‘Predictable acting out.’ Falwell’s sexual theology may have led to his downfall.

Jerry Falwell Jr. recently resigned as president of a large conservative Christian college, Liberty University, amid a storm of sexual accusations.

Among Falwell’s several misdeeds, it’s been alleged that he and his wife, Becki, maintained a sexual relationship with a much younger former pool boy.

Falwell says he wasn’t a participant in Becki’s admitted affair with Giancarlo Granda and that he’s forgiven her infidelity. Becki Falwell backs his account.

But Granda, the former pool boy, insists otherwise. He says Falwell not only knew about the relationship, but liked to watch his assignations with Becki, a fetish known as cuckolding.

I don’t know who’s telling the truth here, so I speculate with some trepidation and humility. Still, if I were a betting man, I’d bet on the pool boy’s version.

The same hyper-conservative, slash-and-burn worldview espoused by Falwell, his late father, Jerry Falwell Sr., and other ultra-conservative Christians sometimes leads to specific, ultimately predictable types of sexual acting out.

Theology has real-life consequences, and they extend to the bedroom.

I don’t say this out of condescension. I say it out of compassion for the Falwells—and for all of humanity. Whoever we are, Christians or not, conservatives or liberals, we’re all fallen. We’re subject to weird lusts and haywire hormones and general warpedness. Nobody’s immune. We’re all potential freaks.

But the theology of the Christian right makes its members especially vulnerable to a certain type of sexuality: one I think is grounded in shame and self-loathing.

Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at The Kinsey Institute, recently detailed research that suggests conservative men are substantially more likely than others to fantasize about sharing their wives or partners with other men.

According to Lehmiller, nearly two-thirds of heterosexual Republican men reported having this fantasy (compared with fewer than half of straight Democratic men). Thirty percent of Republican men said it’s a frequent fantasy. They also reported more fantasies about taboos such as swinging and voyeurism.

While the research wasn’t about conservative Christians per se, there’s a definite overlap, because fundamentalists and white evangelicals tend overwhelmingly to be Republicans.

None of this is to imply Democrats and liberals and atheists don’t have their own kinks. Lord knows they do. But they’re different kinks, the research shows.

Here’s my own unscientific interpretation of the Falwell allegation.

Fundamentalists and ultra-conservative evangelicals such as Falwell (as opposed to moderate evangelicals) are shaped by a religious subculture that focuses on sexuality almost to the exclusion of any other moral issue.

It’s obsessed with preserving young adults’ virginity until marriage. It’s horrified by any form of non-heterosexual orientation. It’s preoccupied with male leadership and men’s superiority over women and by traditional ideas of manliness.

Sometimes it even seeks to define for straight, married couples the specific activities they can or can’t practice with each other.

I remember a Lexington minister telling me he was in the midst of a new morality campaign. He’d begun pressuring the married couples in his conservative church to sign pledges promising to abstain from oral or anal sex. Such activities were homosexual in origin, he declared, and thus sinful even within marriage.

I don’t know how that campaign turned out. But I’d guess he didn’t achieve the results he’d hoped for and likely got some results he didn’t intend.

Once you become over-zealous about stopping some certain variety of sex, pretty much all you accomplish is to guarantee people will have more of it.

(A friend of mine, raised in a fundamentalist sect, claimed there was no sex as thrilling as sex that might send you straight to hell.)

Not surprisingly, interwoven with this stern theology of sexuality is a deep sense of shame—which paradoxically leads to even more deviance, which multiplies that shame.

That’s why I tend to believe the pool boy’s story of Falwell’s cuckoldry. It fits a mold I’ve witnessed up close, having grown up around that religious subculture.

The stronger the prohibition, the stronger the urge to transgress it. If you’re hounded to always assert your manliness and superiority, some rebellious recess of your soul will drive you to do the opposite. If you’re told your wife is weaker and it’s your duty to protect her, you may find yourself driven to debase her instead.

I emphasize here that the cuckolding allegation about Jerry Falwell Jr. might not be true.

If it is true, you’ve either got a self-loathing man who wanted to humiliate himself by watching his wife make love to a younger, stronger guy—thus denigrating his own manhood—or else you’ve got a vain, domineering man who doubled down on his wife’s supposed inferiority by coercing her into sex with the pool boy, thus shaming her.

Or possibly you’ve got both. It’s complicated stuff.

I decided long ago not to waste my breath preaching against sex. I didn’t think I’d accomplish much good and feared I might do great harm.

I decided instead to focus on God’s grace. Grace says we’re all squirrelly and messed up and prone to unwittingly harm ourselves or others, but fortunately the good Lord loves us anyway and takes us as we are.

That includes Jerry Falwell Jr., Becki Falwell and Giancarlo Granda. Bless their hearts.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.

This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 12:45 PM with the headline "‘Predictable acting out.’ Falwell’s sexual theology may have led to his downfall.."