‘It’s do as I say, not as I do’: the lurid fall of evangelical pariah Jerry Falwell Jr

Jerry Falwell Jr in 2016. ‘I hope that people will see how potentially dangerous this level of hypocrisy is,’ Giancarlo Granda said. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Jerry Falwell Jr once said there was nothing that then president Donald Trump could do that would endanger support from him or other Christian evangelical leaders. “When Jesus said we’re all sinners, he really meant all of us, everybody,” he told the Washington Post in January 2019.

Falwell knew whereof he spoke. A year and a half later, he would resign in disgrace from Liberty University, the evangelical college his father founded in Lynchburg, Virginia, after a series of personal scandals that would have made even Trump blush.