“People had sort of an assumption that if you carry the Falwell surname you’re bringing with you the Falwell brand of spirituality,” Jonathan Merritt, a religion writer and Liberty graduate who has known the Falwells since childhood, told me. Jonathan was seen as upbeat and pious, but Jerry, Jr., was different: a mercurial character who often reminded people that he was not a pastor. His lifework was left to his two sons: the elder, Jerry, Jr., became the president of the university the younger, Jonathan, assumed the ministry of the megachurch, Thomas Road Baptist, on the edge of campus. The elder Falwell died in 2007 and was buried in a hilltop memorial site at Liberty. He founded Liberty, in 1971, with the aim of graduating “champions for Christ.” He remains most famous for forging the Moral Majority, the evangelical political organization that helped to propel Ronald Reagan to the White House and placed the concerns of social conservatives at the center of the Republican agenda. Known as a winsome salesman fond of practical jokes, Falwell steadily won converts, filling successively larger halls, until he presided over a renowned Baptist megachurch and a national television ministry.
Jerry Falwell, Sr., made a humble start in the ministry in 1956, preaching to a few dozen worshippers in an elementary school and broadcasting a program called “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” on a Lynchburg radio station. The campus-seven thousand idyllic acres in Lynchburg, Virginia-is the cradle of a white evangelical dynasty that has shaped a half century of American politics. In truth, of course, Liberty is not just of the world but an engine of its power and ambition.
LIKE FATHER LIKE SON STRUGGLE LYRICS MOVIE
On weekend evenings, it’s common to see a couple watching a movie from opposite sides of a dorm-room window, on a laptop positioned such that they can both see the screen: Netflix and chill, Liberty-style. New students pledge to follow the Liberty Way: no having sex outside of marriage, no listening to music with lewd lyrics, no drinking. At Liberty, this detachment can start to feel literal. The delineation draws from Jesus’ warnings to his followers that they would never be fully at home until they reached the heavenly realm. Liberty students talk about “the world” a lot, as something that exists elsewhere, apart from them-a sinful realm that demands engagement but should not be trusted or imitated. Schultz grew up in a military family and moved around often as a child she became “born again” at the age of six. “We need to be careful not to be like the world,” a twenty-one-year-old engineering student named Elizabeth Schultz told me.
LIKE FATHER LIKE SON STRUGGLE LYRICS PATCH
In the opposite direction, an enormous “L.U.” monogram is emblazoned on a green slope a few hills away gleams the white patch of the school’s year-round ski park. Looking west, beyond the school grounds, you get the feeling that there is nothing but hilltops melting slowly into the heavens. Packs of youth roam tidy walkways, tossing balls and toting Bibles. There is something dreamlike about Liberty University’s campus, with its neat rectangles of lawn and academic buildings so new that they could be a stage set.
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