Word: religion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just to keep going, Falwell must raise $100 million a year, promoting religion with all his corporate daring and guile. His Thomas Road Church in Lynchburg is the cockpit of the whole enterprise. Jammed with TV directors and monitoring screens, it is where Falwell tapes his Sunday-morning service, which is broadcast that evening as the Old Time Gospel Hour to 392 stations across the country. A bank of 62 telephone operators takes incoming pledges after the show...
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...
...many Americans share that style of religion without really being Fundamentalists. At its heart, the movement is cemented by two things: an unbudgeable belief in the word-for-word accuracy of the entire Bible and a spirit of militant resistance to anything in church or society that is thought to conflict with scriptural commands. The Bible is considered "inerrant" as it was originally written. That means the Good Book is free of error not only in spiritual and moral teaching but in all historical details. According to this view, miracles, whether the Virgin Birth of Jesus or the parting...
PORNOGRAPHY. In Fundamentalist eyes, the press, the movies, and especially TV shows that feature sex and violence are waging a war against religion and traditional family values. The initiator of many of these complaints is Donald Wildmon, 47, of Tupelo, Miss., a clergyman in the liberal United Methodist Church who nonetheless exudes a Fundamentalist spirit in running the National Federation for Decency. In 1982, the group boycotted, with mixed success, television advertisers who sponsored offensive shows. Wildmon also organizes believers in many cities to get the Playboy channel off local cable. Sex on television, says Wildmon, "threatens the very continued...
...deal is apparently in the works: Fidel Castro, 59, will reportedly receive $2.5 million from the U.S. publisher Simon & Schuster for three books. The first volume would include his 1979 speeches to the United Nations and his views on Latin America's debt, the second his thoughts on religion and Marxism, and the third his memoirs. Questions remain, however, about whether el jefe maximo will ever receive his fee. Last November the Treasury Department issued a license to Simon & Schuster allowing it to sign a contract with Castro as long as all payments go to a blocked account...