Jerry Falwell Sr.’s sex secrets spill out

In a startling interview, the legendary Evangelical pastor is discussed by his disgraced son

To his religion he’s a disgrace, but to me, Jerry Falwell Jr. is divine. In a new interview, he spills the beans on his famous father.

Jerry Falwell Sr. died in 2007, and had been for decades an iconic Evangelical cleric. From thundering against civil rights for Blacks, or women and homosexuals, he’d seemed to be the very image of God.

In a profile in Vanity Fair, his son says—it was all an act.

Jerry Jr. was never much into the religion.

“It’s almost like I didn’t have a choice,” he says, thinking over his childhood in one of the most famous families in the country. “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I was not my dad.”

We got a peek at him as a teenager in a memory by James Finn, a pastor’s son himself who’d met Jerry Jr. at age 13, and recalled his shock:

“When he let fly with ‘damn,’ ‘Jesus,’ and the occasional F bomb, I gasped.”

Jerry Jr. speaks now of having to fight off the intense pressure to get into the line of succession. Evangelicals love the idea of a pastor’s son following in his father’s footsteps, like kings. Jerry Jr. recalls:

“People would say to me, ‘We know you’re gonna be a preacher because your dad is one.’ I thought, That’s the last thing I want to be.”

But was his father the man everyone thought?

Jerry Falwell would rant against alcohol, then come home and drink the few drops of alcohol he could smuggle past his wife. “Sometimes he would drink a whole bottle of Nyquil. He called it Baptist wine,” Jerry Jr. says.

Jerry Sr. wanted to get out of Lynchburg, Virginia. “My dad wanted to travel the world as an escape,” Jerry Jr. says. But Macel was always there, keeping him in line. “She wanted to live a small-town preacher’s life. She didn’t let him mess around.”

His mother was laying down the rules. “My mother was the only reason my dad became puritanical,” Jerry Jr. says. The famous Jerry Falwell began to rant and rave about drinking and homosexuality, his son says, to show his wife he’d be good enough for her.

I was struck by the most amazing sex story.

A misogynist religion, preaching female subordination and male control, was led by a man who was desperately changing himself to please his wife.

Whoever he was—is unknown. Falwell was playing the part she wrote.

I think about Macel Falwell—Evangelical leader?

I’m looking through a 1979 biography, Jerry Falwell: Aflame For God. Macel was a girl in the church he attended as a young man. She played the piano, sang and taught children’s classes. She was notably shy.

A 2008 memoir she supposedly dictated to Sean Hannity, Jerry Falwell: His Life and Legacy, has Macel recalling her youth:

“We never listened to any music except Christian music. We did not watch movies, and alcohol was forbidden. I was the youngest of three daughters with a younger brother on whom we doted. I was timid and hesitant about life, a trait that would progress with the years.”

She knew little of people, or the world. Just a sheltered Christian girl, repeating the lines she’d been told to say.

Macel was interviewed by the Washington Post in 1984. She and her husband, she assures, think alike on everything. “I have complete freedom,” she says. “He lets me handle all the finances. On spiritual things, he’s the spiritual leader.”

She’s asked if divorce can ever be justified. She thinks. “Abuse — or a homosexual partner. Homosexuality is a sin, that’s all it is.”

Jerry Jr. got along with his dad.

“My dad and I were thick as thieves,” he says. And his brother, Jonathan, was more his mother’s type—a “gregarious rule follower,” the Vanity Fair profile says. (Jonathan refused to be interviewed.) They never got along.

“I wasn’t someone my mom could control,” Jerry Jr. says. “She realized Jonathan was someone she could control.”

And so Jonathan, like his father, became a pastor.

When Jerry Falwell died, there was a pervasive sense that his act had been fraudulent. Christopher Hitchens famously said: “If you gave him an enema he could have been buried in a matchbox.”

It was Jerry Jr. who had the administrative skills to save Liberty University, on the brink of financial collapse when his father died. A public position went with it that he didn’t want—an Evangelical overlord.

“There was so much pressure on me to become somebody I wasn’t,” he says. “I’d wake up each day saying, ‘How am I going to do this?’”

In private, he wasn’t even that Christian.

“Nothing in history has done more to turn people away from Christianity than organized religion,” he said. “The religious elite has got this idea that somehow their sins aren’t as bad as everyone else’s.”

His family kept up a sexy side-life in Miami. As I traced in my post “The Evangelical Femme Fatale,” his wife Becki had a lot of interests—most of them hot young men. She was skilled at getting them.

But it was, as usual, the gay issue that Evangelicals really cared about. A reporter got a tip: “Why does Falwell need to own an LGBT-friendly hostel?”

One thing led to another, and Jerry Jr. and Becki were shown to have been in an ongoing threesome with a young man. When it blew up into a publicity nightmare, Liberty demanded his resignation. And Jerry Jr. said: “Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”

I realized—his father could never say the same. 🔶