#Jerry Falwell Jr.’s disgrace underscores danger of institutional capture 

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Jerry Falwell Jr. used Liberty University as a personal platform, and now he’s paying the price.
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The tragedy of Jerry Falwell Jr. is that he turned out to be exactly the putz many people expected him to be.

But even amid all the horrifying comedy — whatever is going on with the Falwells and that Miami “pool boy” — there is real tragedy.

The principal tragedy is institutional.

Jerry Falwell Jr. and Liberty University present a textbook example of American institutional decline. As the political analyst Yuval Levin has argued at length in his 2020 book “A Time To Build,” many critical American institutions are failing because they have been hijacked by the personal ambitions of their leaders.

Rather than serving an institution — be it a church, a university, a corporation or Congress — men such as Falwell pervert institutions to serve their own ends: financial, political, sexual, etc. They use it as a personal platform rather than subordinating their own agendas to the greater institutional good.

That is the fundamental reason for Americans’ declining confidence in institutions ranging from the press to the pulpit and from the faculty lounge to the C-suite.

So while Falwell may have something in common with disgraced evangelists such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, he also brings to mind former McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook, who is accused by the burgermeisters of lying about his sexual involvement with employees, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, whose career in the House was undone by ethical and sexual scandals.

One of Falwell’s great passions was the accumulation of property. In the words of one Liberty administrator: “We’re not a school; we’re a real-estate hedge fund.”

As the university added to its wealth — its endowment currently sits around $1.6 billion — so did Falwell’s friends and family, who were awarded lucrative contracts and questionable loans from the school.

That infamous photograph that finally got the Liberty administration’s attention showed Falwell carousing on a 164-foot yacht lent to him on several occasions by NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick — after Liberty had signed a sponsorship deal with the team.

Having winked at such shenanigans for so long, Liberty and its leadership will suffer along with Falwell, as they deserve to. Conservative Christians could use some new and dynamic intellectual and institutional leadership right now, but Liberty probably will never be able to provide it.

It may not be quite as big a mess as the one at Trump U. (which produced three settlements in fraud lawsuits), but, in truth, the university does not have much of a reputation to defend or to recover.

The tragedy of Liberty University is both what it is and what it might have been.

Falwell stands accused of moral hypocrisy. He often protests that he is not a clergyman, but that is hardly to the point. Conservatives are right to complain that such charges of hypocrisy are largely reserved for them. Nobody blinks when Joe Biden quotes the sainted Pope John Paul II while running on an all-abortion-all-the-time platform. But that does not let Falwell off the hook.

It is not only clerics and crusaders who hold the reputations of religious institutions in their hands.

We should be quick to forgive, but also quick to comprehend. With that in mind, Falwell’s relentless pursuit of political power is, if anything, of more urgent concern than his financial dealings or such common shortcomings as his supposed lechery.

After insisting for so long that his role was a commercial one — lawyer, real-estate developer — Falwell reversed course to set himself up as an arbiter of Christian faith and hitched that faith to a corrosive brand of partisanship that served his desire for fame and status rather than Liberty University’s educational and Christian mission.

This presents an eternal difficulty for Christian institutions and leaders, at least those outside of the cloister, who must balance a missionary interest in the hereafter against a reformist interest in the here and now.

Falwell’s fall is a reminder that the worldliest of concerns have a way of colonizing religious endeavors. When politics crowds out faith, political power becomes another golden calf.

From that point of view, Falwell’s most serious offense isn’t greed or lechery, but idolatry.

And being a putz.