Jerry Falwell Jr.’s career, both at Liberty University and as a figurehead of the evangelical community, is over.
After years of mounting stunts and scandals, Falwell’s personal life exploded into the national limelight. At first, he tried to get ahead of the story, with the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard breaking his eleventh-hour statement claiming that his wife Becki had engaged in “an inappropriate personal relationship with” a pool assistant they had met nearly a decade ago, “something in which I was not involved.” Then, however, came the real allegation — that one of the most sanctimonious moral scolds in the nation had recruited a 20-year-old pool boy to have sex with Becki while Falwell watched. Some people are just into that.
If you took this pitch to a porn director, he would shun it as too trite even for the internet’s lowest form of entertainment. And it’s true. Everyone calling Falwell a hypocritical hoaxer is also right. But the true tragedy of this scenario isn’t just the collateral damage among Liberty’s truly faithful, besmirched by Falwell’s failures. It’s the simple fact that Falwell should have been out before reports of his cuckolding and “throuple” were made public.
As a tax-exempt institution, Liberty is legally forbidden from making formal political endorsements, something Falwell jeopardized when he decided to sell out Ted Cruz, a faithful and practicing evangelical who would have materially advanced religious liberty as president, to back the thrice-married adulterer who now occupies the Oval Office. And now, there is the question of why precisely Falwell pulled the trigger for President Trump. Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher has an idea:
In a sane society, personal circles should care about moral behavior, and public communities ought to care about consensual behavior. Falwell’s followers followed neither tenet here. While Falwell degraded Liberty’s reputation to help Trump, the powers that be in his community stood by. And now that his personal preferences — none that involved coercion, manipulation, or any other sort of abuse of power — have apparently sprung to national news, the non-evangelical public has handed down its verdict. And why? Simply because the draconian and often overbearing moral policing of Liberty’s community would dictate that what Falwell did was wrong.
Falwell should have faced the thrust of his own community to leave Liberty long ago. Let this unnecessary personal humiliation of his be a lesson to those who forget the importance of confronting their own and holding them accountable.
