{"id":1136,"date":"2007-05-15T16:00:24","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T20:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=1136"},"modified":"2007-05-15T16:00:24","modified_gmt":"2007-05-15T20:00:24","slug":"on-jerry-falwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=1136","title":{"rendered":"On Jerry Falwell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jerry Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church and founder of Liberty University, passed away this morning<\/a>. He was seventy-three.<\/p>\n

I met Falwell a few times over the years. Living in Lynchburg, his home town, will do that. Falwell and I would never have seen eye-to-eye on politics–I’m progressive, he was a conservative–nor religion–he was a Christian, and I am anything but<\/i>–but I can’t argue with the humanity in the man. He prayed for my father when he had his heart attack in 1996.<\/p>\n

I’ve often thought that the Falwell persona seen on television–the belligerent, inflexible bigot and xenophobe–was very much an act, that privately Falwell was a more temperate person than his public self allowed. Falwell never scared me the way Pat Robertson or Franklin Graham scare me.<\/p>\n

I have an autographed copy of his autobiography. I’ve never read it. To this day I’m not even sure why I bought it. Maybe it just seemed like a cool thing to acquire at the time.<\/p>\n

I visited Lynchburg about a month ago. Driving east on 460 you can see a giant mosaic carved into the side of a mountain–the logo of Liberty University. “It’s supposed to be big enough to read from space,” my brother said. Now I won’t be able to have a conversation that begins, “So, what’s Jerry done now<\/i>…?”<\/p>\n

Rest in peace, Jerry Falwell. Lynchburg will be a different place without you, that’s for sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jerry Falwell, pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church and founder of Liberty University, passed away this morning. He was seventy-three. I met Falwell a few times over the years. Living in Lynchburg, his home town, will do that. Falwell and I would never have seen eye-to-eye on politics–I’m progressive, he was a conservative–nor religion–he wasContinue reading “On Jerry Falwell”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[193],"class_list":["post-1136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-obituary","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}