The ghosts of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the OG’s (Old Guard) of the religious right are dancing these days. Since his inauguration, Trump has rewarded his religious right allies with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.”

“Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to undermine separation of church and state,” Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery recently reported.

On May 1, members of the religious liberty commission were announced, and nearly all are ultra-conservative Christian nationalists with a huge right-wing agenda. The commission’s chair is Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and its vice chair is Ben Carson.

Right Wing Watch profiled several of the commission’s members:

• Paula White, serving again as Trump’s faith advisor in the White House, has used her position to elevate the influence of dominionist preachers and Christian nationalist activists. A preacher of the prosperity gospel, White has repeatedly denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic. When Trump announced the Religious Liberty Commission, White made the startling assertion, “Prayer is not a religious act, it’s a national necessity.”

• Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who developed the Heritage Foundation’s “road map” for overturning marriage equality and was the face of Heritage’s anti-trans activism.

• Franklin Graham, the more-political son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is a MAGA activist and fan of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies who backed Trump in 2016 as the last chance for Christians to save America from godless secularists and the “very wicked” LGTBT agenda. After the 2020 election Graham promoted Trump’s stolen-election claims and blamed the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol on “antifa.”

• Eric Metaxas, a once somewhat reputable scholar who has devolved into a far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist, emceed a December 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power.

• Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who helped lead U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ equality, was an original signer of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declared that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”

• Kelly Shackleford, president of First Liberty, who works to undermine church-state separation via the courts; Shackleford has endorsed a Christian nationalist effort to block conservative judges from joining the Supreme Court if they do not meet the faith and worldview standards of the religious right.

• Allyson Ho, a lawyer and wife of right-wing Judge James Ho, has been affiliated with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ equality religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute.

Other commission members include Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry; 2009 Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean Boller; TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.

Montgomery noted that “Advisory board members are divided into three categories: religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The list is more religiously diverse than the commission itself; in addition to right-wing lawyers and Christian-right activists, it includes several additional Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim activists.”

Notable new advisory board members:

• Kristen Waggoner, president of the mammoth anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which uses the courts to make “generational” wins like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has been named as a possible Supreme Court Justice by the Center for Judicial Renewal, a Christian nationalist project of the American Family Association’s advocacy arm. The ADF is active around the world.  

• Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom.

• Jentezen Franklin, a MAGA pastor, told conservative Christians at a 2020 Evangelicals for Trump rally, “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”

• Gene Bailey, host of FlashPoint, a program that regularly promotes pro-Trump prophecy and propaganda on the air and at live events. Bailey has said the point of FlashPoint’s trainings is to help right-wing Christians “take over the world.” FlashPoint was until recently a program of Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel.

• Anti-abortion activist Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., once dismissed the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality by saying , ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”

• Abigail Robertson, CBN podcast host and granddaughter of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

Donald Trump claiming that he’s the front man for “bringing religion back to our country,” is as if the late Jeffrey Epstein claimed that he was working to end sex trafficking.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation called Trump’s religious liberty commission “a dangerous initiative,” that “despite its branding, this commission is not about protecting religious freedom — it’s about advancing religious privilege and promoting a Christian nationalist agenda”.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Betselm describes how the Israeli government encourages the settlements

Most of the settlements in the West Bank are defined as national priority areas. Accordingly, the settlers and other Israeli citizens working or investing in the settlements are entitled to significant financial benefits. These benefits are provided by six government ministries: the Ministry of Construction and Housing (generous loans for the purchase of apartments, part of which is converted to a grant); the Israel Lands Administration (significant price reductions in leasing land); the Ministry of Education (incentives for teachers, exemption from tuition fees in kindergartens, and free transportation to school); the Ministry of Industry and Trade (grants for investors, infrastructure for industrial zones, etc.); the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (incentives for social workers); and the Ministry of Finance (reductions in income tax for individuals and companies).

Benefits are an inducement and not an excuse to acquire stolen property and are no reason to harass neighbors in an extreme and violent manner. Criminally attacking innocent Palestinians in adjacent villages gives the settlers a feeling of being all-powerful, all-commanding, all-authoritative, and having the right to murder, rob, and torch anyone they want.

The world treats the settlers as ultra-nationalists, as people with overzealous prophecies who are eager to fulfill a commitment to their God. They run amok because their beliefs are amok. Their violence must be stopped and, hopefully, legal and moral forces will subdue them. The word, as usual, is naive.

These hilltop villains arrive with a twisted mission — to bring their select group back to a land they fanatically believe God has given to them. People are entitled to their myths and ahistorical stories as a central focus to hold their ethnicity together; they are not entitled to take fantasy, pose it as a reality, and use the subverted reality for diabolical purposes. The settlers’ existence depends upon denying existence to others. The settlers’ principal purpose in life is to disturb the lives of others. They have often operated as a murderous contingent, completely unattached to reality, and finding pleasure in dominating their victims.

The settlers play the role of shock troops for the government. Not wanting the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a euphemism for the Israel Offensive Forces (IOF), to be identified with the intended genocide of the Palestinian people, the Israeli government has purposely selected and conveniently installed the Orthodox Jews to commit the mayhem and carry out the vicious deeds. The ever-alert and just-around-the-corner police and military forces always arrive too late to halt the crimes committed against Palestinian villagers. No matter how severe the crime, the criminals, are rarely apprehended, and if apprehended, never severely punished.

After decades of suffering under extreme oppression, with no end in sight, with oppressors who could live as well in other places, the destruction of the Palestinian people has unique qualities that defy rational thought. Particularly unique is the Western world’s assistance to the destruction, where, for the first time in history, external forces support and encourage mass violence against an established community, done in solicitation from Israel and in cooperation with foreign groups.

Examine the attacks from the promotions by the underwriters to the actions of the perpetrators and we learn that the attacks are a conspiracy of the unsettled and the deadly strikes on the Palestinians reverberate throughout the world; we are all menacingly affected and do not realize it.

Religious Right evangelists, multitudes of Jewish organizations, compromised political hacks, and the easily deluded, without compunction and without care of the damage they do to others, actively assist Israel in its deliberate repression of the Palestinians. The calamities that these partners in crime inflict upon the Palestinians are identifiable; their effect upon much of the rest of the world’s population is not understood. Political and policy subversion, financial corruption, moral degradation, harmful machinations against individuals that feature false charges of anti-Semitism, indoctrination, and unnecessary military actions are some of the calamities perpetrated against American citizens.

Military Actions

In the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government fooled its population and Americans suffered casualties from the treachery. The “intelligence assessment” that Sadaam Hussein was prepared to finalize the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and visit them upon the United States proved false and the reasons for the invasion were a hoax. Not revealed was that the hoax was a hoax. The George W. Bush administration’s reason for the invasion was not due to its fear of Hussein acquiring advanced weapons of mass destruction, it was due to the Israel-friendly neoconservatives — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, and Elliot Abrams — convincing the administration that a strong Iraq could become the central military power of the Middle East, be able to confront Israel, and should be defeated. How do we know this?

It is ridiculous to assume that a government and its intelligence agencies could believe that Sadaam Hussein was “secretly creating biological agents using mobile laboratories in “road-trailer units and rail cars.” Laboratories for biological agents are fixed in tightly controlled and specifically designed buildings to maintain clean air and prevent escape of the deadly agents. How was this “secret operation” discovered? It wasn’t; it came from a supposed interview by German intelligence with one person, an Iraqi dissident, Rafid Alwan, known as Curveball. CNN investigated Curveball.

Just days after Powell’s presentation, U.N. weapons inspectors presented evidence they said disproved those claims. But six weeks later, on March 20, 2003, the United States launched its invasion, toppling Hussein’s government in three weeks but locking itself in a war against an insurgency that has cost more than 4,000 American lives.

… No biological weapons, no germ labs, no weapons of mass destruction of any kind were found in Iraq after the invasion.

… Subsequent U.S. investigations into the intelligence failure around the claims found that German intelligence considered the defector “crazy” and “out of control,” while friends said he was a “liar.”

Did Saddam Hussein try to acquire uranium yellowcake or aluminum tubes for developing nuclear weapons? He did not, but even if he did, the Iraqi leader did not have the equipment for enriching the uranium. What did he need and how long would it take to enrich the yellowcake? Iran claimed to have converted a few tons of yellowcake in 2004 and they still do not have sufficient uranium for a nuclear weapon.

Why did the U.S. government and its expert intelligence agencies believe Hussein was manufacturing biological weapons and seeking material for making a nuclear weapon? They could not and they did not believe the ridiculous propositions; it was just a way to trick the populace into thinking evidence was available that proved Hussein sought weapons of mass destruction and to justify the invasion without disclosing the real reason.

The neocons were intimately involved with Israel and promoted Israel’s interests. They had already produced a 1996 policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” for Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the document recommended the removal of Saddam Hussein. Couple the fact that the United States had no reason to attack Iraq with the constant urgings by the influential neocons in the Bush administration to topple Hussein and we have the reason for the unreasonable invasion of Iraq.

International Terrorism

International terrorism has caused havoc to Americans. This violent phenomenon would exist apart from Israel, but Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians has strengthened the terrorist ranks. How has Israel contributed to international terrorism? Osama bin Laden clarified that conjecture

“Osama Bin Laden Warns America,” CBS News by Joel Arak, October 30, 2004:

He (bin-Laden) said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital.

“While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women,” he said.

From Lawfare

Recently declassified information from the first-ever interrogation of someone presumed to be a senior al-Qaeda operative captured after 9/11 provides dramatic new insights into Osama bin Laden’s plans for a follow-up attack to Sept. 11. Specifically, bin Laden was plotting a major attack in Israel, a move consistent with his obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict and U.S. support for Israel. The attack was thwarted at the last minute.

The Middle East Institute connects Israel to the rise of Jihadists

A number of jihadist groups have made Palestine a central tenet of their political goals. Over the years, Al Qaeda, one of the most powerful global jihadist outfits, has often mentioned Palestine in its various communications.

… Consequently, the [ISIS] narratives target the United States, as a key ally of Israel and a direct contributor to the plight of the Ummah. Several European nations, along with Australia and Canada are also criticized for their recent calls to boycott the United Nations conference on racism — aimed at demonstrating Israel’s apartheid on Palestinians.

Financial

The American public rebels at swollen government budgets, huge government deficit spending, and punishing government debt, all intended to help the American nation, and refrains from voicing anger at the unnecessary government contributions to the foreign nation of Israel and its people.

As part of an agreement, signed by former president Barack Obama in 2016, the U.S. taxpayers pledged to give the Israel war machine $3.8 billion annually until 2029. The agreement releases Israel from budgeting funds for its military and diverts those funds to build settlements. In effect, Obama told Netanyahu, “You build the settlements and we’ll supply the weapons for militarizing them.”

As of Mar 1, 2023, the Congressional Research Service documents that the “United States has provided Israel $158 billion in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding.” The Jewish Virtual Library has a similar figure of $152 billion until the year 2022.

Unknown to most of the American public is how it subsidizes the settlements. The Washington Post had  a revealing opinion story on the subject

From 2009 to 2013, more than $220 million was sent across the ocean and into schools, synagogues and playgrounds dotting the hills of Judea and Samaria. Millions of tax-subsidized dollars have gone to Jewish settlements in Hebron, helping to sustain a grim reality in the segregated part of the city, where Palestinian movement is sharply restricted and their economic life has been suffocated.

Political System

In 2020, 28% of voters referred to themselves as white evangelicals. Overwhelmingly, they cast their votes for Republican candidates. The two most important issues for these churchgoers are Right to Life and support for Israel. The former is more talk than walk; candidates who run on a platform that includes women’s rights to abortion have done well. The later issue, which is losing adherents in a younger bloc of the “saved,” serves Israel well; many politicos have lost the evangelical vote and elections because they lacked unwavering support for Israel. Trump would be in Nowheresville if he defied the evangelicals and criticized Israel.

Led by Pastor John Hagee, founder and chairperson of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), dozens of spokespersons for the evangelical community spend prime time praising Israel to the faithful. In 2013, a Pew poll showed that 82 percent of white evangelicals agreed with the statement, “Israel was given by God to the Jews.”

Former Israel Prime Minister, Menachem Begin courted the American evangelicals and Benjamin Netanyahu solidified the courtship after meetings with the most popular evangelical personalities, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Each July, thousands of conservative evangelicals gather in Washington, DC for an annual summit of CUFI. Besides voting massively for candidates who support Israel, estimates have the conservative evangelical community contributing between $175 and $200 million annually to apartheid Israel.

The evangelist community votes are insufficient to assure Israel gets its chosen candidates into office. Individual Political Action Committees (PAC) operating under the umbrella of The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), pro-Israel groups, such as United Democracy Project (UDP), Democratic Majority for Israel, Republican Jewish Coalition, and Pro-Israel America, and wealthy Jewish individuals supply campaign contributions in big numbers. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, gambling casino operator, “Sheldon Adelson, and his wife, Miriam, spent $123 million on the 2018 midterm elections, all of it benefiting Republicans.”

PACs allied with AIPAC “poured more than $24m into defeating Democratic primary candidates critical of Israel. Last month it celebrated defeating former congresswoman Donna Edwards, who was the favorite to win a Maryland seat until the UDP spent $7m to unleash an advertising blitz against her.” The UDP also spent more than $4m to defeat Andy Levin, an Israel supporter who “dissented from AIPAC’s support for hardline Israeli policies,” in the 2022 Democratic primary for a congressional seat in northwestern Detroit.

No argument with individuals and PACs legally contributing to the campaigns of candidates they favor and feel will propose policies benefitting the American people. AIPAC and its allied Jewish organizations and individuals contribute to the campaigns of candidates that favor the policies that benefit a foreign government, Israel, and, often, purposely steer elections for one narrow reason — to defeat candidates who may be rewarding to the American electorate but criticize Israel.

Reshaping U.S. policies

In 2010, the FBI uncovered 10 unregistered Russian agents living in the U.S. as ordinary citizens, engaged in harmless activities, such as meeting people in high places in order to influence their attitudes and reporting American views on foreign and domestic affairs to Moscow. Multiply the number of discovered Russian agents by thousands and you will have the number of Israeli expatriates in the U.S. who do the same for Israel and more; by becoming U.S. citizens they vote for Israel-friendly candidates.

In 2014, the Israeli government ministries and the Los Angeles-based Israeli American Council, which represents Israelis across the United States and promotes their interests, estimated between 500,000 and 800,000 Israelis lived in the U.S., about 150,000 living in the New York area, 120,000 in Los Angeles, and 80,000 in Miami. What are the more important voting areas in the United States? New York, California, and Florida are significant. Enough dual-citizen American-Israelis can shape the ballot in those regions and may have done that in Florida during the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Has Israel purposely selected citizens to emigrate to the United States and influence voters? I have known Israelis living and working in the United States. They have invited people into their homes and propagandized for Israel, persuaded synagogues to display the Israeli flag, and collected statistical information for Israel. Others went to Israel, became allied with a known Israeli institute, returned with a grant from a Jewish institution, and, due to previous ties with a recognized Israeli institute, became scholars at recognized think tanks.

Aside from its allied PACS efforts to steer American elections, AIPAC’s function is to lobby Congress. Funding annual trips to Israel for senators and representatives is an essential part of the “wooing” of Congress. According to Legistorm, “AIPAC’s charity arm has spent $15.7 million on congressional visits to Israel since 2000. On gift travel disclosures, AIPAC says the purpose of these trips is ‘educating policymakers about the U.S.-Israel relationship.’”

At its annual convention in Washington, which important congressional leaders attend, AIPAC displays its influence in shaping the federal government and its policies. During the Covid epidemic in 2020, AIPAC convention speakers included Vice President Mike Pence, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker, Democratic Rep. Nita Lowey, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. These influential political figures must have a reason (getting elected?) for paying homage to the Lobby for Israel group.

Harmful machinations against individuals

Unable to respond to the obvious reality of an Israel built upon the theft of Palestinian lands and oppression of the Palestinian people, Israel’s supporters resort to slander and vicious attacks on Americans to deter the population from understanding the Middle East crisis.

Canary Mission, AMCHA Initiative, anti-Defamation League, and other Jewish organizations ferret out groups and persons that support the Palestinians and harass and defame them with the usual charge of anti-Semitism. The attacks lead to the proposition that Anti-Zionism equals Anti-Semitism, an identity that has become the final resting place of the word “anti-Semitism.”

Stealing another community’s lands, ethnically cleansing a population, and instituting a severe repression that terrorizes the communities, makes them immobile, purposely denies agriculture, water rights, and fishing rights, willfully ruins cherished olive and orange groves, interferes in acquiring livelihood and employment, and reduces ontological security, which defines the Zionist intrusion into the land of Palestine, is a Goddamn awful way to behave.  Being against Zionism is a positive and meritorious action. No sound person can argue with that recommendation.

If anti-Zionism is a positive and meritorious action, then the equation anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism indicates that anti-Semitism is a positive and meritorious action. Can that be? No, it cannot be, and Israel’s supporters are guilty of defaming Jews and should be taken to task for their insistence that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism. Or, maybe this shows the unworthiness of the word anti-Semitism, that it is not a word to describe hate; it is a hateful word used to prevent debate and harm people.

Moral degradation

Pro-Israel organizations have used nefarious methods to skew voting patterns, manipulate the American mindset, and prevent legitimate debate. They have made a mockery of American democracy and allied Americans as partners in an intended genocide of the Palestinian people. Instead of focusing on China and Xinjiang, the U.S. authorities should focus on Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Or, maybe the government and media purposely shift the focus to China in order to divert attention from Israel?

Conclusion

The manner in which the Israeli settlers have inflicted their deadly operations on the Palestinians characterizes the happenings in an insane world. Imagine someone running through the streets, injuring innocent pedestrians and onlookers saying, “That’s not nice, you shouldn’t be doing that and others saying, “How can I help? And, when you’re finished, come over for a cup of coffee.”

Everything should be done to stop this madness; too little has been done and that little has been ineffective. The reason for this deficiency is obvious, a thought exists that bringing Israel to the Court of Justice harms the Jewish people and Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that preventing harm to the Jewish people is a priority. Just as anti-Zionism equates to anti-Semitism is an oxymoron, “bringing Israel to the Court of Justice harms the Jewish people” is also a contradiction. The Jewish people have already harmed themselves and should stop harming others. Helping other people is a high priority in a moral world. Helping the Palestinians to escape destruction is one of the high priorities. Accomplishing that task will not harm the Jewish people; it will prevent an eventual moral and physical destruction of the people of the book, a win-win proposition for all participants in the crisis.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!

– 2 Samuel 1:25

Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr., leader of a megachurch in Lynchburg, Va. since the 1960s, founded Liberty University in 1971. In 1979 he founded the Moral Majority as a political movement opposed to abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and liberal, socialist thought; it was dissolved within a decade due to competition, infighting and mounting irrelevance. But the university became maybe the world’s largest Christian academic institution, with tens of thousands of resident and online students.

Falwell died in 2007 and his oldest son Jerry Jr. (then 46) was appointed as his successor as LU president. (The second son is a pastor at a large church attached to the institution.) A University of Virginia-trained lawyer, Falwell was not a minister but active in the Evangelical community and had been selected by his father to maintain his policies. The university retained its strict bans on homosexuality, premarital sex in general, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, etc.

Fast-forward to 2012 when Jerry Jr. and his wife Becki were vacationing in Miami.

There she met a handsome pool attendant named Giancarlo Granda (20) and invited him to have sex with her. He agreed and met her later at a hotel where she offered him whiskey and introduced him to her husband sprawled out on the other bed. Falwell assured him that he didn’t mind him pleasuring his wife and told him that he should just “go for it.”

Granda states (to CNN’s Anderson Cooper) that the couple seemed accustomed to this type of activity and recruiting young men for this purpose. He did not know at the time who who they were. But this became a regular thing for some years, Granda telling Reuters that the trysts took place “multiple times per year” from 2012 to 2018 at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells’ home in Bedford County, Virginia. Meanwhile the Falwells made Granda a business partner in a gay-friendly hostel in South Beach now co-owned by Jerry’s son Jerry Falwell III (known as Trey).

Falwell in recent days acknowledges that Becki had relations with Granda but states that he himself was “not involved” whatever that means. Granda for his part says Falwell is now “throwing his wife under the bus.”

These revelations came after embarrassing reports of Falwell’s attendance at rock concerts, evidence of drinking, sharing nude photos of his wife with male confidants, and the unzipped photo on social media. A Liberty University student claimed that when he stayed over at the Falwell home (after a band practice in 2008 when he was 22), Becki “was the aggressor” in joining him in bed and performing oral sex on him. In the wake of such reports the Trustees forced Falwell to step down from his position, exposed as a total hypocrite.

*****

Now, what does this mildly interesting tale have to do with Donald Trump?

In 2016 Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen did some work for the Falwells, trying to “retrieve photos” in the possession of a former friend of Granda’s involving the couple’s relationship to him. This suggests that Trump himself knew that the Falwells, like him, had sexual baggage they needed to conceal. He was perhaps happy to lend his “fixer” Cohen help in return for some kind of “deal.”

Trump was invited to deliver a speech at Liberty University on January 18, 2016. It was a major event in the campaign, a rare semi-prepared talk (as opposed to his typical rambling homily). That’s the address in which Trump famously cited a verse from “Two Corinthians” occasioning a ripple of laughter among the students at the mandatory assembly.

“Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame. … Is that the one you like? ‘” asked the smirking president, who proceeded to quote it with affected gravity: “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

The pandering reference to the school’s motto, the failure to address the meaning of the Bible verse, and misidentification of the text’s very title (Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians, or for short Second Corinthians) indicated that Trump had minimal understanding of, or sensitivity to, the Christian religion.

But Falwell on Jan. 26 issued a ringing endorsement of Trump. “In my opinion, Donald Trump lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the great commandment,” he declared. “He cannot be bought, he’s not a puppet on a string like many other candidates … who have wealthy donors as their puppet masters And that is a key reason why so many voters are attracted to him.”

I can’t help but wonder what the pool-boy who’d been servicing the Falwells for over three years thought when he heard that about Trump’s life of loving and helping.

This ongoing scandal kind of recalls the affair of the megachurch evangelist Ted Haggard and male prostitutes in 2006, and TV evangelist Jim Swaggart with prostitutes in 1991. Such events can disillusion believers.

Yes of course Christians believe in forgiveness, because God is infinitely forgiving (1 John 1:19). Disgraced evangelists usually bounce back and retain their fan bases and income flow. But exposed hypocrisy has contributed to the sharp statistical decline of Christianity in this country. It has dipped while support for gay marriage (that central target of the religious right) has become generalized.

Liberty University is in my opinion a fundamentally reactionary institution, requiring of its students a course on Bible-based “creationism” and another on evangelism; it is dedicated to the inculcation of an especially backward form of Christianity. I think it wrong to subject young minds to that kind of indoctrination. But those who want to do it should at least observe their own rules. What is the Liberty University student to think now, about the founder’s family?

The Old Testament is pretty clear about adultery (Deuteronomy 22:12) . But Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” As serious Christian students know this story occurs only in John (John 8:7) and not in the synoptic gospels. It has a Gnostic feel to it, in Jesus writing something in the dirt that causes the accusers to slink away. The usual interpretation is that Jesus was rejecting the “old covenant” based on Mosaic Law (that among other things prescribed death for adulterers) and establishing a “new covenant” based on forgiveness and grace at the center of Pauline theology. (See the above-mentioned Second Corinthians, chapter 3).

So sure, the wife can be forgiven for her lustful sins. But the Bible doesn’t really address the cuckold fetish; it doesn’t say, “You must not let your wife have sex with another man while you watch.” There is “the sin of Onan” (Genesis 38:8) and that term has been used historically as a euphemism for masturbation. But the text actually refers to conscious withdrawal to prevent impregnation so it’s not really relevant here.

The Christian student can just accept the fact that we’re all born in sin and the Falwells have paid the price for their sins. At the same time the student might wonder why, if Falwell and his wife could have bi threesomes at a hostel, I can’t do that in my dorm? Or if he can watch and beat off, why can’t I?

That is, this episode both causes the Liberty University community to once again, as Christians always do, forgive sin–but it might also cause it to think more rationally about sexuality and in particular its institutional homophobia.

But sex issues aside, what do the Falwell’s business dealings tell you about capitalism? Christian students, can you really serve God and Money at the same time? (See Matthew 6:24). Why is Falwell retiring with a severance package of $ 11 million? And what does Falwell’s relationship to Donald Trump tell you about Christian evangelism and politics?

May all Liberty University students be asking these questions!

“How are the mighty fallen!” grieved David, soon to be king, after the death of his beloved Jonathan at the battle of Mt. Gilboa against the Philistines (1 Samuel 28). One doubts many will mourn the fall of a power-couple unmasked as hypocritical hedonists. But it’s an occasion to reflect on that fact that the Trump era has both elevated the Christian right to unprecedented heights and seen its most spectacular humiliation.

Liberty University gave Trump credibility among evangelicals. Now it itself is tainted by scandal. Falwell was among Trump’s most powerful Evangelical supporters. Now he is disgraced. Just as other major figures associated with Trump (like former campaign manager Stephen Bannon) are charged with serious crimes, Jerry Falwell, Jr. bites the dust. Meanwhile Trump’s older sister and a niece reveal Trump’s religiosity as a sham.

For those who fear that Trump relying on “Christian fascist” support will win the election, all this should be good news.

This article was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2020 at 7:08pm and is filed under Christianity, Donald Trump, Sexuality.