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Liberty Liberated
Jerry Falwell, president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the largest Evangelical school in the country, has taken an indefinite leave of absence. Falwell’s most recent trouble came after he posted a bizarre picture with a young woman on a family vacation and quickly deleted it. In the time it was up, the photo went viral, and within hours, many were calling for his resignation. The balance tipped when North Carolina Representative Mark Walker, tweeted, “Jerry Falwell Jr’s ongoing behavior is appalling. As a Music Faculty Advisory Board Member and former instructor @LibertyU, I’m convinced Falwell should step down.”
Falwell explained that the photo came from a “Trailor Park Boys” costume party. Later he told a Lynchburg radio station, “Yeah, it was weird. She’s pregnant. She couldn’t get her pants zipped and I was like trying to like … I had on a pair of jeans I haven’t worn in a long time and couldn’t get zipped either. So, I just put my belly out like hers. She’s my wife’s assistant, she’s a sweetheart. I should have never put it up and embarrassed her. I’ve apologized to everybody. I promised my kids I will try to be a good boy from here on out.”
In addition to the scandal of sharing a picture with his pants unzipped, Falwell also appeared to be holding an alcoholic beverage, which he said was “black water,” and sounded inebriated when he called into the radio station the next day.
While it’s possible this was an honest mistake, albeit one that’s almost inconceivably stupid for a fundamentalist Christian college president, it also highlights a type that Falwell embodies. The first line of the New York Times’ coverage is revealing, “Jerry Falwell Jr., one of President Trump’s most prominent and controversial evangelical supporters...” Of course, the NYT would like to link any negative coverage they can to Trump, but Falwell hasn’t exactly made that difficult. There are a lot of people who don’t like Falwell because of his support for Trump, but this misses the point entirely. Falwell has not just been one of the outspoken supporters of the President, he has embodied the Trump M.O., your personal conduct doesn’t matter if you get results.
In 12 years at Liberty, Falwell has brought the school out of debt, built a $2 billion endowment, grown the online program by tens of thousands of students, and established Liberty as one of the most important Christian schools in the world. However, he’s also gained a reputation for having double standards when it comes to the behavior he demands of the students and the behavior he exhibits in his own life. Liberty is known for having extremely strict student guidelines; many of which Falwell violated in his behavior last week. In his vision to become the Notre Dame of Evangelicalism, he may have also inherited their reputation for compromising on their beliefs to attain standards of academic and athletic excellence. What’s the use in building a Christian University if you don’t have a Christian witness?
David French blasted Falwell for failing to come close to the standards imposed on Liberty undergraduates, “The president lived life with greater freedom than his students or his faculty. The message sent was distinctly unbiblical—that some Christian leaders can discard integrity provided their other qualifications, from family name to fund-raising prowess, provided sufficient additional benefit.” This isn’t the first time a situation like this has occurred. In a feature piece last year for Politico Magazine, Brandon Ambrosino chronicles Falwell’s troubled tenure at the helm of Liberty during the Trump years. During Michael Cohen’s trial, it came out that he may have helped Falwell bury leaked explicit pictures. Falwell’s business dealings have come under scrutiny because of real estate investments and using the school’s non-profit status for personal and political gain.
Emma Green details Falwell’s history of questionable behavior and subsequent apologies and coverups. What’s most striking is that In many of these cases, Falwell has pointed out that he’s not a pastor and he’s not a spiritual leader; he’s just the head of the nation’s biggest Christian university. This refusal to take responsibility, not just as a Christian man, but as a Christian leader, is the heart of the problem with Jerry Falwell Jr.
The problem is not that Falwell has been one of the president’s most important evangelical backers. College presidents should be able to advocate for whoever they want, assuming they take into consideration the tone that might set for their students. The problem is not that he was drinking, or even that he was dressed inappropriately with a young woman. The problem is that Jerry Falwell Jr. doesn’t think he needs to live what he says he believes. Politics is a distraction in this case. Falwell leads a school whose mission is to “train champions for Christ,” but Falwell shows very little indication that he believes this message at all. It’s hard for an institution to train champions for Christ when the president is a champion of hypocrisy.
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Study Philippians
When Paul wrote the letter to the Philippians, he saw an opportunity for the Gospel in a difficult time. In this series, Terry Feix walks through the unique opportunity we have to see our world changed by the Gospel during these unprecedented times.
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President Donald Trump, 2020 | Photo: The White House, Gage Skidmore
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The President issued three presidential memoranda and one executive order continuing additional unemployment payments, deferring the payroll tax, pausing evictions, and deferring student loans for the rest of the year.
The orders reinstate $400 per week of additional unemployment, down from $600 previously. Republicans and business owners have questioned the efficacy of paying people more not to work than to work. Dems have argued that regular unemployment is not enough to keep people afloat during the economic turmoil of the pandemic. This measure charts a middle road through the negotiations. The payroll tax cut was implemented by President Obama and has been a non-negotiable for Trump. Both of the other measures, concerning student loans and evictions, continue what Congress mandated in the first rounds of relief.
Maybe predictably, these measures are being challenged by both sides. While Mnuchin defended the President’s actions, Republicans have cited constitutional concerns about taking up Obama’s “pen and phone” tactics. Pelosi cried overreach, saying the President usurped Congress’ spending authority. The President responded that the American people cannot wait for Congress to play politics with relief bills. Pelosi and Schumer have refused to budge on their almost $4 trillion dollar package, which includes some of the measures the President enacted.
Republicans have also sited that President Obama used executive orders to pay for healthcare and to provide a path to citizenship for the Dreamers. The question is, what does Trump’s use of this same power do for the future? Sen. Ben Sasse called the president’s use of executive orders, “unconstitutional slop.” Yuval Levin and Adam White called the measures “precarious and weak” with regard to their effect and a violation of the Constitution with regard to their method. The strongest GOP criticism is that this was wrong when Obama did it and it’s wrong now. Many Dems want to spend even more money, but don’t want the President to get to choose the terms.
Joe Biden is expected to announce his VP this week. The choice has narrowed to two, Sen. Kamala Harris and former National Security Advisor and Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice. There are still other candidates, but the focus has shifted to these two.
On another front, Biden is going to have to deal with his racist gaffs. Biden made several unfortunate slips this week during interviews, almost all of them dealing with race. When asked if he had taken a cognitive assessment, he asked a black journalist if he was a “junkie.” He then stumbled through saying he was looking forward to demonstrating his mental fitness against Trump in the debates. He said that unlike the African American community, the Latino community is very diverse. He later backtracked.
Time is running out for Biden’s basement campaign. The President has taken two tough interviews in the last month - with Chris Wallace and Jonathan Swan - and in both cases, the interviewers said they have reached out to the Biden campaign for an interview and have been snubbed or denied. Sooner or later, Biden will have to sit for a live interview, and that will reveal the real state of his mental faculties. Expect the Biden campaign to get the former VP some reps in before the debates, but they’re currently looking at a give and take, more interviews means more statements to walk back, fewer interviews means more skepticism about Biden’s mental fitness.
New York public schools can choose to open for the fall semester. Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that schools can and should open for the class in person. Chuck Schumer said that failure to open schools would significantly hurt the economy, a point many Republicans have been making over the last few months. New York City is the largest school district in the country with almost a million students, followed by Los Angeles which will be online only, Chicago who will be online only, Miami-Dade which will be online only through Oct. 5, and Clark County in Las Vegas, which will open for a 2-day hybrid schedule.
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Best Reads:
“Should Christians Hope in Civic Engagement?” - Mark Tooley, The Gospel Coalition
Christians, especially non-evangelicals, are all over the map politically, and if Trump unified evangelicals in 2016, he has dispersed young evangelicals in the four years since. One of the groups that’s gained some traction calling on Christians to vote Democrat is the AND Campaign. Led by Michael Wear, a former Obama staffer, Justin Giboney, a Democratic political strategist in Atlanta, and others, they seek to combine biblical values and social justice. In a recent book, Compassion (&) Conviction, they make the case for Christians who find themselves leaning more toward progressive ideologies but committed to evangelicalism.
Tooley rightly points out the difference between issues like abortion and immigration, two that progressives like to group together, add in racial reconciliation, or whatever other current social issues. Tooley points out that the church has historic and traditional causes and hierarchies of concern. It’s not a problem to be more passionate about some than others. He may not be hard enough on the fact that Christian Democrats like Wear support candidates who would not agree to have them in their own party because of his pro-life stance. Progressives though are making the interesting point that you must be able to advocate for candidates you don’t agree with on some very big points. Conservatives may find that they need that perspective at the rate things are moving.
“The Right Kind of Reparations” - James Hankins, Law & Liberty
In light of the protests and the wave of support for racial reconciliation reforms, one topic that’s not going away is reparations. But how do we even get started on the reparation debate? Proposals for repaying African Americans have come with trillion-dollar price tags and hundred year time spans. How can you pay reparations for things that happened 150 years ago? I might argue that the first step is to drop the term reparations entirely and move toward fixing the current problems suffered by the current population. To do that, we have to start with education - and there’s no better time to do it. James Hankins argues for the best version of this I’ve seen. If you want to make the biggest difference for African Americans, use some of the money propping up the prices of secondary education and use it to improve urban school districts. Provide school vouchers for urban families so that they can choose which schools to send their kids to. Funnel money spent providing student loans to bolster the quality of education. In the discussion on how to make life better for the poor and disenfranchised, this is a great argument.
“Survey: Majority of American Christians Don’t Believe the Gospel” - Joe Carter, The Gospel Coalition
It’s always interesting to find out what Americans really believe - even if it’s sometimes discouraging. In a recent set of data from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, 65% of Americans claim to be Christians, but 52% of them believe you can earn your salvation; essentially, if you’re good you’ll go to Heaven. Some of these findings are really bizarre; for example, just over 50% of people believe they will go to Heaven - combined with the 65% who claim to be Christians a minimum of 15% aren’t sure about what will happen to them after they die. The takeaway should be an encouragement to talk about our faith with other people - and not just unbelievers. Most people are more likely to grow in their understanding of their faith by having regular conversations with people they trust. Know what you believe and look for opportunities to share it. People around you (even at church) may need to hear it.
“The Anti-Abortion-Rights Movement Prepares to Build a Post-Roe World” - Emma Green, The Atlantic
What would America look like without Roe vs. Wade? There’s a group of people preparing for that reality. “Activists in that movement are working towards a grand, and perhaps fantastical, vision: a world where abortion is not just illegal, but unthinkable, and where babies are much more common as a result.” Of the fronts in the culture war, the Pro-Life cause looks the most promising, and it’s becoming an exclusively Republican cause. But the coalition is building. This is an issue that Catholics, Jews, and Evangelicals can all work together to solve. While the Supreme Court ruling against the Louisiana law mandating admission privileges for abortion doctors was a setback, the momentum is still building. Headed into the election, conservative judges, especially Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court, should come back into focus, and the momentum of the Pro-Life movement will be a big reason why.
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