Falwell's Fall . . . and Redemption with Diana Butler Bass
Brad talks to Dr. Diana Butler Bass, distinguished scholar of American Christianity, about Jerry Falwell Jr's. demise. Last week, racy pictures posted by Falwell on social media led to him being put on indefinite leave from the university. Dr. Bass provides insight into why this particular scandal led to his downfall, the gendered dynamics of the situation, and the well marked path for Falwell's redemption.
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My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
It is the second week of August, and despite the disaster timeline that we are living through, there is one story that we just have to talk about.
Last week, Jerry Falwell Jr.
was put on indefinite leave from Liberty University following the posting on Instagram of pictures and video of a party that took place on a yacht.
In one of the pictures, Jerry Falwell Jr. is posing with a young woman.
She, we now know, is the assistant to his wife, Becky.
And he has his arm around her waist.
He's holding what, by all accounts, seems to be a glass of alcohol.
And they both have their pants unzipped, showing their underwear.
It seems as if there was a context or a theme to the party that explains why they would have posed this way.
But the larger sort of issue here is that this picture and the video associated with it led to Jerry Falwell being asked, or maybe not even asked, but put on indefinite leave from Liberty.
Just to give you some context, Liberty University is the largest Christian university in the country.
It enrolls about 15,000 students on campus and has about 100,000 people enrolled in online programs.
It has incredible influence in the evangelical world.
And it was, of course, started by Jerry Falwell Sr.
Many of you will know that Jerry Falwell Sr.
is a seminal figure in the rise of the religious right.
He was a big part of the push for evangelicals to vote for Reagan over Carter in 76.
He started the moral majority in 1979 and up until his death, In the mid-aughts, he was a kind of figurehead for the religious right and its rise to prominence in American politics.
Jerry Falwell Jr.
took over the Liberty University when his father passed, and since then there have been numerous scandals surrounding him.
Most recently, there's been a scandal involving The loaning or giving of over a million dollars to a pool boy that he and his wife had met on a trip or on a vacation.
This raised some eyebrows because it seemed very suspicious that they would give this much money to someone that they had just met, someone who was very young, college-aged, and who they set up the money to be used as part of a business scheme.
And that scheme was a hostel, a hostel that was essentially A gay-friendly hostel and one that was known for kind of ruckus or debaucherous parties, something that you would just not think that the president of the largest evangelical university in the country would be involved with.
There's also the reports that there are racy sexual pictures of both Jerry Falwell and Becky Falwell that Michael Cohen Donald Trump's former lawyer and fixer, who we all know is serving time for his crimes, helped to essentially make go away.
So scandal has followed Jerry Falwell Jr.
as of late, and these pictures and the video were essentially the straw that broke the camel's back.
I had the opportunity to talk about all this with Dr. Diana Butler Bass.
Many of you will know her as a prominent writer, theologian, speaker and scholar, somebody who's written 10 books and is a prominent kind of face in American Christianity.
Well, she had great insight on this, and so I'm really happy to share our conversation with you now.
And I'm absolutely thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Diana Butler-Bass, who's an author, speaker, scholar, and what I consider just a distinguished scholar of American Christianity.
Over Dr. Bass's career, she has written about everything from spiritual trends and sort of spirituality in the world and in this country.
She's written the kind of genre, I'll be honest, I'm very jealous of, which is a kind of Memoir Theology that includes personal experiences of hers and a sort of theological development, and also history.
And so she's the author of 10 books, including Grounded, Finding God in the World, and Christianity After Religion, The End of the Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening.
Both of those from HarperOne and also has a new newsletter called The Cottage and you can find that on Substack and we're going to talk hopefully today about one of her recent posts there.
So, Diana, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
I'm very, very grateful.
No, it's wonderful to be with someone else who has degrees in American religious history.
This is a topic I don't get to talk about quite as much.
People ask me to, you know, talk about spiritual trends and it's like, oh I like, I do that, I like doing that, but talking about history really gets me going.
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