Word: fundamentalistism
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Besides his church base and political legion, Falwell during the past 14 years has created a Fundamentalist college, Liberty University, that teaches 6,500 students on a lush, wooded 4,400-acre campus in Lynchburg. Each year Liberty sends out some 300 graduates to churches around the country, a growing network of supporters ready to serve Falwell's Fundamentalist causes. Thus far, 700 of them are pastors of their own churches...
...many ways, Ronald Reagan made Jerry Falwell possible. The preacher is routinely introduced to audiences as a friend of the President's. In 1980 Falwell lined up Moral Majority behind the candidate, and Reagan agreed with the Fundamentalist positions on such issues as school prayer and abortion. When Reagan visited Liberty University in October 1980, Falwell basked in the limelight. Last February, when the President turned down an invitation to address the National Religious Broadcasters in Washington, the organization turned to Falwell. After he called the White House, both Reagan and George Bush agreed to speak...
...Missouri Bible college as an ordained Baptist minister, he started the Thomas Road Church in Lynchburg and began to broadcast his services on radio. Within a year his membership jumped from 35 to nearly a thousand. Falwell was a smooth storyteller and his blunt, biting tongue gave his Fundamentalist listeners a new sense of confidence. He thundered against adultery, drinking and premarital sex. He built his church audience with a series of stunts, importing Christian karate experts to smash blocks of ice in front of the congregation and exhibiting the "world's tallest Christian," a 7-ft. 8-in. wrestler...
Another aspect of Falwell's crusade has received less attention but is at least as important in its implications. He is mobilizing and altering the consciousness of that once insular component of American religion known as Fundamentalism. Before Falwell, Fundamentalist preachers denounced evil in "the world" in order to compel their flocks into strict isolation from it. Nowadays those same jeremiads are a stern call to social action. "When I was growing up," recalls Fundamentalist Pastor Keith Gephart of Alameda, Calif., "I always heard that churches should stay out of politics. Now it seems almost...
...clear, as critics have claimed, that this sort of theology is tied to other Fundamentalist ideas on geopolitics. However, the Fundamentalists are fiercely anti-Communist and, for that reason, support a strong military and favor U.S. involvement in the affairs of other nations if it can be justified as opposition to Communist encroachment. Fear of pro-Soviet radicals is the basic reason Falwell would risk opprobrium to support South Africa's present regime. Unlike many other American religious groups, Fundamentalists typically favor an extensive U.S. nuclear arsenal...