What Lunch With Jerry Falwell Jr. Taught Me
Sex, purity, and shame in the Evangelical world
Most people are aware that Jerry Falwell Jr. — famous evangelical Christian, staunch Trump supporter, and outspoken foe of LGBTQ equality — has resigned as president of Liberty University. Few are surprised he got caught up in a sex scandal that forced him to resign. Sex scandals are so common in the Evangelical world they rarely shock anyone.
That’s worth pondering.
I had lunch with the Falwell family when Jerry Falwell Jr. and I were teenagers. He and I shot hoops in his driveway. Looking back on that lunch, the roots of the scandal are obvious and shed light on why the Evangelical world will probably never stop being rocked by the sexual transgressions of its leaders.
First let me explain a little about Evangelical sex scandals and purity culture, then I’ll come back to meeting the Falwells.
Evangelical sex scandals are pervasive
Evangelical powerhouses like Jim Bakker and Ted Haggard are infamous for the sex scandals that brought them down. Others like Eddie Long aren’t as well known, but they represent a pattern of sexual misconduct, often involving gay sex, that fills news cycles.
Jonathan Poletti, writing on Medium, has compiled a top-ten scandal list of the decade, but it only scratches the surface. As Jay Michaelson wrote a couple years ago in the Daily Beast, “the real Christian preacher sex scandal is how many there are.”
Purity culture and sexual regulation
The frequency of Evangelical sex scandals raises a serious question. Shouldn’t the Evangelical world be less likely to have problems with illicit or abusive sex? After all, Evangelicals are famous for regulating sexuality and elevating “purity” to a high altar.
Aside from perhaps Roman Catholics, no Christians obsess more about sexual morality than Evangelicals, who have created a so-called “sexual purity culture” to attempt to keep sex strictly inside marriage.
Purity culture is strongest in fundamentalist churches, yet as Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) note, even the most progressive evangelical Christian communities endorse most of its ideals.
Purity culture shames and harms women
CBE points out seven lies of purity culture that shame women, fill them with values that are contradictory and impossible to to uphold, and that often destroy their self worth:
- Women are responsible for men’s sexual sin
- Women’s bodies are something to be ashamed of
- Women shouldn’t have sexual desire
- Women’s virginity is the only thing of worth about them
- Women don’t enjoy sex as much as men
- If women have sex before marriage, everything will go wrong
- There’s no difference between sexual abuse and sex before marriage
Purity culture versus consent culture
Purity culture and the concept of consent don’t play well together. Purity culture has nothing to say about consent, ony about the sinfulness and harmfulness of extra-marital sex, especially pre-marital sex, which is supposed to be especially tragic for virgin teen girls.
Since consent can’t matter outside marriage, consent isn’t taught as an important value. So women and girls can assume the harm and pain from sexual abuse actually come from having premarital sex. And since purity culture blames women and girls for premarital sex, they often come full circle and blame themselves for their own abuse or rape.
Purity culture and boys
Purity culture does a number on boys too. While the harm may seem less profound than with girls, boys are still taught to be ashamed of their sexuality. They’re taught that sex is a powerful force that will tempt them to evil worse than it will ever tempt girls.
They learn they should always suppress sexual attraction, like it’s a cancer just waiting to explode.
Many people rightfully note that purity culture shifts much of the “blame” for sex to girls and women while letting boys and men off the hook. While that’s true and terrible, boys still get hurt — often very badly.
Boys (like girls) are taught not to masturbate and never to have any sort of sexual experience before marriage. That means no kissing, no hand-holding, and certainly no making out. Not ever.
They’re taught to feel deep shame if they do anything remotely sexual. That sense of shame is inevitable, of course, because nobody could ever live up to the demands of purity culture.
Purity culture is impossible
Just as teenagers are turning into sexual beings, flooded with hormones and sexual impulses, purity culture teaches them that everything they’re feeling is twisted and wrong.
Anyone who remembers being 14 probably realizes the folly of expecting adolescents not to masturbate. But the teens themselves don’t understand the folly. Many of them believe in the shame they’re taught, and therein lies a huge problem.
Evangelical kids grow up learning to lie and internalize shame
I knew for sure I was gay by the time I was 12. I also knew that same-sex attraction, masturbation, and any kind of sexual stimulation was sinful, shameful, and too horrifying to talk about.
So, obviously, I never talked about it. To anyone. For years.
I spent years wracked with guilt. I spent years assuming I was a terrible person who couldn’t control his “lust.” I spent years hiding, lying, and internalizing patterns of deception.
What choice did I have? Something was obviously wrong with me, because I couldn’t stop feeling and doing sexual things. That’s what they taught me in church. If I wanted to keep belonging to the only community I’d ever loved, all I could do was lie. Forever.
And that’s what did, until I couldn’t take it anymore. When I was 16, I decided I’d had enough, and I broke free.
People like Jerry Falwell Jr. lie for life
In case you don’t know what happened, Falwell has been caught out in what look like a couple of different cuckold scenario affairs. While the facts are still coming in, pretty solid evidence points to him deriving sexual pleasure watching much younger men have sex with his wife.
Given that Liberty University is one of the strictest proponents of Evangelical purity culture, Falwell resigned his presidency a few days ago when the scandal started to break.
He seems to be trying to shift most of the blame to his wife. I’m not surprised by either his sexual escapades or his blame shifting.
What meeting Falwell taught me
Jerry Falwell Jr. is my age, and when we were young teenagers, my dad was a Baptist pastor in Jerry Falwell Sr.’s orbit. They corresponded and sometimes visited one another.
When I was 13, I joined Dad for a drive to Lynchburg, Virginia and the Thomas Road Baptist Church, which the elder Falwell pastored. We arrived at the parsonage around lunchtime and sat down with the family to eat.
Zing!
The only person I clearly remember is Jerry Jr. I was smitten at once. He was bigger than me, more confident, handsome, kind, and funny. I couldn’t take my eyes off him long enough to eat all my southern fried chicken and biscuits.
He was extremely polite to both his parents, and as soon as our dads ran off to do whatever they had to do, Jerry Jr’s mom spoke up. “Can you entertain your guest, please, Jerry?”
His very southern, “Yes, Ma’am,” was instant and cheerfully obedient.
But out in the driveway with his basketball hoop, a different Jerry emerged. No, I’m not about to tell you Jerry is gay and I’ve known it all along. But as the two of us played horse, a gang of boys slowly emerged from church/campus nooks and crannies.
The first thing I noticed was Jerry was a natural leader. He set all the rules, decided who played and didn’t play, and did it all with gruff charm.
The second thing I noticed is he swore. No big deal for a 13-year-old, you say? Then you don’t know Baptist culture. When he let fly with “damn,” “Jesus,” and the occasional F bomb, I gasped.
When he joked about Hollywood movies he’d seen (strictly forbidden in our world) and sexy women he’d like to make out with, I knew I was in the presence of a true rebel, a much more DARING rebel than I’d ever dreamed of being.
They say preacher’s kids are always the worst, and I guess there’s some truth to that. As a PK, myself, I already knew for sure I could never live up to the impossible sexual demands my dad’s religion imposed.
I could never stop thinking boys like Jerry were hot. I could never stop fantasizing about them at night. And I could never stop feeling pain and guilt over that. So, eventually, I left. I felt I had no choice.
But Jerry made a different choice. He stayed.
When I think of him now, I see that sweaty boy playing basketball and swearing like a sailor. I wonder if he knew then how impossible were the demands of the purity culture his father was helping spread throughout the Evangelical world.
I wonder if he realized he was internalizing patterns of shame and deception that would eventually destroy him. I wonder if he wishes he got out at 16 like I did.
But he didn’t. He’s still blaming his wife for his own deceptions. He’s still guilty of imposing extremist purity standards on the campus of Liberty University when he knew for certain he couldn’t live up to them.
But I can’t help feeling empathy and compassion for that charming, basketball-playing boy from all those years ago. If only he’d known how impossible his struggle for “purity” was going to be.
If anything good can come of Falwell’s fiasco, more Evangelicals will realize they need to let go of purity. They need to leave behind the shame of sex that leads only to lies and scandal.
James Finn is a former Air Force intelligence analyst, long-time LGBTQ activist, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, an essayist occasionally published in queer news outlets, and an “agented” novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].