It’s hard to write a short critique of a news feature that is 8,600 words long and is built on waves of on-the-record sources, documents and off-the-record information from insiders whose roles in the story are explained, in detail, without using their names.
Thus, there is no way for me to address the many issues covered in the Politico investigation of former Liberty University leader Jerry Falwell, Jr., that ran with this headline: “They All Got Careless’ — How Falwell Kept His Grip on Liberty Amid Sexual ‘Games,’ Self-Dealing.” The second layer of that headline offered more details: “The deposed university president secured backing by ousting critics and hiring the family members and businesses of loyalists.”
This is, in many ways, three stories in one — sex, money and family history. No one will be surprised that secular journalists focused, as much as possible, on sex and money. Thus, there are debates here about the sexual escapades of Falwell and his wife Becky, some of which have been confirmed by Falwell himself and most of which have been denied.
I am sure that, on the Liberty campus and in Lynchburg, Va., many people close to the university and Thomas Road Baptist Church are playing pin-the-quote, trying to figure out who said what. In one summary statement, the Politico team simply says:
A POLITICO investigation, including interviews with dozens of Liberty officials from Falwell’s time as president, found a university community so committed to the Falwell legacy that even trustees considered it unthinkable to exert power over the son and namesake of the university’s revered founder. Plus, the university employed at least 20 relatives of stakeholders — defined as senior administrators and the 32-member Board of Trustees, according to federal tax disclosures — which gave many leaders an incentive to stay on Falwell’s good side.
In terms of the sexual scandal, that leads to numerous passages like this one:
… (M)ultiple former university officials and Falwell associates told POLITICO that Jerry frequently shocked them with risqué comments and, in at least two cases, showed off a photo of himself at the beach with his arms around two topless women. (The Falwells said the story about the photo was “completely false.”) His alleged comments included making open references to women’s appearances, discussing oral sex and offering a gratuitous assessment of his own penis size during his 13-year tenure as head of the evangelical university that his father founded, where sex is forbidden outside of marriage.
Hiding in these references is that drama that I found most interesting and poignant — the story of a minister and his increasingly secular son.
It’s clear — with lots of names on the record — that battles at Liberty have frequently pitted the evangelical community of leaders that surrounded the Rev. Jerry Falwell against the financial and political insiders who manned the campus barricades during the era of Jerry Falwell, Jr. The bottom line: Falwell the younger was and is a lawyer and real-estate professional who — early on — stressed that he never saw himself as as campus spiritual leader. Hold that thought, because this is the part of the story on which I would like to focus.
Of course, now that Falwell has filed a lawsuit against Liberty (click here for .pdf of Jerry Falwell, Jr. vs. Liberty University), journalists and news consumers who want to glory in the gory details can wait to see if the Falwell’s end up on a witness stand testifying under oath, along with their former associate Giancarlo “pool boy” Granda. I’ll be stunned if the legal teams on either side allow this drama to reach that stage.
As I said, the sex scandal is one of the key stories here, along with the numbingly detailed descriptions of the insider financial arrangements and job structures at the heart of the university’s growth and finances. Were any of these arrangements illegal, or were they simply sleazy or, to put this in theological terms, the worst kind of stewardship of the gifts of faithful donors and parents of Liberty students?
But as someone who followed the work of Jerry Falwell, Sr., closely in the 1980s, here is the moment that I think religion-beat specialists should continue to probe — if there are journalists who are interested in the lessons that sincere evangelicals need to learn from this complex and tragic story.
You see, it’s easy to connect the work of the Moral Majority of the father with the flashy Trumpaloosa celebrated by the son.
The key word there is “moral.” It’s not clear that the culture of the father led logically into the campus culture of the other. This Politico epic does make it more than clear, with strong sourcing, that it was the reality of Trump — the man — that so distressed many of the most loyal disciples of Jerry Falwell, Sr.
So what happened? Readers will want to start here:
The elder Falwell, who was born in 1933, diverged from the fire-and-brimstone sermons popular among evangelists, instead bringing a sense of calm and neighborliness to his sermons, which he marketed aggressively. He started Thomas Road Baptist Church in an old bottling factory in Lynchburg, Va., when he was 22. Within 15 years, he had built a many-tentacled ministry with thousands of members, a K-12 private school, Bible studies, and television and radio broadcasts that were syndicated across the country.
He was also a prodigious fundraiser, drawing in money from parishioners and television viewers willing to tithe and donate for the church’s range of offerings. And he expanded aggressively, often borrowing large amounts of money to rapidly build out his ministries.
In 1971, when Jerry Jr. was nine, Rev. Falwell decided to start a university. The 38-year-old preacher had himself attended an unaccredited Bible college, but he partnered with Elmer Towns, a Christian leader and academic, on an ambitious vision: building a nationally famous institution for evangelical Christians on a par with what the University of Notre Dame represented to Catholics and Brigham Young University for Mormons.
This was an almost absurd ambition, of course. It’s possible to argue that attempting to fund academic structures of this size automatically led to trouble and temptations (especially when you add ambitions to become a football powerhouse).
However, if you read this story closely, and also dig into other accounts of Jerry Falwell’s life, it doesn’t appear that anything changed, in terms of the father’s essential personality and approach to life and ministry. He wanted to be successful. He wanted political clout after being stunned by Roe vs. Wade. But I have, through the years, talked with critics who knew this man who stressed that he was a good man and a kind man. His ambitions grew, but he didn’t change.
But the father did depend on the skills of Jerry Falwell, Jr., when it came to helping Liberty climb out its ongoing financial crisis. Thus, that brings us to this:
On May 15, 2007, Rev. Falwell woke up early, ate breakfast with Godwin, and went to his office, which was housed in a 1923 home originally built for Carter Glass, co-founder of the Federal Reserve. At around 10:45 that morning, Falwell was found unconscious on his office floor.
The reverend’s death, from heart issues at age 73, was unexpected. But he had long prepared for the moment. His elder son, Jerry Jr., would take over Liberty University, while younger son Jonathan, who had followed his father into the ministry, would assume the pulpit of Thomas Road Baptist Church.
Despite having been earmarked for the role, Jerry Jr. struggled to play the part of a university president. He lacked any sort of formality. He was stilted and awkward in front of a crowd.
To be blunt, the son knew little nothing about Christian higher education and he seemed to know the language of Christian ministry — he possessed a set of code words — but there was immediately evidence that this was a man who wasn’t walking the talk.
Thus, what did Jerry Falwell, Sr., know and when did he know it — IF he knew any details about the tensions in the life of junior? What did the associates of the father know about the son and when did they know it?
I’ll end with one more crucial passage. Read this carefully:
A non-academic, [Jerry Falwell, Jr.] he maintained a hands-off approach to faculty and staff, rarely appearing at meetings or dropping into buildings to hold court like his father often did. He usually moved throughout the day with only one other person, Becki, who worked out of a room next to his in the campus administrative building.
There were signs from the start that these Falwells — unlike the abstentious Jerry Sr. and Macel — weren’t entirely at home in the evangelical world. On occasions, two faculty members told POLITICO, they observed Falwell showing up to campus smelling like alcohol or slurring his words, and believed the pressure associated with being a figurehead leader had taken a toll on him.
In private, Falwell clashed with allies of his father. …
This leads to the question that I raised in an earlier “On Religion” column about the fall of Falwell Jr. — “Philosophy, politics and money: What comes next for Liberty University?” Here is one crucial passage:
… Falwell Jr. developed a swashbuckling style that caused heat, especially when linked to race, guns, jets, politics, yachts and his specialty — real estate. Controversies about his de facto partnership with President Donald Trump thrilled many Liberty donors, alumni, parents and students, while deeply troubling others.
Many Christian college presidents are super-pastors who provide ties that bind to denominations, churches and networks of believers. Falwell Jr. — a lawyer — turned into a dynamic entrepreneur who courted powerful conservative politicos.
What happens now? Personally, I think journalists need to keep their eyes on any public gestures by the Rev. Jonathan Falwell and inquire about what he is doing behind the scenes. What would have happened if his father had chosen this pastor as the evangelical leader of an evangelical university?
Will the presidential search committee, which is said to be forming right now, focus on money and ambition or regaining the culture that was at the heart of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s work?
Stay tuned. For several years now, I have predicted that some of this drama will — sooner or later, in one form or another — end up on a cable-television network founded by Donald Trump.