When reading That. Vanity. Fair. Article, it will help to focus on the obvious answer to the big question that will immediately pop into your head (especially if you happen to be a journalist).
The question: Why did Jerry Falwell, Jr., choose to talk to a magazine with a solid footprint on the American cultural and journalistic left?
The answer: Falwell is a lawyer who, at the moment, has a number of pressing legal issues in his life. To put this in D.C. Beltway lingo, he appears to be “hanging a lantern” on his problems. Here is one online definition of that term:
"Hang a lantern on your problem” was entered into the political lexicon in the 1980s by Chris Matthews, a former chief of staff to Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill. Matthews explained “hang a lantern on your problem” to the New York (NY) Times in 1987: “The first step is, admit you have a problem; that gives you credibility. The second step is to use that credibility to redefine your problem, or use the problem for your own purposes.”
As I explained during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), it is interesting to read the Vanity Fair piece and, with a mental highlighter pen (a real one if you get the analog magazine), mark the questions that Falwell chooses to answer and the ones that he declines to answer. Then, repeat the process with the questions that are answered and rejected by other key voices — think Giancarlo “pool boy” Granda and legal representatives for Liberty University.
This process will yield insights into two of the most obvious plot lines in this soap-opera mess, as in its steamy Miami-angle sex scandal and the ugly legal wars between Jerry Falwell, Jr., and the shamed leaders of Liberty University.
Once you’ve done that, you’re read to dig into the deeper elements of this story, which are clearly visible in the long, long, long second deck of it’s double-headline:
INSIDE JERRY FALWELL JR.’S UNLIKELY RISE AND PRECIPITOUS FALL AT LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
Jerry Falwell Jr. was the Trump-anointing dark prince of the Christian right. Then a sex scandal rocked his marriage and ended his lucrative stewardship of the evangelical education empire founded by his father. In a series of exclusive interviews, Falwell — accompanied by his wife, Becki — describes the events that led to his ouster, their fallout, and why he’s finally ready to admit he never had much use for his father’s church anyway.
If you had followed Jerry Jr. closely, you probably weren’t all that surprised to find out that he was the ultimate bad-boy preacher’s kid. This prepares you for the article’s big reveal — which is that Jerry Falwell Jr., is trying to play the wink-wink “exvangelical” card that has been effective in the media careers of so many other people linked to evangelical Protestant empires.
This brings us to Donald Trump. Once you have played that ironic card, it is perfectly logical to understand why Jerry Falwell, Jr., turned his back on the starchy, true-evangelical GOP candidate — Sen. Ted Cruz — who was the choice of most (repeat, “most”) white evangelicals who were associated with Liberty University heading into the 2016 White House race.
The hidden (sort of) Falwell, Jr., was a shoot from the lip, hard drinking, laugh at pious dweebs, wanna-be real estate tycoon who was handed his powerful father’s empire. Trump must have seemed like a long-lost brother and soulmate. Their embrace was totally logical.
Let’s look at two long passages in this story. In this one, spot the key name in the formation of Falwell Jr.’s political worldview:
Falwell and Jerry worked well together because Jerry happily let his father be the frontman. Around campus, people called them Big Jerry and Little Jerry (Falwell called his son J.J.). “Jerry was almost a recluse,” a former colleague said. “He would come in, usually through a side door, and go into his office and shut the door.”
Falwell often invited his son to join him and his chief of staff, Mark DeMoss, for lunch at the Holiday Inn near campus. Jerry rarely went. Instead, he often ate alone in a Wendy’s parking lot, listening to Rush Limbaugh in his car. Talk radio became Jerry’s political religion. “Rush is the reason I became a conservative,” Jerry told me. He keeps a framed photo of his first meeting with the late broadcaster, at the 2018 White House Christmas party, in his living room. “That was the most starstruck Jerry had ever been,” Becki said.
There were some white-knuckle moments, but by the mid-1990s, Liberty’s finances stabilized. “God sent him to me just in time,” Falwell wrote of his son’s efforts in his autobiography. “He is more responsible, humanly speaking, for the miraculous financial survival of this ministry than any other single person.”
Was anyone surprised that Rush Limbaugh became a Trump evangelist? Limbaugh was the perfect bridge between the real “JJ” and The Donald.
So what does Falwell Jr. believe? The article makes it clear that he is a do-it-yourself “evangelical” who isn’t interested in all of those picky doctrines that motivate true believers.
Here is one more crucial passage. Read it carefully:
Jerry Falwell Sr. founded Liberty in 1971 with the goal of creating a Notre Dame for fundamentalists. “We’re turning out moral revolutionaries,” he once told The New York Times. But the school was still a largely unfinished canvas when Jerry enrolled in the fall of 1980. Not surprisingly, he chafed under the draconian rules, which at the time even banned R-rated movies. “During my freshman year, my buddy and I went to a convenience store and I drank a few beers. I thought, I’m the wild one,” Jerry recalled, laughing. …
Jerry was at a spiritual crossroads. He didn’t want to be a fundamentalist, but he wasn’t an atheist either. Jerry said he majored in religious studies at Liberty so he could figure out what he really believed. It was during a course on apologetics — the study of defending Christianity to nonbelievers — that Jerry said he was persuaded it was “rational” to believe Jesus was literally the son of God and the miracles of the Bible happened. “I became a true Christian in college,” Jerry told me.
Newly confident in his faith, Jerry decided believing in Christ didn’t mean he had to follow the evangelical rules. After all, Jesus was a rule breaker too. “Organized religion says you have to earn your way to heaven. What Jesus said was, ‘You just have to believe,’ ” he said. For graduate school, Jerry was determined to escape the fundamentalist fishbowl of Lynchburg. In the fall of 1984, he entered the University of Virginia Law School, 70 miles north in Charlottesville. It was Jerry’s first time living away from home, and he could freely lead an outwardly secular life: He never bothered to join a church.
That’s that.
The way I see it, “JJ” has played the cards that he believes he needed to play to land some kind of settlement with the embarrassed Liberty University trustees and then move on. Does he have hopes for some kind of final act, other than — it would appear — saving his marriage and his family? Stay tuned. Maybe he’ll just stick to real estate.
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FIRST IMAGE: The famous Twitter image of Jerry Falwell, Jr., Becki Falwell and Donald Trump, with photobomb from Playboy cover.