Jerry Falwell Jr. Comes Clean, Tells All to Vanity Fair.

He was a crown prince of the evangelical movement but he tells Vanity Fair it was a scam.

“BECAUSE OF MY LAST NAME, PEOPLE THINK I’M A RELIGIOUS PERSON. BUT I’M NOT. MY GOAL WAS TO MAKE THEM REALIZE I WAS NOT MY DAD.”

For the first time, Falwell opened up about his true spiritual beliefs and how they diverge from those of his infamous father, who cofounded the Moral Majority and waged a scorched-earth cultural war for four decades. When I told Falwell that many people thought he, consciously or not, wanted to destroy himself, he considered it for a moment.

“Subconsciously, yeah, I believe that’s true,” he said, nodding. “It’s almost like I didn’t have a choice.” He went on: “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I was not my dad.”

...Looking back, Jerry said his dad adopted militant stands against drinking and homosexuality to prove to his wife that he would be a conservative Christian. “My mother was the only reason my dad became puritanical,” Jerry said. Jerry said his dad also knew that there was a lucrative market for such beliefs. “He became a different person to build a church and a school,” Jerry said. It was a point of pride for Jerry that his dad was friends with liberals like Larry Flynt, Ted Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson. “He really didn’t judge people,” Jerry said.  

...On the morning of May 15, 2007, Falwell suffered a massive heart attack at his desk and died. He was 73. Three days after Falwell’s death, Jerry had to speak at Liberty’s graduation in front of more than 15,000 people. “I was scared to death,” he said.

His anxieties only grew that summer. “It was the worst three months of my life. There was so much pressure on me to become somebody I wasn’t,” Jerry remembered. “I’d wake up each day saying, ‘How am I going to do this?’ ” As Liberty’s first family, Jerry and Becki became Christian celebrities overnight. “We had to put on an act,” Becki said. Of course, Jerry could have stepped aside if he didn’t intend to uphold the spirit of Liberty’s extreme social conservatism. But that would mean Jerry would have to give up the power and privilege the job offered. As president, Jerry flew on Liberty’s private jet and vacationed with billionaire donors. Jerry felt he had successfully compartmentalized his public and private identities for most of his life. Why stop then?

...Jerry said that being on the receiving end of evangelicals’ moral opprobrium has fundamentally turned him away from the movement. He believes in Christ, he said, but not the church. “Nothing in history has done more to turn people away from Christianity than organized religion,” he said.