Jerry Falwell Jr.



Jesus said love our neighbors as ourselves but never told Caesar how to run Rome — he never said Roman soldiers should turn the other cheek in battle or that Caesar should allow all the barbarians to be Roman citizens or that Caesar should tax the rich to help poor. That’s our job.

We were that close to having an evolution denier, climate change conspiracist, and Christian fundamentalist in charge of our nation’s public schools.

Jerry Lamon Falwell Jr. is an American attorney, evangelical Christian activist, and former academic administrator. He served as president of Liberty University from his father's death in 2007 until resigning in disgrace in 2020.

Falwell was the most prominent evangelical leader to embrace Donald Trump, showing that the lack of morality among the Moral Majority is intergenerational. There was concern that Trump may ironically have appointed him Secretary of Education, instead of someone just as bad. Falwell says he was offered the education job but turned it down.

Falwell fails to even understand basic Christian theology (Augustine of Hippo), because greed.

Falwell ruled Liberty University with an iron fist, forcing faculty and students alike to not deviate from pro-Trumpist, far-right Christianity. Falwell promotes right wing conspiracy theories; for example, he used social media to claim that Hillary Clinton conspired with Russia to come up with the

Downfall(well)
2020 was a year of controversy for Falwell. Lowlights include flippant dismissal of COVID-19, calls for parts of Virginia to secede from the state, and a racist tweet that resulted in many African American employees and athletes quitting Liberty University. In August 2020, Falwell posted a picture to Instagram from a party on a yacht. In that photo, he revealed that he was a fan of the show (as he was dressed like one of the characters from the show), a fan of rum and Coke  Cuba libre "black water", and lastly, a big fan of posting selfies to Instagram with his pants unzipped, exposing his underwear choice of the day to the world. This clearly violated Liberty University's dress code regulations, and violated Liberty's policy on drinking alcohol. A poster on Reddit calculated that if a Liberty University student was captured in the same scene, thanks to Liberty's strict social regulations, the student could possibly have accrued more than $9,000 in school fines and 900 hours of required service, and possible expulsion. This was the last straw for many Liberty University faculty.

If there are two things that make evangelicals really uncomfortable, it is alcohol and sex. The yacht photo contained both. Outrage was widespread in the evangelical community, and consequently, Falwell took an "indefinite leave of absence" from the university.

Adding even more to Falwell's woes, a business partner (Giancarlo Granda) alleged that he was involved in a multiyear sexual relationship with Falwell and his wife. Ironically (considering the considerable use of the insult cuckold or cuck as a snarl word among Donald Trump supporters online, and Falwell's unswerving support for Trump) according to the allegations, Falwell "enjoyed watching from the corner of the room" while the business partner had sex with his wife. This is essentially the literal definition of The Falwells had also had engaged the services of Michael Cohen, Trump's disgraced personal lawyer, to keep a number of incriminating photographs from the public — this happened before Cohen was imprisoned and turned on Trump.

On August 24, 2020, Falwell resigned as president of Liberty University, and withdrew from the university's board or directors. To add insult to injury, Lynchburg, Virginia, where the school is located, went blue for the first time in over 70 years during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, rejecting his favorite president.

In late October 29, 2020, Falwell Jr. sued Liberty University for breach of contract and bizarrely, given the complete lack of a connection of Liberty University to Falwell Jr.'s exhibitionist/cuckold lifestyle, defamation. Predictably for such a baseless lawsuit, it was dropped by December 2020.

Using Virginia's unique "business conspiracy" law that makes it illegal for two or more people to conspire to harm the reputation of a business, Liberty University fired back on April 2021 by suing Falwell Jr. for 10 million dollars. The charges also included breach of contract and fiduciary duty. One of Falwell Jr.'s defenses in the "pool boy" affair (in an August 23, 2020 article in the Washington Examiner) was a claim, denied by Granda, that Granda was trying to extort money from the Falwells over the matter. The suit alleges that Falwell knowingly withheld this information during his contract renegotiation in 2019 — according to the lawsuit, had Liberty known "the full circumstances of Granda's extortion of Falwell Jr.," "the Executive Committee would have refrained from entering into the [2019 agreement]". The lawsuit also complained that Falwell failed to disclose and address his issues with alcohol. In an additional sting for the Falwell family, a son of Falwell Jr., Trey Falwell, was dismissed from his role as a Liberty University vice president in April 2021.

De-evangelization
Following his bitter feud with the Liberty University Executive Committee, Falwell claimed that he is no longer an evangelical, though still a right-wing Christian: