The Fall of Liberty's Libertine

Libertine: a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.

- from Dictionary.com (Emphasis mine.)

I am trying to read a technical document just now.  It's for a proposal I'm putting together for an environmental project, and it is a very dry document.  Dry documents tend to make me sleepy, so I indulged myself in a quick bit of Web surfing to distract me from my overwhelming desire to snooze.  (Yes, I know - a better tactic would be to drop and do 25 push-ups.  I'll try that next time.)

My web surfing (when I indulge in it, which is not often) frequently takes me to a consideration of the 1980's, which were a high point for the Republican Party and for the freak show known as white American evangelicalism.  So I googled "evangelical scandals 1980's pastors" and came across a surprising bit of present-day news.  In case you didn't know it, Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Jerry Falwell who founded and led the "Moral Majority" of the 1980's, resigned this week from Liberty University.  His resignation was not voluntary, but came as a result of the revelation of his involvement in a few sex scandals, and the revelation of a photo of himself and a woman who is not his wife posing together with their zippers down.  (Literally!)

It is no secret that the junior Falwell is racist.  It is also no secret that he has been a rabid supporter of another serial adulterer named Donald John Trump.  Falwell is like many white Evangelical mouthpieces in saying that we must support Trump because he is "a chosen vessel whom God has raised up for a glorious purpose" - and "if God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar for His glorious purposes, God can use Trump to carry out His mysterious plan!"  Note that in saying such things, both he and others like him are bad-mouthing not only God, but Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar.  How ironic that in showing himself to be just as slimy as Trump, Mr. Falwell has brought consequences upon himself.  And I expect that Liberty University will not itself survive unscathed.

In my march through the reading of the Old Testament, I am now reading the book of Micah.  And what Micah says is a direct contradiction of Falwell, and of other sketchy people like him, including Franklin Graham.  But I do not write this to moralize.  Rather, I want to make a psychological observation.  Jerry Falwell Jr. seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the pathological, narcissistic raging of white supremacy against a world that is inexorably changing around those who wish to remain supreme.  Like Trump, Falwell Jr. is a symptom of a larger American disease.  He is also yet another example of the outworkings of damnation.

And now, back to work!