Bernie Sanders Is Spending Rosh Hashanah at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University

In the autumn of 1983, Senator Ted Kennedy stood at a podium in Lynchburg, Virginia, in clear, square glasses, and spoke to 4,000 students at Liberty University. Jerry Falwell, the televangelist and reverend who in 1971 founded the school as Lynchburg Baptist College, was seated to his left. Kennedy, Falwell’s wife Macel later wrote, joked that he would watch the Old Time Gospel Hour if Falwell agreed to extend the students’ curfew by an hour that night. He underlined the incongruity of the event, this speaker and this setting. “A number of people in Washington were surprised that I was invited to speak here—and even more surprised when I accepted the invitation,” said the so-called Lion of the Senate, in the unmistakable mid-Atlantic timber of the Kennedy clan. “They seem to think that it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a Kennedy to come to the campus of Liberty Baptist College.” And then, in exchange for Falwell’s invitation, Kennedy issued an invitation of his own. “On Jan. 20, 1985,” he said, “I hope Dr. Falwell will say a prayer at the inauguration of the next Democratic president of the United States. You might not appreciate the president, but the Democrats certainly would appreciate the prayer.”

No Democrat was elected to the presidency that autumn. Rather, Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term, with help from Falwell’s Moral Majority. But the families—the famous Catholic Kennedys, the famous Baptist Falwells—did find at least one time pray together. When Ted Kennedy’s mother, Rose, was nearly 100 years old and ailing, the senator asked Falwell to visit and pray with her, and the pastor gladly obliged. When Kennedy died in 2009, two years after Falwell did, Jerry Falwell, Jr., wrote an appreciation of the friendship between the two (he also noted that Kennedy had written him a letter of recommendation to law school). “Both of these men,” Falwell, Jr. said, “understood that they could disagree without being disagreeable. They were both lightning rods for their respective causes, but they treated each other with civility and respect.”