A Life in the Moral Majority : STRENGTH FOR THE JOURNEY An Autobiography<i> by Jerry Falwell (Simon & Schuster: $17.95; 446 pp.)</i>

First of all, these blasted things are not autobiographies. As Jerry Falwell puts it, “And thanks too to Mel White who spent endless hours listening to my reels and reels of tape and making them into readable prose.”

Please note that I am not saying that Jerry Falwell, Lee Iacocca, and the latest quarterback with a good agent don’t have the right to produce as many of these artifacts as they can sell. (Maybe the implication is that the nominal authors are far too busy or too important to be bothered with the actual writing, but that we need their wisdom anyway.)

What I am saying is that if you haven’t had the grit to select, organize, take your own risks, and appear for judgment in your own words, you haven’t written an autobiography. No question there is a book there that you are in some sense responsible for, but it isn’t an autobiography. What is it? We need a name for these hybrids, and since they are often described as having been told to someone with a tape recorder, I would like to suggest we call them astolds.

The distinction is relevant here: With an astold, the reader cannot form an impression of the integrity of the author according to the integrity of the author’s style. There is no place to fix blame or credit.

In Falwell’s book, I was irritated by the careless nature of the chronological structure. To take one example, he spends eight pages describing his adolescent days as a prankster/delinquent, a behavior that culminates with the felony-level theft of lunch tickets, and gets him and his athlete friends in some serious trouble. Suddenly, at the end of the passage, he drops in this paragraph:

“I looked awful that day. My fingers and face were bandaged. My nose was broken and swollen twice its normal size. Both eyes were black. My face was puffy and swollen from a near-fatal auto accident.”

The accident is a revealing and critical event in young Falwell’s life, as it turns out, but we hear no more for almost 300 pages, when it arises in another connection.

There are quite a few unintentionally funny lines in the book. Describing an orgy of confession and apology that took place in “a famous Kansas City restaurant whose name I have forgotten,” when Falwell was leaving a church whose original members had not received him kindly, he says: “Tears were shed. Much cheesecake was consumed.” My favorite occurs later in the book, and is drawn from a visit that Falwell made to San Francisco during the heyday of the Moral Majority uproar: “The tragedy of Sister Boom Boom’s life was that no one had ever shared with him the redeeming Gospel of Jesus Christ. . . .”

Whom can we fault for such lapses? Falwell? His ghost writer? No one, really. These errors are endemic to the genre. All we can do is report our irritation or misplaced amusement, and proceed to evaluate the book on the basis of “content”--the attitudes, reports, and pronouncements of the person speaking into the tape recorder.

In spite of its structural and rhetorical flaws, the book does a pretty good job of evoking something I take to be Falwell’s genuine voice. That voice is always either telling stories or sermonizing.

Some of the storytelling is not too bad, although there are a lot of unconnected and wasted anecdotes. The best material in the book comes early on, when he describes his forebears and his early family life. His father, Carey Falwell, was a highly successful and respected businessman in and around Lynchburg, Va., a man with a generous hand for his friends and for the needy, a powerful and just figure that a young son could look up to. He was also a bootlegger, a fierce-tempered hard-case who always had a pistol at hand, a distant and uncommunicative father, a man who would not tolerate talk of God or the church, and finally, a fratricide and an alcoholic.

It may have been that the elder Falwell had gotten his distrust of the church from his father, who had watched his young wife die of uterine cancer in 1914 in spite of his prayers, and had rejected belief in God ever since.

In any case, his story is a moving account of a strong and complex man in a rawer and maybe more basic America, a richly involved and intelligent man about whom the shadows gradually gather. It is, in short, a tragedy. Carey Falwell had a younger brother, Garland, who was apparently the prototypal wild child. Garland Falwell worked as a runner for the Prohibition whiskey his other brother was selling, and shared in the family wealth. But he drank, took Dexedrine to stay awake, and became more and more violent and lawless and paranoid. Carey rescued him from serious prosecution several times, but Garland became convinced that Carey was his enemy, and after a brush with the law one night, came to the family restaurant, guns drawn and firing away. His brother shot him through the heart.

The older Falwell was acquitted on a plea of self-defense, but this episode, according to his son Jerry, was responsible for the drinking that eventually killed him.

Now place into this story Jerry Falwell’s mother, nee Helen Beasley, a tall, quiet, firm, and deeply religious homebody, who apparently made her peace with her husband’s apostasy, but never ceased to pray for his salvation or work for her son’s conversion. Falwell credits his mother’s Sunday breakfasts, which she used to lure him out of bed, and during which she faithfully had the radio tuned to the “Old Fashioned Revival Hour,” with preparing him for his eventual conversion. And place into the story the young Falwell himself, rebel and A-student, a scholar so skilled, his calculus teacher was later to beg him not to abandon mathematics for preaching, a self-made athlete, a prankster and driver of fast cars (he opens the book with a sneaky boast about speeding to the old family cemetery, the sort of minor sin that Baptist preachers like to brag about because it proves them human).

It is hard not to feel that there is a powerful story at work here, a theme of anger, loss, grief, open love and hidden resentment. It was hard for me not to make assumptions about what was driving the young Falwell’s rebellion, what sort of admiration-crossed-with-fear with regard to his father. It was hard for me not to think that there was, in spite of the author’s reassurances, a bitter if deeply veiled struggle between the mother and the father, and that the boy’s soul formed a battleground of that struggle. It is hard not to imagine his conversion as a final release, a victory over that father at the expense of a sort of intensity and depth--the conversion did not occur, we notice, until after the death of the father.

The trouble is, Falwell does not take us into these questions. I am sure that he thinks he does, because he announces early on that he is going to tell us a story of sin and redemption. He proclaims, in that peculiar Baptist way, so stonily proud of being (as they assume) unfashionable and disliked for their virtue, “Sin? I confess it is an ugly word, quite out of style these days . . . ,” and goes on to deliver a condescending and bathetic sermon about the work of the Enemy in this world. He puts on his pulpit voice, and lectures.

The sermons come thick and heavy, and they are all rote, routine, the same old stuff. It is the same old stuff we need to hear, the preacher might say in response. It is the hardness of our hearts that causes us not to listen to the old, old story become the new, new song. But I don’t think so. I don’t think that is the problem at all.

Falwell recounts the horrible things that befell his father and grandfather and uncle; he does not hide from us the misdeeds of his own youth, and all these he categorizes as sin. He recounts Biblical tales, explains Southern Baptist theology, and generally does a bang-up job of doing what the Baptists call bearing witness. And yet somehow the sin never becomes connected with the salvation in any visible progress of motivation. We have several “witnesses” of sinners who went to church even though they didn’t understand why they were going, who raised their hands to ask for prayer even though they hadn’t been aware they were going to, and this sort of thing is not explained as an almost cultural inability to see what is happening in your own heart, but as the spirit of the Lord working powerfully.

The theology is savage--God is so “just” He has to have punishment, no matter whether the punished one is the guilty one, and so Christ is killed to spare us. The actual moral perception time and time again misses the point. “There were times that Dad’s pranks bordered on cruelty,” he says, and tells a tale of his father and some co-workers getting revenge on a complainer by skinning and frying the complainer’s cat and feeding it to him as “friend squirrel.” It’s a funny story, in that horrible Southern way, but by my lights, that isn’t a prank, and it doesn’t border on cruelty--it crossed over the border some thousand years ago and settled in the heartland.

The book comes closest to something that might be taken as true Christian humility in a long section on race relations, which includes (finally) the complete story of the auto accident, in which a young black friend is also seriously hurt, but is refused treatment in the emergency room until Falwell’s brother guarantees payment. Falwell’s ministry ignores blacks for a very long time, and in this, Falwell admits, he was wrong. He is very clear in saying that all men are equal in Christ, and he says that his Thomas Road ministry is now open equally to black and white. But it is not long, even here, before he is back at the excuses, explaining how growing up in the South had made an unconscious racist of him, and yet blaming the demonstrators for their tactics and saying that he and the civil rights leaders had simply been speaking to different points: “We wouldn’t admit the injustice, and they couldn’t admit our right to solve the problems on our own.”

Most telling, I think, is the way this biography degenerates to statistics after the young Falwell’s conversion. We hear more and more glancingly, and in more and more cliched terms, of his romance and marriage, the births of his children. We do get a few case histories of amazing conversions, of generous gestures by rich and faithful patrons. But the story is increasingly, after the first third, a story of strategies, organizations, teams, recruitment, building funds, and of branching and interlocking organizations. It is a familiar story to anyone who has grown up as a Southern Baptist. There is the first tiny church of the apprentice pastor, a splinter church that has resulted from a feud in the larger official church. This passionate little mission prays, and beats the bushes, and the ranks of membership swell. (Falwell used to knock on 80 doors a day.) A new building is needed, but the money is not available. The preacher goes down to the bank, and the president gives him, miracle of miracles, a loan with no collateral. Repeat the process as the church buys a radio station and reaches millions. Repeat as the church organizes innumerable missions. Repeat as Jerry Falwell forms the Moral Majority.

It isn’t that Falwell comes off in this book as the secular humanist’s version of the Evil One. He doesn’t. He comes off, actually, as fairly human and sincere (remembering always that a preacher is a professional at sincerity). It isn’t that some of his ministries (the retreat for alcoholics, the home for unwed mothers) have not done genuine good, probably, maybe. It isn’t the insular smugness of what I think of as the “We-Baptists” motif--we Baptists don’t believe in grief, we Baptists love to hug, we Baptists believe in once-saved always-saved. It isn’t even that somewhere in this narrative there are not mentioned moments of true spiritual change and insight.

It’s something about the way the workings of the spirit are measured in here, something about the moment of conversion resembling a closing in a sale, something about the numbers, the finances. The whole thing reminds me of a pyramid marketing scheme. The motivational meetings where visions of transcendence are whipped up to create revivalist fervor. The testimonials of the already converted. The grow-or-die quality of the whole endeavor. And finally, the irrelevance of the actual nature of the particular product. We may describe the product in the most glowing of terms, we may believe in the product completely, but it is to be noted that the product will always be described in exactly the same way every time, and that it must be so described, because it is a product, and its function is not to heal, but to get itself sold many times over.

Which is not to say you shouldn’t buy Jerry Falwell’s life. I personally am glad to have my copy, and plan to look into it fairly often, taking it down when I do so from its place on the shelf with all the other astolds.