This is an opinion column.
Sometimes there’s no joy in being proven right. Especially when the thing you’ve been proven right about has caused a great deal of unnecessary harm.
That’s how I felt when I read the lengthy piece in Vanity Fair about Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife, Becki. The Falwells sat down with the magazine to give their side of the story after Jerry’s ouster as president of Liberty University, the massive Christian institution founded by his pastor/evangelist father.
A single quote from Falwell best sums up the depressing article:
“Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I was not my dad.”
Mission accomplished.
I first pointed out the inconsistencies between Falwell’s public behavior and LU’s statement of faith--not to mention the understanding of scripture held by most theologically conservative Christians--in January 2019. It was mind-boggling to me that a board of trustees dominated by ordained pastors charged with protecting the biblical mission and vision of the university couldn’t see that their president didn’t share those beliefs. Liberty is known for demanding adherence to high biblical standards in the lives of their students. But for their president, it seemed that anything went.
There’s no explaining the lack of action by the LU board, except to assume they decided that excellent business acumen made up for lack of biblical faithfulness and discipline. Falwell had grown enrollment beyond their wildest dreams and filled the endowment coffers to the brim.
Falwell made it clear over and over that he didn’t care much for the sensibilities of biblical Christianity in public life. I wrote about it again in August 2020, pointing out that not only were these trustees failing spectacularly as stewards of the school and the public witness of our faith, but they were also failing the Falwells.
It took a lot to shame the Liberty trustees, but Becki Falwell’s affair with a much younger Miami man with whom the couple co-owned an LGBTQ+ friendly hostel finally moved the needle. Giancarlo Granda once claimed to have naked photos of the First Lady of Liberty that had required the services of Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen to eradicate. In retrospect, that detail brings Falwell’s early and unqualified support of Trump into sharper focus.
Either way, now that he’s “free” from Liberty (his words), Falwell is clear that he thinks organized religion is a great evil and that one can be a Christian while rejecting the church. This is wholly incompatible with a biblical understanding of the church, Christ’s love for the church, and its role in the Kingdom of God.
It’s also sad and chilling that Falwell has reduced Christianity down to the liberal “just believe” construct while rejecting any use for obedience to the commands of scripture. We believe that salvation comes by faith alone through grace alone, to be sure. But any evangelical can explain to you that those who love Christ will honor him by obeying his commands.
It’s all just a mess. Jerry Falwell, Jr. says he played a role for many years because it was what the job--which came with excellent compensation and power--required. But like many before him, he found the play-acting of the Christian life too taxing over time and lost the will to keep up the skit.
His story is not all that unusual. People who grow up in cultural Christianity often spend their lives keeping up a similar ruse because it’s what their community expects. But the difference between most of them and Falwell is that they are not entrusted with a tremendous Christian platform, complete with the potential to bring credibility to our faith or to destroy it.
It was the responsibility of the Liberty University board to keep their highly-visible school in the hands of a leader with the spiritual maturity and discipline that such a job demands. It was the job of the many pastors on that board to recognize a deeply confused man in their midst and minister to him after removing him from a job for which he was never equipped.
We don’t know if Falwell would have been receptive to the correction and the teaching. But it should haunt us all that a man hostile to organized religion can run a Christian institution and never have his governing board admit the error and correct it until forced to by the national press and a Miami pool boy.
Every last person on the LU board of trustees who governed during the tenure of Jerry Falwell, Jr. should resign. Today.
Dana Hall McCain writes about faith, culture, and politics for AL.com. Follow her on Twitter @dhmccain for more thoughts on these topics and frequent Auburn Basketball Bandwagon fan posting.