God's Right Hand

January 9, 2012
A blogger for National Catholic Reporter, Winters has written a balanced and highly readable account of the controversial pastor who roused evangelicals and mobilized them to engage in public life. Winters doesn’t fawn over Falwell nor ridicule him, but instead provides a critical assessment of his strengths and weaknesses. Readers will find the personable and friendly Falwell, capable of befriending Ted Kennedy and Larry Flynt, as well as the shrill and divisive Falwell, who accused producers of The Teletubbies of modeling gay sexuality to children, or warning that the United States does not deserve to survive if Roe v. Wade is not overturned. Love him or hate him, Falwell had an extraordinary ability to capture the public spotlight and shape the culture wars in ways that resonate today. This biography is especially useful as a snapshot of America’s religious and political fortunes during the second half of the 20th century. Winters offers provocative theories along the way. He suggests, for example, that conservative Southerners like Falwell transferred the racial superiority they had lost in the wake of integration into a national superiority that conflated patriotism with religious faith.

November 15, 2011
A sympathetic biography of the man who, for good or ill, became "the face of Christianity to millions of Americans" in the 1980s. A successful pastor and pioneering televangelist who built his Thomas Road Baptist Church from 36 members to a megachurch of thousands, Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) was distressed that as America descended into what he considered moral anarchy, Christianity was represented in the political arena primarily by complicit liberal clergy. He saw government oppression in Supreme Court rulings and IRS policies, and he rallied conservatives to a defense of their values with "a fighting faith, a muscular Christianity ready to do battle, not reach an accommodation, with the forces of secularization at work in the mainstream culture." Winters (Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats, 2008, etc.) effectively describes the worldview of a fundamentalist Baptist pastor that informed all of Falwell's actions. He did not fully comprehend the pluralistic values of the society he wanted to reform, or the difficulties of promoting a morality grounded in religion within the politics of a secular culture. He was capable of forming lasting personal friendships with such opposing figures as Ted Kennedy and Larry Flynt, and yet his goals and intolerant rhetoric were often deeply hurtful and offensive to millions; as Flynt put it to him, "You don't need to poison the whole lake with your venom." Winters focuses primarily on Falwell's political activities as a leader of the Moral Majority; an account of his parallel career as a pastor must await a more comprehensive biography. The author presents a thorough if indulgent account of Falwell's rise to national prominence, including the temptations, conundrums and missteps that befell him as his deepening involvement in politics drew him far afield from the biblical roots of his thinking. Falwell achieved few of the Moral Majority's goals, but he reshaped the Republican Party and national politics. An illuminating biography, though Winters is often too forgiving of Falwell's trespasses.

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Starred review from November 15, 2011
This is the story of a sincere man. Jerry Falwell believed in biblical fundamentalism so completely that he couldn't understand that his vision was opaque to many others, Christians as well as unbelievers. In this engaging, well-balanced sociological rather than personal biography, an excellent journalist emphasizes the two major efforts of Falwell's public career: to build a church in Lynchburg, Virginia, that would exemplify Christian community and evangelism, and to defend traditional morality in America by means of politics. He succeeded at both endeavors. Falwell crafted the archetypal megachurch, providing for education, preschool to graduate school, and many humanitarian services (a facility for recovering alcoholics was the first such frill he set up) as well as worship. Far more famously, he booted conservative evangelicalism out of its self-chosen isolation since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial and into the heart of the Republican Party. The only truly ill effect of his efforts, Winters maintains, was that, to achieve his political goals, he reduced Christianity to ethics, thereby contributing to the drift of Americans in general away from a Christianity shorn of its salvific, metaphysical power. What may most impress many is that, for all his fulmination, Falwell truly distinguished sin and sinner: two of his sharpest adversaries, Ted Kennedy and Larry Flynt, became his lifelong friends.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)