In the main building of the Liberty University campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, there is a Jerry Falwell museum. The first exhibit you see is devoted to Falwell’s father. Carey Falwell was a nonbeliever, a successful entrepreneur, a hoodlum, bootlegger and gunman who shot his own brother dead — not the kind of family skeleton usually put on public display.

But the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who started Liberty University in 1971 and grew it into the largest evangelical institution of higher learning in the land, was not an ordinary college president. His Carey Falwell exhibit was meant to convey that even the son of a sinner can become a man of God.

It was also a not very subtle reminder that Falwell came from tough stock. He was a Christian who couldn’t be counted on to turn the other cheek.

Falwell was a theological fatalist but a political activist. If this seems like a common combination today, that is largely due to Falwell himself. Before he came along, evangelical Christianity was inward looking. The Baptists, especially, had been badly burned by the failure of Prohibition and the mockery of the Scopes trial and turned away from politics during the first half of the 20th century. As a young preacher, Falwell asserted that the church had no business getting involved in such issues.

“I meant well, but I was wrong,” he wrote in his autobiography. This change of heart was one of the many unintended consequences of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which galvanised Falwell. He got into politics not out of love but out of hatred for “abortion, the drug traffic, pornography, child abuse and immorality in all its ugly, life-destroying forms.”

... contd.