“Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies and everyone goes, ’cause everyone knows Brother Love’s show,” is how Neil Diamond put it in his 1969 hit “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.” Everyone still knows, because evangelism is one area of life that remains virtually unchanged, even through the cataclysmic advent of modern media.
The death Tuesday of Rev. Jerry Falwell reminds us of an essential truth about public purveyors of religion: Their jobs have been the same for centuries. That’s an odd thing to say, perhaps, because ever since the word “televangelism” was coined, we’ve been told that media completely transformed the evangelical movement. We’ve been persuaded that personalties such as Billy Graham and Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson and Robert Schuller constituted an entirely new species.
But it didn’t, and they’re not. Television only increased the size of the congregation (and the total haul in the collection plate). It didn’t change the order of worship, which all of us — no matter what our spiritual beliefs may be — know so well: the hymns, the sermon, the offering, the altar call. That’s how Diamond could write his song and know listeners would be able to envision the sweaty scene. Or how Sinclair Lewis could write a novel such as “Elmer Gantry” (1927), with its satirical sneer at religious hypocrisy.
Falwell could have died in 1807 or 1907 instead of 2007, and his time here on Earth would not have been appreciably different, give or take a few limousines and microwaved meals. He’d still have preached, written, stuck his fingers in various political pies. Television altered the scope of what he did, but not its essence. He’s indistinguishable from well-known public evangelists of earlier eras, the Billy Sundays or the Aimee Semple McPhersons.
Television alters everything it touches — except evangelism. It’s one of the very few public professions that have survived intact through the inexorably rising tide of media. A church service from last Saturday or Sunday could be frozen, lifted and then dropped down and thawed out in, say, 1827, and nobody in the wooden pews would gasp or faint. They’d know exactly what they were watching.
Politics, business, entertainment, news, sports, education: Media have transformed all of them. Presidents are different because of media. So are professional athletes and journalists. But evangelists still do what they’ve always done. Media have given more people a front-row seat at the revival — we can see every twitch and bead of sweat — but the elements of that revival are the same as they’ve been for centuries.
Falwell had his detractors, but he was a powerful cultural presence, all the more so because that presence cast a shadow stretching out for centuries. Even in a universe of a thousand channels and a billion blogs, Falwell’s old-time religion turns out to be just what it says it is: timeless.
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jkeller@tribune.com
