| Notes |
Published Aug. 25, 2020
Updated April 16, 2021
Jerry Falwell Jr. had long made a point of emphasizing that he was not trying to be a moral leader. He made crude jokes, insulted fellow Christians and was photographed partying on yachts and in nightclubs. But he rarely apologized or expressed regret. “I have never been a minister,” he explained on Twitter last year. He liked to tell reporters that Jesus did not tell Caesar how to run Rome.
That was always an unusual stance for the head of a distinctly evangelical institution. But Mr. Falwell pulled it off until recently, coasting by on a combination of success — Liberty’s endowment grew to $1.6 billion under his watch — and good will engendered by lingering institutional fondness for his father, who founded the school and was both a minister and an administrator.
On Tuesday, after a chaotic 48 hours in which a sex scandal emerged and Mr. Falwell resigned, changed his mind and then changed it back again, he was officially out as president and chancellor of Liberty University, the influential evangelical institution in Lynchburg, Va. Many students and others with ties to the school greeted his departure with relief. A seemingly constant flow of controversies was finally over. |