Jerry Falwell Jr, president of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, son of the late founder of the so-called “Moral Majority” who led the way in birthing the movement in American politics known as the Religious Right, has—with his wife Becki—been caught in a sordid adulterous affair [1]. He has been described as “one of the most powerful and potent voices in the evangelical movement until this breathtaking scandal” [2].
While the younger Falwell has not admitted to every detail of the alleged affair, he has acknowledged his wife’s “fatal attraction” for a younger business partner and the emotional depression their relationship had brought him [3].
Falwell took an indefinite leave from his post as Liberty University president when a prominent news outlet reported his having posted lewd photos of himself on Instagram with a woman who is not his wife [4]. Despite Falwell’s denial of the more perverse allegations by his wife’s ex-lover [5], e-mails, text messages, and Face Time videos have been produced which all but confirm the ex-lover’s claims [6].
On August 25, 2020, the Board of Trustees at Liberty University, one of the largest and most influential conservative Christian higher educational centers in the United States, announced the resignation of Jerry Falwell Jr. from its presidency, as well as the Board’s acceptance of his decision [7].
Theological Error and Moral Hypocrisy
Let’s not get pious or self-righteous here. All of us are vulnerable to temptation if and when we lower our guard and lose our grip on the power of God to keep us from falling (Jude 24). If it can happen to King David, who—while walking in the counsel of the Lord—was called “a man after God’s own heart” [8], it can happen to any of us. But when such misdeeds occur in the lives of individuals whose theology divorces salvation from the moral choices of the “saved,” and who seek to place civil government in control of the personal moral conduct of citizens, the twin evils of theological error and moral hypocrisy must be both acknowledged and denounced.
Again we are forced to confront the fatal role of doctrinal error in reducing the sinfulness of sin in the perception of those who believe and teach such error. In an interview with National Public Radio in 2017, in which he was asked about the moral character of the current president of the United States, “Falwell said evangelical Christian theology is about recognizing that everyone is a sinner in need of forgiveness. ‘You can’t go by who’s sinned and who hasn’t, because we all have,’ Falwell said. ‘The ones that you think are so perfect and sinless—it’s just you don’t know about it. They’re all just as bad. We all are. And that’s the bottom line” [9].
In another public interview, Falwell likewise tried to belittle the current U.S. president’s moral failings by claiming:
Our whole faith is based upon the theology of forgiveness, on the fact that we believe that Jesus taught us that all of us are sinners and we all sin every day [10].
The mixture of truth, error, and hypocrisy in the above statements is appalling, to say the least. Yes, the Bible is clear that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). All of us, therefore, stand in need of God’s forgiveness. But where, may we ask, did Jesus say that “we all sin every day”? Where did Jesus, or any Bible writer, teach that sin is inevitable for the Christian? Didn’t Jesus tell the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more” (John 8:11)?
Naturally, Falwell quoted no Bible texts in support of his claim that sin is unavoidable, even for the converted. Moreover, the Bible is clear that sin must be forsaken as well as confessed in order to be forgiven:
If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sins, and heal their land (II Chron. 7:14).
He that covereth his sins shall not prosper, but whoso confesseth, and forsaketh them shall have mercy (Prov. 28:13).
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon (Isa. 55:7).
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (I John 1:9).
Both the Old and New Testaments are clear: God’s forgiveness is not unconditional. Jesus said in His Sermon on the Mount that in order to be forgiven, we must be willing to forgive those who have wronged us (Matt. 6:14-15). Those who receive the forgiveness God offers are to be cleansed “from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:9). No wonder Ellen White declares, speaking of Biblical repentance: “Repentance includes sorrow for sin, and a turning away from it” [11].
To blithely repeat the statement that “we’re all sinners” and that everyone is therefore just as bad as everyone else so far as the reckoning of God is concerned, is both seriously misleading and an easy way of justifying one’s own—or someone else’s—pursuit of sinful practices. There is a clear and unequivocal difference in the Bible between sinners who repent and sinners who persist in sin. For a Christian leader to defend—on the basis of the statement that “everyone is a sinner in need of forgiveness” [12]—one who has publicly boasted of his adulterous conquests [13], and who has bragged of assaulting women and getting away with it [14], is nothing short of a sacrilegious prostitution of the Bible doctrine of salvation by grace through faith.
Can we truly be surprised when those who rationalize such sins in others find their own moral guard compromised in the hour of temptation?
Moreover, the hypocrisy on display here is worth more than passing attention. Not too long ago, as we all remember, another American president confessed to adultery, though in tones that no one could fairly describe as boastful. Why did we then encounter a near-deafening silence from the evangelical world regarding God’s forgiveness and everyone’s need of it? Could this silence have just a little to do with the fact that the U.S. president then in power disagreed with the evangelical political agenda, while the current one professes agreement therewith?
Conclusion: Whited Sepulchers
Hypocrisy is often the twin sister of intolerance. The Pharisees were the Religious Right of their day—like their contemporary American counterparts, yearning for a theocracy over which the Messiah would make them His earthly administrators [15]. It was to these religious phonies that our Lord attached the label, “whited sepulchers” (Matt. 23:27). One finds it hard to escape the conviction that were our Lord among us today, He would be using this phrase again. Yet again we see the fulfillment of Ellen White’s prophecy that as the time of the end draws near, “the sins of Babylon will be laid open” [16].
Far from predicting the secular onslaught obsessed over by today’s cultural and religious conservatives, the New Testament speaks of the last days as a time when people will profess “a form of godliness, while denying the power thereof” (II Tim. 3:5). Jerry Falwell Jr and his religio-political compatriots commonly parrot the lopsided evangelical focus on the forgiveness of sins, with little if any stress on divinely-empowered victory over sin. Too many of their personal lives, and those of their political champions, reflect this grotesque imbalance. It is this spiritual bankruptcy, and the powerless gospel used to justify it, that leads to the quest for the carnal power of secular statecraft as a substitute. Hence the cry of the second angel in Revelation 14:
Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication (verse 8).
According to the book of Revelation, this fornication is committed by apostate Christianity with “the kings of the earth” (Rev. 17:2). This is the illegitimate union of church and state which our Lord forbade when He declared, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Such carnal weapons are the natural recourse of those who devalue the strength of the only weapons which can ultimately subdue evil, as described by the apostle Paul:
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds,
Casting down imagination, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ (II Cor. 10:4-5).
It is in the thought life where sin gets started. When wicked thoughts are cherished, sin is the result (James 1:14-15). However low or lofty our social, ecclesiastical, or political station, the path to integrity and purity—or the denial thereof—begins in the heart. The gospel according to Holy Scripture is one of both pardon and power, forgiveness and victory. Again we cite the apostle John’s assurance, in which both features of the gospel are affirmed with equal clarity:
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (I John 1:9).
When we experience this cleansing, we will cease to be the whited sepulchers Jesus condemned (Matt. 23:27), and will at last be arrayed in “fine linen, bright and pure,” which “stands for the righteous acts of the saints” (Rev. 19:8).
REFERENCES
1. Sarah McCammon, “Liberty University Doubles Down After Falwell Denies Reports of His Resignation,” NPR, Aug. 24, 2020 https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/905600300/falwell-resigns-from-liberty-university-following-sex-scandal-allegations
2. Kyra Phillips, Evan Pereira, and Jon Haworth, “Jerry Falwell Jr. officially resigns from Liberty University,” ABC News, Aug. 24, 2020 https://abcnews.go.com/US/jerry-falwell-jr-officially-resigns-liberty-university/story?id=72587982&cid=clicksource_4380645_3_heads_hero_live_headlines_hed
3. Paul Bedard, “Exclusive: Falwell Says Fatal Attraction Threat Led to Depression,” Washington Examiner, Aug. 23, 2020 https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/exclusive-falwell-says-fatal-attraction-threat-led-to-depression
4. Aram Roston, “Business partner of Falwell’s says affair with evangelical power couple spanned seven years,” Reuters, Aug. 24, 2020 https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-falwell-relationship/
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Daniel Burke, “Jerry Falwell Jr. says he has resigned as president of Liberty University,” CNN, Aug. 25, 2020 https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/25/us/jerry-falwell-jr-liberty-university-resignation/index.html
8. Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 723.
9. McCammon, “Liberty University Doubles Down After Falwell Denies Reports of His Resignation,” NPR, Aug. 24, 2020 https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/905600300/falwell-resigns-from-liberty-university-following-sex-scandal-allegations
10. Phillips, Pereira, and Haworth, “Jerry Falwell Jr. officially resigns from Liberty University,” ABC News, Aug. 24, 2020 https://abcnews.go.com/US/jerry-falwell-jr-officially-resigns-liberty-university/story?id=72587982&cid=clicksource_4380645_3_heads_hero_live_headlines_hed
11. White, Steps to Christ, p. 23.
12. McCammon, “Liberty University Doubles Down After Falwell Denies Reports of His Resignation,” NPR, Aug. 24, 2020 https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/905600300/falwell-resigns-from-liberty-university-following-sex-scandal-allegations
13. “Donald Trump’s Crude Talk on the Howard Stern Show,” March 24, 2002 https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/10/08/donald-trump-howard-stern-show-women.cnn
14. “Donald Trump Access Hollywood Tape,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Access_Hollywood_tape
15. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 509.
16. ----The Great Controversy, p. 606.
Pastor Kevin Paulson holds a Bachelor’s degree in theology from Pacific Union College, a Master of Arts in systematic theology from Loma Linda University, and a Master of Divinity from the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University. He served the Greater New York Conference of Seventh-day Adventists for ten years as a Bible instructor, evangelist, and local pastor. He writes regularly for Liberty magazine and does script writing for various evangelistic ministries within the denomination. He continues to hold evangelistic and revival meetings throughout the North American Division and beyond, and is a sought-after seminar speaker relative to current issues in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He presently resides in Berrien Springs, Michigan