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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Alberta
Read between
June 25 - June 29, 2024
“Well, John, most evangelicals are craven hypocrites who adhere only to selective biblical teachings, wield their faith as a weapon of cultural warfare, and only pretend to care about righteousness when it suits their political interests. So, it’s no surprise they would ally themselves with the likes of Donald Trump!”
The crisis of American evangelicalism comes down to an obsession with that
worldly identity. Instead of fixing our eyes on the unseen, “since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” as Paul writes in Second Corinthians, we have become fixated on the here and now. Instead of seeing ourselves as exiles in a metaphorical Babylon, the way Peter describes the first-century Christians living in Rome, we have embraced our imperial citizenship. Instead of fleeing the temptation to rule all the world, like Jesus did, we have made deals with the devil.
The best explanation for what afflicts the Church was evident at my church.
“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
The organizer was Paul Weyrich, a Catholic journalist turned political insider who in 1973 had cofounded the Heritage Foundation, which would become Washington’s leading conservative think tank.
Each of these men had effectively abandoned the Republican Party in the aftermath of Watergate, hoping that a descendant of purer ideology would supplant the GOP.
“co-belligerents,” people of different beliefs but shared objectives.
Over the past few years, Falwell had watched kindred spirits such as James Dobson (Focus on the Family), Beverly LaHaye (Concerned Women for America), and Donald Wildmon (American Family Association) launch faith-based organizations that reached much of the evangelical world but missed his fellow fundamentalists.
Weyrich told Falwell there was a “moral majority” of Americans on their side.
And so Falwell would launch the Moral Majority with a focus on pornography, homosexuality, drug use, rising divorce rates, secularism in public schools, and, above all, abortion.
abortion was considered a “Catholic issue.”
In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming the procedure under a generous range of circumstances.
(W. A. Criswell, the SBC ex-president and legendary pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, one of America’s leading megachurches, approved: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person.”)
the Supreme Court had “advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and justice.”
In retrospect, given the dramatic jump in abortion rates following Roe, advances in medical technology that gave the public a window into the procedure, and the attention lavished on the subject by influential Christians, the overnight groundswell of opposition makes sense.
The triumph of pro-lifers in 1978, Billings wrote to Weyrich, would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.”
Whereas the GOP establishment’s preference, George H. W. Bush, kept a strategic distance from the religious right, Ronald Reagan made his courtship of these newly mobilized Christian voters a tactical linchpin of his campaign, specifically engaging on the abortion issue in ways Bush would not dare.
When Reagan clinched the nomination, he rewarded Falwell by naming Robert Billings as his faith-based liaison for the general election.
“a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian.”
Less than a decade removed from founding a small Christian college in Lynchburg, Virginia, this country preacher was one of the most powerful men in America.
a cutting-edge mailing list which now exceeded 7 million names and addresses.
The enrollment spike following Reagan’s election brought a wave of politically crazed young conservatives to campus.
This influx demanded a hiring spree, and some of the folks Falwell brought in, particularly for administrative positions, were partisan cronies he’d met through his burgeoning Republican network.
namely those older fundamentalists who still distrusted the mixing of religion and politics.
he met and married a Liberty girl—and not just any Liberty girl, but a Lynchburg native, a product of Thomas Road’s private K–12 academy whose family had deep ties to Falwell’s empire.
‘Are you serving God? Or are you following a man?’”
Ever since he disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989—sensing, rightly, that he’d lost sight of his responsibilities as a pastor—Falwell had been eclipsed by a new generation of Christian culture warriors.
He ranted about Tinky Winky, an animated purple creature on the toddler-aged TV show Teletubbies who was supposedly homosexual despite a lack of reproductive organs.
He said the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed three thousand people were “probably deserved” because of how America had turned away from God, and blamed “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians”—as well as the ACLU—for inviting such devastation on the country.
All told, Falwell had “racked up more than $100 million in debt” to keep the university afloat, according to a 2020 Politico investigation, and could not pay it back.
1987 sex scandal involving televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker prompted untold millions of Christian viewers to close their checkbooks for good.
especially given Jerry Sr.’s concession to him, on many an occasion, that their Baptist rules had no bearing on anyone’s salvation—yet he loved him unconditionally.
Mark DeMoss.
It’s true that the school’s new president had never portrayed himself as a pious man. If anything, he went out of his way to inform people—perhaps even warn them—that he was not a religious role model.
“Get even.”
Falwell had grown more comfortable in his skin as the school’s leader; that skin was combative, conservative, Trumpian.
Liberty stripped its College Democrats club of official recognition, denying it the use of university funds.
Lurking over Becki Falwell’s left shoulder, framed in gold, was a cover of Playboy, graced by a bow-tied Trump and a smiling brunette covered only by his tuxedo jacket. Forty years after his father had singled out the magazine as a symbol of civilizational decay, Falwell posed in front of it, beaming shoulder to shoulder with a man who had appeared in a soft-core porno flick (and who, one-upping the adultery Jimmy Carter confessed to committing in his heart, engaged in the real thing, including with a Playboy model and an adult-film actress).
He launched a campus think tank in partnership with Charlie Kirk, the firebrand activist and president of Turning Point USA, calling it “The Falkirk Center for Faith and Liberty.”
“The Liberty Way,” to control the student body. (Dancing, among other activities, remains banned on campus to this day.)
How did Falwell get away with this behavior? The question seemed answered easily enough: Liberty was thriving by every outward metric, with assets listed at $2.6 billion in 2017, an increase of 900 percent from when he had taken over a decade earlier. (That
The reason nobody confronted him—some combination of donors, administrators, trustees, Executive Committee members—is that many of them were just as complicit in the school’s broken culture.
was still run by the same cast of third-string operators who couldn’t get hired at most community colleges.
But then, a few weeks into the leave, he and his wife, Becki, issued a bizarre statement to a blogger at the Washington Examiner explaining that Becki had carried on an affair with a family friend.
Early in his presidency, Prevo told Scott Lamb, Liberty’s then–chief communications officer, in a recorded phone call that electing Republicans to office was one of the university’s “main goals.”
After students took the extraordinary step of rebelling against the Falkirk Center—drafting a petition that read, “Associating any politician or political movement with Christianity bastardizes the Gospel of Jesus Christ”—Liberty changed the name.
The school’s ban on certain behaviors—drinking, partying,
premarital sexual contact—made reporting abuse all but impossible, given the associated violations of the honor code.
His name was Nick Olson.
