Brandon Ambrosino is a writer living in Delaware. His pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic and the BBC, among others.

Jerry Falwell Jr., invites me into the conference room in Liberty University’s executive suite. His oldest son, Trey, is there, mostly to observe; he doesn’t say anything unless Jerry or I ask him a question. He’s in learning mode. Next week he’ll be 27 years old.

Jerry apologizes for running late. It’s Monday morning. On Thursday night, he’ll deliver a speech at the Republican National Convention, and wanted to run it by a politician friend first. The friend claimed to write his own speeches, which Jerry was relieved to hear—that’s what he has decided to do, too. Jerry says he’s nervous: It’s his first time addressing a national political convention—although, he notes, he did give a speech to a gathering of Evangelicals last month at Trump Tower.


Earlier that day, I mentioned Jerry’s RNC speech to his brother, Jonathan. “I think he’s speaking on Thursday,” I said. Jonathan shrugged and said he didn’t know when it would happen. He didn’t seem angry or uncomfortable; just not all that interested. The next day, he would tweet that he was praying for Jerry “as he has the opportunity to speak on a pretty big stage at the RNC. Proud of him.”

Whereas Jerry Falwell Jr., has endorsed Donald Trump and emerged as his most prominent surrogate in the Evangelical world, his brother hasn’t taken a public position on any candidate.

Though the two aren’t at odds — in fact, they speak of each other affectionately — the division between the two sons of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell on the endorsement is a window into one of the biggest questions in Republican politics right now: Whether the Evangelical conservative movement can become the unified force it was under the Falwells’ influential father.

The division between the two sons of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell on the endorsement is a window into one of the biggest questions in Republican politics right now.

Donald Trump—proudly materialistic, thrice-married, and bungling his Bible quotes in public—has split Evangelical voters in a way that no Republican candidate has in modern memory. And the two Falwells—one openly political, the other far more hesitant to hitch his faith to a public endorsement—embody how that division is playing out. Not that they represent two extremes; they don’t. Rather, they represent different ways of navigating the often slippery tension between private faith and public policy.

Of course, that’s partly due to their respective positions. Jonathan is an ordained reverend; Jerry Jr. is not. Jerry Jr. is politically active; Jonathan is not. Jonathan leads Thomas Road, the Baptist church with some 15,000 congregants, which his father founded in 1956; Jerry Jr. helms Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the world, which his father founded in 1971. (Full disclosure: I’m a graduate.)

It’s an inheritance worthy of Shakespeare, as though Jerry Falwell’s two sons were each endowed with different aspects of his personality—one, the politically active trained lawyer and controversial manager of a movement; the other, the devout preacher who values piety and swears off fame in favor of ministry.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Jerry is going to make a point about the importance unity in America. “That’s something that the world needs to learn today,” he says: “that you can disagree and still be friends.”

***

So how did the chancellor of the world’s holiest college wind up endorsing Trump?

He nods knowingly. Clearly, this isn’t his first time taking the question.

Jerry says he got to know Trump after he spoke on campus in 2012, and he was instantly impressed. “The better acquainted I became with him, the more I was convinced that his motives were pure — he had nothing to gain from running for president.”

From where Jerry stood, it seemed as if all Trump wanted to do was make the country great. “He’s a real patriot. He loves the country, he loves the American people. And all people.” Some might disagree with that assessment: that Trump loves all people. In fact, Trump is widely known for his strict policy proposals on immigration — including his infamous temporary ban on Muslims — and his remarks that some of the Mexicans hopping the border were rapists and criminals.

Jerry is particularly respectful of what he calls Trump’s “business acumen,” drawing a comparison between the country’s current financial situation, and that of Liberty, which, according to Falwell, was at the edge of financial ruin for years. “We had to bring in the best lawyers, accountants, and executives to help pull Liberty back from the brink, to make it one of the most prosperous, successful universities in the world.”

Just as Liberty saw huge financial growth under Jerry, America’s economic instabilities will be turned around under Trump, he says.

There’s a lesson here, he continues — presumably for Christians unsure about Trump. “We didn’t have a litmus test for faith for the professionals we were bringing in. It was, ‘Who’s the best?’ That’s what this country needs. Financially, it’s on the edge of the cliff. We need someone with business acumen — not a career politician — but somebody who can do for this country what we did at Liberty.”

Jerry Falwell Jr. (right) hosts Donald Trump for a speech at Liberty University. | Getty

The more Falwell talks about Trump, the more obvious it becomes that he didn’t come to support him primarily for religious reasons — as some criticism has implied.

“Oh no,” says Falwell, laughing. “He happened to be on the right side of a lot of social issues. But we’re at a point where we have to save our country first and put our differences on other issues aside. We’ve got to be Americans first. We’ve got to pull together and unite. … We’re not at a point where we have the luxury of arguing over issues that are not paramount to our survival.”

There’s a tension here, between religious conviction and political expediency. It’s always a tough one to navigate, and people are sure to become enraged when any public figure plants a flag on either side. But some of Falwell’s critics, like Russell Moore, think the chancellor veered too far to one side.

“For years,” Moore wrote in the Washington Post, “secular progressives have said that evangelical social action in America is not about religious conviction but all about power. They have implied that the goal of the Religious Right is to cynically use the ‘moral’ to get to the ‘majority,’ not the other way around.”

Falwell’s and other Evangelicals’ endorsements of Trump, he concluded, “has proven these critics right.”

Jerry says his father sometimes angered conservative Christians with his political endorsements, most notably his endorsement of the Hollywood divorcee over the Baptist Sunday School teacher Jimmy Carter. “Dad was always that way: who’s the candidate that’s best for this country? We can debate theology later — that was his famous line. I kind of feel like that’s in my DNA.”

Rev. Jerry Falwell and President Ronald Reagan during a 1987 speech at Liberty University. | AP Photos

Not everyone buys the comparison.

“Trump is no Reagan, let’s be absolutely clear about that,” says Frederick S. Lane, author of The Court and the Cross. Beyond the two candidate’s clear character differences, he says, there’s a major situational difference: Reagan didn’t have any real competition within his party in terms of “values” candidates. There were no viable alternatives for Falwell to choose from.

Compare that with the contemporary GOP field, says Lane, which featured several presumptive nominees who were aligned with the kinds of family values the elder Falwell would have supported. Why, then, he asks, with Christians like Cruz and Huckabee and Santorum available, would Falwell go for Trump? His guess is that Falwell knew Trump was the one with the biggest shot of winning. Falwell made a practical, strategic decision.

It’s fair to say that Falwell is a different man than his father. But perhaps a better explanation for the endorsement is that Falwell’s epoch is different than his father’s.

Among the wider popular culture, Reverend Jerry Falwell’s legacy is shaped less by the school and church he founded; it’s defined by his political involvement, and particularly the Moral Majority. Established by Rev. Falwell in 1979, the Moral Majority was a coalition of conservative voters that organized to help elect politicians who they felt shared their Judeo-Christian values and cultural outlook. Ever since, the conservative evangelical vote has been a formidable bloc of the Republican Party.

If something like a Moral Majority were to be started today, it wouldn’t be able to call itself a majority. Issues that for the past several decades have been a rallying cry for Evangelicals no longer resonate with a wider audience. Same-sex marriage, abortion, pornography — these issues seem settled by the American populace, and any candidate who regularly airs moral reservations about them doesn’t stand a good chance with voters.

I asked Jerry what he thought of the uproar he caused when he and his wife posed with Trump for a picture in front of a framed Playboy magazine cover. Jerry was dismissive. “I thought it was silly,” he said. Indeed, to many people, it was, even if it was also a chance to mock a noted conservative who made such a public misstep. (The jokes virtually wrote themselves.) But others thought Falwell was too quick to dismiss a criticism that his father would’ve taken seriously.

Rev. Falwell in 1980: “We’re fighting a holy war. What’s happened to American is that the wicked are bearing rule. We have to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.”



In other words: Make America great again.

In 1976, after Playboy published an interview with then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in which he admitted to struggling with “lust,” Carter found himself on the receiving end of a harsh rebuke from Reverend Falwell. “Giving an interview to Playboy magazine was lending the credence and the dignity of the highest office in the land to a salacious, vulgar magazine that did not even deserve the time of day,” said Falwell.

Lane sees some hypocrisy in the whole fiasco, though it centers less on the Reverend’s issue with the cover and more on his response to Carter’s admission of personal struggles. ”How about Falwell supporting a guy who has not admitted he’s lusted in heart, but lusts after his daughter?!”

Still, Lane notes, times have changed. A scandal over an adult magazine will hardly ruin presidential aspirations today.

Jerry agrees. “There were times in our past that Evangelicals were defined by this or that social issue,” he says. But look at polls, he says — the social issues that used to be at the top of Evangelicals’ concerned list aren’t there anymore. “We’re at a point now when Evangelicals are just Americans, just like every other group you can think of, and we have to pull together,” says Jerry. “We’re concerned about borders, about terrorism, our jobs going overseas because of weak trade deals, the economy, and our debt.”

All of those issues, it should be noted, are things Trump promises to fix.

Robert Jones, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute and author of The End of White Christian America, sees a shift afoot within the religious right away from “values voters” to “nostalgia voters,” a term he’s defined in The Atlantic as ““a culturally and economically disaffected group that is anxious to hold onto a white, conservative Christian culture that is passing from the scene.”

The similarities the demographics share, Jones says, have to do with the rhetoric of a nation in crisis, and a hearkening back to simple times.

Take a sermon Falwell delivered to his church in 1980, on the importance of the Moral Majority: “We’re fighting a holy war. What’s happened to American is that the wicked are bearing rule. We have to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.”

In other words, Falwell wanted to make American great again. So does his son — and he chose the candidate who shares his dream.

For Jones, the interpretive key to this shift is Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas. “When he was asked about Trump, he didn’t try to make the argument that he was one of [the Evangelicals]. He basically said, ‘We’re at crisis point in this country facing external and internal threats, and I want the meanest SOB in the oval office.” That’s exactly where many Evangelicals are, says Jones.

“My father spent all those years building his brand,” the younger Jerry tells me. “I happen to be his namesake, and I also happen to be the president of the largest Christian university. I think I have a responsibility to be a good citizen. The least I can do is to lend my name and whatever influence I have to make a difference politically.”

The problem is: continuing his father’s brand doesn’t fall to one Falwell alone.

***

Where does the red hair come from?

Jonathan laughs. It’s not the first time he’s gotten that. From what he can tell, he’s the only redhead in his family.

Siblings Rev. Jonathan Falwell, Jeannie Falwell Savas, and Jerry Falwell Jr. walk toward the media for an interview after a viewing of their late father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, in repose on May 17, 2007. | Getty Images

“My dad was never a redhead, but he did have — when he was younger, whenever his sideburns would come down a little lower, they were actually red. But there are no redheads that we know of, and none of my kids have it. So I’m an oddball.”

His hair pops against the purple of his polo and the glassy blue of his eyes. He’s relaxed, legs crossed, in his desk chair. Behind him, the wall is invisible behind an enormous map. It’s not completely updated, he says, but it’s meant to show where his church has planted various congregations throughout the world — about 3,000 in the last eight years, he says. A handmade cross adorns the top of South America, a gift from a convert born in Bethlehem.

Jonathan doesn’t share his father’s public passion for politics — “I’m less interested in that, and more interested in the Gospel” — though he says he’s not a separatist. There have been many times, he says, that he’s spoken about current social issues from his pulpit.

One such example was the Sunday after the Obergefell decision, which established that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. He walked through Bible passages affirming male-female marriage: “God created marriage, not the state. So God gets to define marriage, not the state.” When he said that there would never be a same-sex marriage at Thomas Road so long as he was the pastor, the congregation gave him a standing ovation.

Then he turned his criticism onto the Christians in his pews. “We’ve been an institution that believes and celebrates that marriage is something to be honored among all people — until the going gets rough.” Christian participation in divorce and pornography, he said, destroy the sanctity of marriage as much as any Supreme Court decision ever could. He concluded by charging his congregation not to argue with gays and those who cheered the ruling. Rather, he said, “What we should be doing is displaying the love of Christ that drew us to him in the first place.”

Though some might disagree with his assessment, Jonathan says he learned this virtue from his father. “I know his faith drove him in everything he did.” That faith, says Jonathan, “very clearly tell us to love God, to love our neighbors, to love our enemies. That’s who [dad] was. It wasn’t just sermon fodder.”

Falwell certainly had enemies. Perhaps none moreso than Larry Flynt, publisher of the pornographic Hustler magazine. The pair’s very public battle culminated in a Supreme Court case. In 1983, Flynt ran a satirical advertisement in the magazine in which a parody version of Jerry Falwell “talk[ed] about his first time.” Needless to say, Falwell was livid and sued for libel, an invasion of privacy, and emotion distress. He won $150,000. Flynt appealed, arguing that Falwell was a public figure and that his satire of the reverend was protected free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously sided with Flynt.

Perhaps surprisingly, Jonathan recalls a fond story of his dad and Flynt. “I remember one time, we were down in Boca Raton. Dad was doing a debate with Larry Flynt. They were going at it, as they did, they had a lot of fun, and it was interesting to watch what took place. Afterwards, we went to a restaurant in the hotel and sat around a table — Larry and his wife and assistant, and dad and me sat there and had lunch. He and Larry were talking about baseball, talking about food. I was sitting there, kind of, ‘OK, this doesn’t make sense. They’re diametrically opposed to each other, but they’re sitting there talking like I’d talk to my best buds.’”

Rev. Jerry Falwell (right) and Larry Flynt with Larry King on the set of King’s CNN interview show, January 1997. | AP Photos

Jonathan’s confusion continued when Flynt offered them a ride back to Lynchburg on his private plane. “The whole time, Dad and Larry were goofing off and talking about baseball. When we landed, dad I had a good conversation with him. And when we were driving away, I said, ‘Dad, he’s the antithesis of everything you stand for and preach against. You’re acting like you’re best friends.’ And dad said, ‘We are friends.’”

That was when it all clicked for Jonathan: There’s a way to disagree that isn’t disagreeable. To him, that’s part of his father’s legacy.

“He brought a Christian worldview to disagreement,” he says. “Man, we could really use that.”

The atmosphere in America is certainly tense—perhaps more than it’s been in several decades. And much of that tension is centered on the man his brother is standing behind.

Jerry Jr. notes that when his father had a health scare in 2006, three people wrote his father letters wishing him well: Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and Larry Flynt. (Years earlier, in fact, Senator Kennedy, wrote Jerry Jr. a recommendation letter to University of Virginia’s Law School.) The point, he says, is that his father was able to disagree agreeably with his political opponents.

“That seems to be disappearing every day in American life and that’s sad,” says the younger Jerry. “We need a lesson in civility.”

In fact, that’s the theme of the night he speaks at the Republican convention: Make America One Again.

***

Jerry admits his brother probably “isn’t crazy about [him] endorsing Trump,” but says he’s never said a negative word about it.

There’s an easy temptation in writing this story: to pit the Falwell brothers against each other, to say one’s the pastor and one’s the politician, that one sees God as the hope for America and one sees a womanizing reality TV star as its savior.

But while that wouldn’t be entirely false, it wouldn’t be completely accurate. Sure, both men echo each other at certain times in their conversation, particularly when recalling their father and his ability to be friendly with political opposition. Both frame his legacy in terms of the church and school he founded. Both men, too, recognize his enormous, galvanizing political influence.

An immediate difference between them, though, is that Jonathan doesn’t seem to want to tap into his father’s political legacy. He’s “not that interested” in it. Rather than point someone to a candidate, he says, he’d rather “point someone to Christ.” Compare that Jerry’s endorsement of Trump, which is both a finger-pointing and a thumbs-up.

As Jonathan and Jerry point out, their father’s legacy transcended the boundaries of politics, church, and education. Jerry’s and Jonathan’s respective roles, on the other hand, are much clearly parsed out. The pastor is the pastor; the chancellor is the chancellor.

But whereas “pastor” comes with much stricter guidelines for public behavior, “chancellor” is a much more nebulous title — especially when it’s chancellor of a “Christian university,” which is in itself another difficult term to define. A political endorsement from a college president may be viewed skeptically, but now imagine the president just so happens to run the world’s most infamous Christian college, which was founded by one of the most controversial names in religious politics in the last half century.

There’s a difference between being a conservative Christian and being a Christian conservative.

Both Falwells are engaged in what might be called vocation negotiation — how can I stay true to my position when it brushes up against my political convictions and public expectations of me? But this isn’t unique to the Falwell brand: most religious voters go through that thought process.

Indeed, the entire arm of politics that has up until now been referred to as the Religious Right seems to be grappling with this question in front of the American public’s eyes. As Robert Jones, author of The End of White Christian America, points out, the tension is between Nostalgia Voters vs. Values Voters. To make things even more complicated, these categories have a good deal of overlap, and individual voters might honestly move back and forth between both identities.

There’s a difference between being a conservative Christian and being a Christian conservative. It’s the difference between using “Christian” as an adjective or a noun: a Christian who leans right vs. a Republican with a Christian vocabulary. The latter might use biblical language to couch her political beliefs, but she’s learned that very language simply by existing in a specific cultural milieu. This is not unlike the way Jane Austen believes Englishmen learn Shakespeare, whose “thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct.”

The distinction between conservative Christians and Christian conservatives is subtle, but it may help explain the current implosion and future trajectory of the GOP: The very public in-party brawl is between those constituents who wish Christian to be a noun, and those who are okay with it as an adjective — one whose font size, depending on the political goal of the day, might be downsized. If only in the voting booth.