The Lessons of Lynchburg

To folks in Lynchburg, a town like Laramie, Wyo., must seem a long way off. Lynchburg, in the foothills of central Virginia, is a good candidate for the capital of the Bible Belt: the Rev. Jerry Falwell preaches his Sunday sermon in the Thomas Road Baptist Church, one of more than 150 churches in this small city. Laramie is everything Lynchburg is not--flat and empty, a Wild West railroad-stop-turned-progressive college town. To imagine the two cities is to imagine the vastness of America.

But last weekend in Lynchburg, when Jerry Falwell preached a radically different kind of sermon, a ghost from Laramie was in the room.

Falwell has gained national prominence as a fundamentalist minister, who has built a career in part by demonizing gays and lesbians as immoral, perverse and destructive. So when he publicly reversed some of his most extreme stances this week, his words made headlines. Before a packed sanctuary, the Rev. Falwell called on evangelical Christians to show love and toleration for gays and lesbians and to speak out against anti-gay hate crimes. The sermon capped what was billed as a weekend of reconciliation between Falwell and gay Christians, including a meeting for evangelicals and gays to get to know one another. Matthew Shepard must have been looking on.

Shepard was the gay college student from the University of Wyoming who was murdered a year ago this month in Laramie. After leaving a bar together, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson drove Shepard to a deserted field, beat him savagely, tied him to a wooden fence and left him exposed overnight. A cyclist who found the bloody body the next day mistook it for a scarecrow.

Falwell acknowledged that the Shepard murder was an important spur to last weekend's reconciliation. The stated purpose of the meeting was to tone down rhetoric that may lead to hate crimes against either gays or Christians. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that Falwell told gay and lesbian delegates, "I will be vigilant in assuring that we do not make statements that can be construed as sanctioning hate or antagonism against homosexuals." Visitors said Falwell apologized for making hateful diatribes against gay people, and called on parents to love their children regardless of their sexual orientation.

The cornerstone of the weekend was a face-to-face conversation between 200 Falwell supporters and 200 gays and lesbians who came to Lynchburg from around the country. The Rev. Mel White, a longtime friend of Falwell's who broke with the religious right when he came out of the closet in 1993, pressed for the personal meeting as a chance to break down barriers of misunderstanding and stereotypes. Falwell exulted at the progress: "Four hundred people who disagree met for 90 minutes without any shouting," he told the group, according to several publications. "The building didn't collapse. They discovered it was okay and even legal to meet and meet again."

It was progress, certainly, but it would still be a stretch to call the founder of the Moral Majority a friend of the gay community. Falwell made it clear that he still opposes homosexuality, and over the years he has devoted far more energy to saving gays from their supposed sin than to saving them from physical assaults. A typical sampling of Falwell's rhetoric is the July edition of his National Liberty Journal, in which he wrote that we cannot "blame" genetics for "adultery, homosexuality, dishonesty and other character flaws." Most famously, Falwell urged parents to avoid the British children's program "Teletubbies" because one character, Tinky-Winky, is purple and has an inverted triangle on his head which made him a subversive "gay role model."

A cynic might suppose that Falwell's newfound emphasis on Christian love for gays stems from a need to appear moderate in moderate times. Faced with George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism," the religious right is on the defensive; its preoccupation with the sin of gayness seems increasingly extreme to ordinary people. This too is Matthew Shepard's legacy: in death, he served as vivid proof of the suffering that scars gay life in America. In this new climate, any evangelical might do well to lie low and preach tolerance. One good sign for Falwell: the Rev. Fred Phelps, the viciously homophobic Kansas preacher who picketed Shepard's funeral, stood outside the Lynchburg meeting with a small band carrying signs that read, "Jerry and a Fairy Equal Sin." Phelps' protest of Falwell's meeting only improves his new-found image as a centrist. With such enemies, who needs friends?

But criticizing is easy: admitting you've been wrong, as Falwell did, takes guts. Mild and incomplete as his words were, they took real courage--many evangelicals, even more inflexible, howled that Falwell was letting them down. More importantly, those words will have real force. For the religious right, Falwell is an elder statesman: he is a famous Christian radio personality, the chancellor of Liberty University and one of the most powerful ministers in the country. As one gay-rights advocate told the Lynchburg News and Advance, "If Jerry Falwell says it, parents will think it's the right thing to do."

Back in Laramie, arguments began in Aaron McKinney's murder trial this week. McKinney's lawyers chose the familiar "homosexual panic" defense, portraying Shepard as a sexual predator who licked McKinney's ear and touched his genitals. Enraged and frightened, his lawyers said, McKinney responded with brutal violence, beating the slender college student over and over with the butt of a gun. In at a summit in Lynchburg, Jerry Falwell vowed to help keep such violence from ever occurring again. For Matthew Shepard, the minister's promise comes too late. But that promise--contradictory, halting, uncertain, well-intentioned and human--may someday help make life less terrifying for gays and lesbians in this vast country.

Adam A. Sofen '01, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House.