Falwell the Lesser

On a regular basis, Jerry Falwell Jr. dispenses his evangelical wisdom to his tens of thousands of Twitter followers, and provides an invaluable guide to the moral and political shapeshifting among evangelical leaders as they struggle to rationalize their support for Trumpism.

Even in an era of marked by exquisite self-humiliations, Falwell has distinguished himself. Along with his wife, Falwell Jr. famously posed for a thumbs-up picture with Donald Trump in front of a wall of Trump memorabilia—including a cover of Playboy magazine featuring a younger Trump with a provocatively posed model.

(At the time the Falwell picture was taken, the model on the magazine cover was “in prison for participating in a scheme to transport cocaine from Los Angeles to Sydney—by hiding the drug in airplane toilets.”)

The irony of the moment did not pass unremarked. “How perfect,” one blogger remarked. “The Evangelical community has whored itself out to Trump in exchange for the promise of power, so why not? Look how perfectly framed that is!! Almost as if it was done on purpose. Diabolical!!” Falwell responded to the online mockery by tweeting out a comparison of himself . . . to Jesus Christ (which he later deleted):

Falwell the Lesser likes these kinds of self-justifying comparisons. After the release of the Access Hollywood video, in which the future president bragged about his sexual predations, Falwell rushed forward with the “King David Defense” of the playboy billionaire.

“God called King David a man after God’s own heart even though he was an adulterer and a murderer,” Falwell wrote. “You have to choose the leader that would make the best king or president and not necessarily someone who would be a good pastor.” (Falwell’s use of “adulterer and a murderer,” was interesting, as was the phrase “the best king or president,” but more about that in a moment.)

Along with other evangelicals, Falwell aggressively severed the cord between personal character and political leadership. “It means sometimes we have to choose a person who has the qualities to lead and who can protect our country and bring us back to economic vitality,” he wrote, “and it might not be the person we call when we need somebody to give us spiritual counsel. “

Not all evangelicals brought Falwell’s analogy. “That is flat out mocking God,” wrote Erick Erickson. God had, in fact, punished David for his sins and David had to cry out to God for forgiveness. Trump, on the other hand, has said that he felt no need to repent or seek forgiveness.

But this has not discouraged spiritual leaders like Falwell from continuing to shift the moral goalposts to rationalize, among other things, the president’s occasional payoffs to porn stars. Last week Falwell expanded upon his insights into the historical context of Trump’s presidential leadership.

Jonah Goldberg responded the next day:

Indeed, Falwell’s tweet was a remarkably compact artifact of historical ignorance mixed with moral vacuity. The Founders fought the Revolutionary War for many reasons, but having a president who “acts like one of us” was not one of them. The Founders—men like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—had no intention of replacing King George with a playground bully or the loud-mouth in the tavern. As George Washington’s presidency made clear, eliminating the monarchy did not mean eliminating all traces of dignity, character, self-restraint, or civility. “So dignified his deportment,” Gouverneur Morris said of Washington after his death, “no man could approach him but with respect.”

Falwell’s tortured attempt to distinguish royalty from presidential behavior is also ironic given his own insistence that we compare Trump’s well-documented immorality with… wait for it… King David, who was, after all, a king.

But leaving Falwell’s historical illiteracy aside for a moment, the gravamen of his tweet is an extraordinary statement about what he thinks of average Americans. Trump, he writes, “acts like one of us.”

Curious minds want to know: Which ones of us? Of course, all men are sinners. But Falwell seems to suggest that we are all chronic liars, bullies, narcissists, and philanderers who revel in our ignorance—and that Trump simply reflects who we are as a people.

In Falwell’s etiolated moral universe, we no longer hold leaders to higher moral or ethical standards. Character is irrelevant. We don’t want someone better than us; we want someone just like us, and we are a pretty sordid lot.

Since it is apparently too much to ask the Liberty University president to read any actual American history, perhaps his library has some books by C.S. Lewis, who recognized the underlying message in Falwell’s bleat. In his Screwtape Letters, Lewis has a senior devil named Screwtape explain the advantages of encouraging people to believe in a false moral equality in which they are as good as their “betters.” He expands on the theme in his essay, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.”

“The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid resounding lie,” Screwtape says. “I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist-measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself.” Speaking through Screwtape, Lewis addressed the real nature of Falwell’s stunted attempts at moral egalitarianism.