https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/01/inside-jerry-falwell-jr-unlikely-rise-and-precipitous-fall
Looking back, Jerry said that his father’s peripatetic lifestyle provided a reprieve from an oppressive marriage. “My dad wanted to travel the world as an escape,” Jerry said. He recalled that his mother’s provincial worldview grated on his father. “She wanted to live a small-town preacher’s life. She didn’t let him mess around,” Jerry said. Divorce was out of the question. According to Jerry, his dad found ways to take the edge off at home, even though Macel never allowed alcohol in the house. “Sometimes he would drink a whole bottle of Nyquil. He called it Baptist wine,” he remembered. Jerry grew up to learn that he too could have a private life that didn’t align with his public persona. [...]
It was a confusing and lonely time for Jerry. Needing a distraction, Jerry offered to help his father do research for his forthcoming autobiography. What he found was a revelation: Jerry wasn’t the black sheep after all. His religious father was the aberration. The articles revealed that the Falwells descended from a long line of rabble-rousers, drunks, and nonbelievers. His paternal great-grandfather, Hezekiah, was an avowed atheist and dairy farmer. His paternal grandfather, Carey, was a notorious bootlegger, or as Jerry put it, “the ultimate entrepreneur.” Jerry’s great-uncle Garland was an alcoholic and drug addict. During Prohibition, Carey and Garland promoted cockfights and distributed illegal whiskey. The brothers later got rich owning bus lines, gas stations, a nightclub, and a hotel where they kept a bear chained up for drunk tourists to wrestle.