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French Friday: Falwell & the Fruit of Evangelical Leadership


He was the president of the largest Christian university and an influential political voice for millions of evangelicals. In a lengthy new Vanity Fair profile, however, Jerry Falwell Jr. now says he has contempt for “organized religion” and “religious elites.”


David French and Skye Jethani discuss the shocking claims Falwell makes about Liberty University, how he lived a double life, and what his downfall says about American evangelicalism. Do Falwell and other disgraced leaders represent a bug or a feature of evangelicalism, and are ministries protecting bad or abusive leaders because they’re focused on the wrong fruit? Then, what’s the Electoral Count Act of 1887, and why is reforming it essential to protect American democracy?


0:00 - Start

0:21 - STORY 1: Vanity Fair profile of Jerry Falwell Jr.

4:17 - Falwell in context

8:16 - Victim or villain?

13:16 - Broader institutional implications

21:05 - Bug or feature?

27:14 - Measuring the wrong fruit

47:19 - An antidote: Being known

53:22 - STORY 2: Electoral Count Act reform

1:06:33 - End




9 commentaires


Bruce
Bruce
08 févr. 2022

Really loved this podcast. I appreciated the humility of both of you. Paul encouraged Timothy to watch his life and doctrine closely. We must watch over our lives and reflect the Spirit’s fruit in our life. We must watch over our doctrine so we can rightly divide the Word of Truth. Between this and the Holy Post you have spent significant time on people in evangelical leadership that have crashed because they haven’t watched over their life. Could you spend some time on those who haven’t watched over their doctrine? I think especially of the Rob Bell’s and some others in what was once in vogue, the emergent movement. My church planted Mars Hill in Grandville and as an …

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C Greg Carroll
C Greg Carroll
23 févr. 2022
En réponse à

Your problem there, Bruce, is that French, Gerson, Wehner, and other evangelical thought leaders, when there is a choice to be made, choose to come down on the side of woke progressives and often to the castigation of traditional values evangelical conservatives. I’m not calling these guys progressives but they are way, way, unquestioning of the mainstream media whose favor they seek and from whom they sometimes receive their paychecks.

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DFH
DFH
02 févr. 2022

Very much appreciated Skye's example of Moses in the Desert of Zin, and whether God values "results" as we seem to do.

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Andy Kirschenman
31 janv. 2022

One of your best. The part where you meld the Fruit of the Spirit with Truth is what I have been waiting for from you guys. The past statements of 'truth is not a Fruit of the Spirit' were incomplete because they didn't really place where truth fit in. I think we all had an idea where you were going but it felt not quite fully baked. But this podcast you brought it all together and the toothpick came out clean!

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Mark Norman
Mark Norman
31 janv. 2022

Seems like Skye is on a Jonathan Haidt kick. You've brought up Haidt in the last two episodes. Let me give you a word of caution before you go too deep down that rabbit hole of nothingness.


The coddling book is intriguing for a moment but can't stand up to scrutiny. One example given talks about how the number of speakers that were disinvited from post-secondary institutions has risen"alarmingly", and uses a graph to scare the reader into thinking censorship in universities is a growing problem.

However, take a look at the Y-axis on that graph, The increase tops out at 40 the year after the country lost its collective mind (2017), and immediately dives back to normal. Now consider…


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Smiley (Stage name)
Smiley (Stage name)
29 janv. 2022

For your 500th episode you should print out a script of the first episode and do a reboot.

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