The son associated with late evangelical titan may be embroiled in a scandal designed for reality television, however it’s not quite as tawdry as his Trumpian way to riches.

The instantly autumn of Jerry Falwell Jr. from high evangelical elegance seems in lots of ways like a Trump-era gloss in the fabled preacher intercourse scandals which have dogged our self-appointed Protestant moralists throughout the contemporary period. Rather than absconding having a church assistant like Jim Bakker or patronizing sex employees like Jimmy Swaggart, Falwell Jr. presumably upped the scandal ante by arranging a threesome together with his wife, Becki, and a pool child. And as opposed to adjourning straight into the fleshpots of urge, Falwell Jr. elected, apparently, to view; in a conservative motion very very long provided to deriding betrayers associated with one real faith as digital cucks, Falwell Jr. made a decision to go with the thing that is real.

When evidence that is photo of junior Falwell’s predilections surfaced, their perch atop the billion-dollar Liberty University kingdom he inherited from their dad had been swiftly threatened.

For connoisseurs of US spiritual scandal, there is a weird karmic symmetry to all of it, since Jerry Falwell Sr. had assisted broker a vital institutional alliance between their Southern Baptist denomination together with competing Pentecostalist faith as he assumed control of the beleaguered (and debt-ridden) preaching franchise of Jim Bakker, disgraced by his or her own dalliances with Jessica Hahn straight back when you look at the 1980s.

But as it is frequently the full situation with this name-brand Protestant preaching franchises, the salaciousness is essentially a sideshow—and right now, a fairly depressingly familiar one. It is not necessarily any longer surprising to see Falwell fils hoisted by their own tumescent petard than it absolutely was to master circa 2016 that his main governmental ally, Donald Trump, had been a serial intimate assaulter.