NESTLED IN THE foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the city of Lynchburg, Va., is best known as the home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. As the city’s largest employer, Liberty wields extensive influence: Its campus is home to more than 16,000 in-person students in a city of around 80,000. (Liberty’s online programs bring its total enrollment up to a staggering 140,000 students, making the fundamentalist Christian school one of the country’s largest institutions of higher education.)
Christian televangelist and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell Sr., born in Lynchburg, launched the Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967 as a segregation academy, followed by an early version of Liberty University in 1971. Falwell’s organizations and television presence formed generations of Christians through fundamentalist values and political organizing. After Falwell died in 2007, his son and successor Jerry Falwell Jr. sought to expand Liberty’s political influence. Falwell Jr.’s personal endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign helped swing the evangelical electorate; in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Liberty University was listed on the Project 2025 advisory board. For more than 50 years, Liberty has solidified its place as a powerful culture shaper, and Lynchburg has become the geographic epicenter of a major branch of white conservative evangelicalism in the United States.
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