liberty university
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.
The Great Vigil of Easter in many Christian traditions is the pinnacle of the worship year. Held between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter, it heralds the return of Christ’s light to those living in the shadows. Christians sing the ancient Exsultet on that night only; Sojourners asked Latin teacher Kate Seat to provide a fresh translation of a portion of that prayer (with its delightful praise of “the mother bee”).
While the show's gossipy tone offers an entertaining portrait of the affection Falwell and his wife had for, shall we say, the things of this world, listeners may find themselves wanting more. I know I did.
After an invitation to pray with leaders at Liberty University, Shane Claiborne tweeted the university's response: A police letter threating arrest if he walks onto campus.
“At the time it was pretty unnerving, because I knew enough about Falwell’s authoritarian instincts,” Martin told Sojourners. “I wasn’t expecting this amazing welcome, but I certainly didn’t expect to be forcibly thrown off the campus.”
1. Northeast D.C. Gets a New Mural Honoring the Workers Who Built the Lincoln Memorial Statue
The mural features the African-American men who quarried the stones that built to memorial.
2. I’m a Historical Curator. Removing Confederate Statues Isn’t Erasing History.
He works to contextualize a statue of Jefferson Davis at a Southern University. Here, Ben Wright knocks down each of the arguments being made for keeping Confederate statues one by one.
Amid calls for President Donald Trump's evangelical advisers to step down from his Evangelical Advisory Board in the wake of the president's statements on last weekend's events in Charlottesville, one of those advisers, Jerry Falwell Jr., went on ABC's This Week to defend Trump and explain why he still supports him.
The Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, will be part of a planned task force on higher education, the White House confirmed. According to Falwell, who spoke to the Chronicle of Higher Education, he will be one of 15 college presidents who will participate. Falwell told Politico, “We haven’t had any substantive discussions on the issues yet.”
President Trump will deliver an “inspiring yet direct” speech on the need to confront radical ideologies during his upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia.
The speech will come during an afternoon lunch with leaders of more than 50 countries with mostly Muslim populations, White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster announced on May 16.
Donald Trump thanked conservative Christians for their votes, and promised to protect their values in his first commencement address as president, at evangelical stronghold Liberty University.
“In America, we don’t worship government, we worship God,” he said to raucous applause at the graduation, at the nation’s largest Christian university, on March 13, in Lynchburg, Va.
Jerry Falwell Jr., president of evangelical Liberty University and early supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump, said in an interview with Fox News' Jeanine Pirro on Friday that evangelicals "have found their dream president." The interview centered on how Trump was faring with evangelicals at his 100-day mark and pointed to the latest polling: Three-quarters of white evangelicals still back Trump, according to the most recent Pew Research findings, and that statistic is highest, at 80 percent, for those who attend church at least once a month. That's consistent with exit polling that found 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump.
The May 13 speech at Liberty’s football stadium in Lynchburg, Va., will be Trump’s first commencement address as president, but it won’t be his first at Liberty, which describes itself as the largest Christian university in the world.
The then-presidential candidate spoke last year at the university’s Convocation, promising, “I will protect Christians,” and famously stumbling over a reference to “Two Corinthians.”
The day before President Trump used his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast to promise a repeal of the Johnson Amendment, a bill was introduced in Congress to effectively do that. It has not yet been scheduled for debate or a vote.
The Free Speech Fairness Act is being touted as a “fix” to the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law that prohibits nonprofits from engaging in politics. But how much of a fix would the act be? Would it offer a First Amendment right of free speech to clergy — or trample the same First Amendment’s guarantee of a separation between church and state?
Some of my friends have been talking about giving up the “evangelical” label, because of what it has come to be associated with, in this year’s political campaign. I’m not ready to make that move. I spent a good part of the 1960s trying hard not to be an evangelical, but without success.
When I marched for civil rights during my graduate school years, I helped to organize “ban the bomb” marches and protested the Vietnam War. I was clearly out of step with much of the evangelicalism of the day.
Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. believes that Donald Trump “will become America’s greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”
But that wasn’t enough to persuade him to accept Trump’s offer to become secretary of education, he said.
Falwell told Religion News Service the decision was due to concerns for the health of his family and the university he leads.
As it is, white evangelicals made up a little more than a quarter of those who turned out to cast their ballots. And by winning 81 percent of their vote, Trump was assured the presidency.
Now, evangelicals are expecting much in return from a president-elect who did not mention God in his victory speech, who was “strongly” in favor of abortion rights until he was against them, who has said he does not believe in repentance, who has made lewd comments admitting to sexual assault.
A student editor at the Liberty Champion, Liberty University's student newspaper, is crying foul after his column was axed by university president Jerry Falwell Jr. The piece — part of a weekly column by sports editor Joel Schmieg — took aim at Donald Trump's so-called "locker room talk" in which the Republican presidential candidate bragged about being able to get away with sexual assault.
This petition clarifies that students want to have their own distinct voice to speak for themselves. Liberty is a place where this dialogue is possible, and even encouraged.
DeMoss told The Washington Post two months ago that the Republican front-runner’s insult-laden campaign has been a flagrant rejection of the values Falwell Sr. espoused and Liberty promotes on its campus.
In late April, the executive committee of Liberty’s board of trustees had voted to ask DeMoss to resign from the board’s executive committee, which he chaired, according to a statement he made to Patheos blogger Warren Throckmorton. Days later, on April 25, DeMoss decided to step down from the board as well, citing “a concern about a lack of trust.”
Liberty University’s board of trustees voted last week to allow students with concealed-carry permits to bring handguns into residence halls, reports NBC Washington.