosticism: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, Billy Graham's Peace with God. What could be more American, in its way, than a version of Christ as the eternal miracle-worker and faith-healer — bringer of salubrity and cash, here and now?
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
Vidal v. Falwell
'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 acros
s our border in Greyhound buses'). Reagan's $1½ 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'.
