Jerry Falwell Jr. has resigned as Liberty University president after a sex scandal involving his wife and a swimming pool attendant that rocked the white evangelical arena that strongly supports President Donald Trump.

“The Liberty University Board of Trustees acted today to accept the resignation of Jerry Falwell, Jr. as its President and Chancellor and also accepted his resignation from its Board of Directors. All were effective immediately,” the university said Aug. 25.

CNN reported that the embattled evangelical leader said he has resigned as president and chancellor of the Christian school, a day after reports thqat Falwell and his wife took part in a sexual relationship with a former hotel pool attendant.

“Jerry Falwell Jr. had long made a point of emphasizing that he was not trying to be a moral leader. He made crude jokes, insulted fellow Christians and was photographed partying on yachts and in nightclubs. But he rarely apologized or expressed regret,” commented The New York Times in a story, Jan. 25.

The BBC reported that Falwell was a long time supporter of Trump.

“I have never been a minister,” he explained on Twitter last year. He liked to tell reporters that Jesus did not tell Emperor Caesar how to run Rome.

“That was always an unusual stance for the head of a distinctly evangelical institution.

“But Mr. Falwell pulled it off until recently, coasting by on a combination of success — Liberty’s endowment grew to $1.6 billion under his watch — and good will engendered by lingering institutional fondness for his father, who founded the school and was both a minister and an administrator,” said the Times.

Jerry Falwell Sr. founded the private evangelical university in the U.S. state of Virginia in the 1970s as well as the conservative Moral Majority movement, a movement that campaigns on moral law.

Giancarlo Granda, 29, said he had an affair with Becki Falwell that started eight years ago. He claimed that she approached him when he was working as a pool boy at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami in March 2012, Christian Today reported.

“Explosively, he claimed that Jerry liked to watch the pair during their sexual liasons,” reported the Christian newspaper noting that Falwell denied the allegations.

“Becki had an inappropriate personal relationship with this person, something in which I was not involved — it was nonetheless very upsetting to learn about,” Falwell said in a statement to the Washington Examiner newpsaper.

Becki has admitted to the affair but refuted Granda’s claims that her husband watched.

At the Tree of Life Ministries, down the road from Liberty University, the senior pastor, Mike Dodson, did not have to look very far for sermon material about sin, redemption and what’s expected of a Christian, The New York Times reported on Aug. 25.

“You have watched one of the most influential leaders of this city, of the country and the world, the Christian community, go down,” Mr. Dodson said, bent with passion. “The Christian community is being laughed at.”

Christianity Today reported Aug. 25, “Falwell joins a regrettable list of prominent evangelical leaders brought down by sexual scandal.”

The newspaper said that critics also expressed frustration about the racial climate on campus, brought to the forefront by a divisive tweet in May that led several African Americans to cut ties with Liberty and dozens of African American alumni to call for his resignation.

When the novel coronavirus pandemic implanted itself into humanity there was a rush to online worship, evoking all sorts of predictions about how people would change the way they go pray.

A new piece of research by Pew on Aug. 17 showed that one-third of U.S. adults have watched religious services online or on television in the past month.

A little over half of them – or 18 percent of all adults – say they began doing this for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Of course, if you’re worshipping remotely, you can’t hug the other members of your congregation or shake hands with your minister, priest, rabbi or imam,” writes Alan Cooperman in the Pew analysis.

“But you can wear whatever clothes you want, turn up (or down) the volume, forget about traffic in the parking lot, and easily check out that service you’ve heard about in a congregation across town or even across the country.”

LOTS LIKE VIRTUAL WORSHIP

Pew finds that whatever the reasons, lots of people like virtual worship.

Nine out of 10 Americans who have watched services online or on TV in the past month say they are either “very” satisfied (54 percent) or “somewhat” satisfied (37 percent) with the experience/

A mere 8 percent say they are “not too” or “not at all” satisfied, according to the Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-July.

So what does this bode for the future?

By the time the COVID-19 pandemic has finally run its course, will Americans have lost the habit of going in person to a church, synagogue, temple or mosque? Asks Pew.

Some commentators have suggested that just as the pandemic has accelerated the trend toward shopping online and made Americans reliant on the internet for work, school, health and entertainment, so might many, if not all, varieties of religious experience move online in the 21st century.

But the Pew survey says that’s not what the people who’ve been worshipping online see in their future.

On the contrary, most U.S. adults overall say that when the pandemic is over, they expect to go back to attending religious services in person as often as they did before the coronavirus outbreak.

The reality is that few expect the pandemic to permanently alter their religious worship routines.

The survey dound that a substantial share of Americans (43 percent) say they didn’t attend religious services in person before the pandemic struck and they don’t plan to start going to a church or other house of worship when it’s all over.

But 42 percent of U.S. adults say they plan to resume going to religious services about as often as they did before the outbreak, while 10 percent say they will go more often than they used to, and just 5 percent expect to go less often.

Similarly, many Americans are not interested in virtual services.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults say they have not watched religious services online or on TV in the past month.

But among one-third of U.S. adults who recently watched services online or on TV, relatively few (19 percent of this group, or 6 percent of all adults) say that once the pandemic is over, they intend to watch religious services more often than they did before it started.