Jerry Falwell - Legacy and Criticisms

Legacy and Criticisms

Falwell's legacy is strongly mixed and often a source of heated controversy. Supporters praise his advancement of his socially conservative message. They tout too, his evangelist ministries, and his stress on church planting and growth. Many of his detractors have accused him of hate speech and identified him as an "agent of intolerance".

He was described by atheist social commentator Christopher Hitchens in turns as a "Chaucerian fraud" and a "faith-based fraud", and "especially disgusting in exuding an almost sexless personality while railing from dawn to dusk about the sex lives of others." Hitchens took special umbrage with Falwell's alignment with "the most thuggish and demented Israeli settlers", and his declaration that 9/11 represented God's judgement on America's sinful behaviour; deeming it "a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the 'faith-based.'" Hitchens also mentioned that, despite his support for Israel, Falwell "kept saying to his own crowd, yes, you have got to like the Jews, because they can make more money in 10 minutes than you can make in a lifetime. He was always full, as his friends Robertson and Graham are and were, of anti-Semitic innuendo." Appearing on CNN a day after Falwell's death, Hitchens said, "The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called 'reverend'." On C-SPAN, Hitchens made the comment that "If he had been given an enema, he could have been buried in a matchbox."

Falwell was an enemy of the revenge humorist "George Hayduke", who called Falwell a "fund-grubbing electronic Bible-banger" and "pious pride-in-the-pulpit". In his book Screw Unto Others, Hayduke mentions the story of one Edward Johnson, who in the mid-1980s, programmed his Atari home computer to make thousands of repeat phone calls to Falwell's 1–800 phone number, since Johnson claimed Falwell had swindled large amounts of money from his followers, especially Johnson's own mother. Southern Bell forced Johnson to stop after he had run up Falwell's phone bill an estimated $500,000. At one point, prank callers, especially gay activists, made up about 25% of Falwell's total calls, until the ministry disconnected the toll-free number in 1986.