“God’s Right Hand”: a new biography of Jerry Falwell

by Michael Peppard

I just finished reading Michael Sean Winters’s new biography of Jerry Falwell, God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right (HarperOne, 2012). Being familiar with his previous work (and the author himself), I must say that he did a fantastic job of writing with a different voice. If I had not known who the author was, I would have had no idea of his political leanings. Kudos to Winters: he has written a balanced biography of a controversial figure.

This is not to say that Winters is not critical in his approach. With a keen eye for political rhetoric, he puts Falwell’s most famous characteristics (and antics) under the microscope and sorts out the core principles from the frequent bloviating. There are myriad facts and anecdotes about Falwell’s rise to power for those interested in tracking it, but Winters also offers some long-view analyses worth considering and testing against other evidence from the Religious Right.
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