Friend of Liberty

About a month ago we received a letter from Jerry Falwell, Jr., the chancellor at Liberty University, an evangelical Christian university founded in 1971 by the late Dr. Jerry Falwell, Sr. The letter represents, in so many ways, the frustrations I have with LU in particular and the religious right in general. I will write more about that letter next week, but I thought it would be good to lay a foundation for my interest in Liberty.

I enrolled at LU in 1985. Our freshmen class was roughly 2500 strong, the largest freshmen class up to that point. The Moral Majority had become a strong political force in our country and LBC had just earned university status and had become LU. it was an exciting time to be on campus. I enjoyed my time at Liberty, learned much, graduated with a B.S. in 1988 and remained in Lynchburg until January 1989.

I knew when I enrolled that my worldview was different than Dr. Falwell’s. I used to cringe when he would review the university’s statement of faith during chapels and other gatherings. I believed most of it, but he would say …

“We believe in the pre-millennial, pre-tribulational return of Christ.”

One or two sentences is not enough to present my view, but I believe what most Christians believed until the early 1900s – Christ is reigning now over a spiritual kingdom and will return to earth but not to set up a political kingdom here on earth.

“pro Israel”

I have nothing against Israel but I think U.S. foreign policy is flawed because of an improper interpretation of Scripture. Anyone paying attention during the Presidency of George W. Bush should know what I’m talking about. I think every American should care about this but I also think Christians should be saddened by it. There are almost 2 Billion people in the world who will not listen to the message of Christ because America supports Israel no matter what the circumstances.

“pro strong national defense”

I also have nothing against a strong national defense, but including it as part of a university’s statement of faith always bothered me somehow.

I didn’t agree with everything Dr. Falwell stood for but I admired his dedication to his church and Liberty.

I have many fond memories of my college experience – fun times with friends, breaking rules, challenging authority, kidnapping the student body president – many of the same experiences others remember from college days, but there are three events I remember vividly because they helped shape my current worldview. I won’t bother to try and put them in chronological order but all of these can be dated with a bit of research.

I was on campus when a young man from another college contacted Dr. Falwell with a message he believed was from God. That message was to step down as leader of the moral majority and focus on his calling as pastor of a local church. I was impressed by Dr. Falwell’s decision to follow this young man’s advice. In retrospect, after all that I’ve seen over the last twenty years, I can’t help but wonder if there was more to that story than we were told. In any case, Dr. Falwell’s decision to focus on pastoring was the right one no matter how he came to it. This experience taught me that it is easy to be distracted by good things. If I have work to do I should do it without being distracted by other good things I could be doing.

I was running the campus radio station during the overnight shift one night during NCAA conference championship games. We never read news announcements overnight but I left the teletype running to keep tabs on the scores. Sometime that night I peeled the paper off the machine and began scanning for cities I knew were involved in the games. I noticed Charlotte, NC and stopped to read the story. Turns out that Jim Bakker had resigned from his position at his ministry due to some kind of sin and that our own Dr. Falwell was going to take over the ministry. I made the announcement over the air but to this day noone has ever confirmed that they heard that announcement. Our radio station was not very popular back then. The next day, Dr. Falwell confirmed the story in chapel.

I was not a supporter of Bakker’s ministry but I’d been to Heritage USA a couple of times and I knew that some good work was being done despite all the charlatan behavior and swindles going on. In the months that followed I heard many different sides to this story and I learned that things are not always as they seem.

The last experience came as a member of the College Republicans. I’ve been registered as Republican for most of my adult life but I’ve always considered myself more of a libertarian. I joined because, as one might imagine, it was a very popular group on the LU campus. It was exciting to be a member. At the convention it was always interesting to see how one or two very large groups of delegates could sway party decisions. Any party plank that did not have the approval of LU’s delegates was almost certain to fail unless George Mason’s group was in support.

It was during this time that I began to realize how flawed the political process can be. I was not completely naive when I joined but being a part opened my eyes to things that I’d not carefully thought through before. Our chapter, despite my best arguments to do otherwise, wanted to endorse George H. W. Bush as a candidate for President. This bothered me on so many levels that I still can’t shake the frustration.

It bothered me because Bush was in favor of what I considered to be a very totalitarian idea – a national curriculum for all schools in America.

It bothered me because Bush was endorsed mostly as a counter to Jack Kemp, who had been branded a “liberal” in our chapter. Kemp’s work with HUD had earned him this label. It seems that any Republican who supports a social program is immediately branded a liberal. I won’t try to justify the existence of HUD, but couldn’t we use a similar argument to brand Bush a liberal for his “national curriculum” idea? How is that a conservative idea?

It bothered me because Bush was clearly pro-choice and just pandering to the right wing by changing his stance. I’m pro-choice so I have no issue with that but I do have issue with a group that openly cares about one or two core issues and then doesn’t stick to them when political power is at stake. In my mind it was more important to Dr. Falwell to maintain his influence on government than to stand up for the issues he cared about.

Some of this is difficult for me to write because I have a lot of admiration for the good work Dr. Falwell did, but the fact is that I’m not proud of other things. Jim Wallis said it best when speaking to Dr. Falwell on Meet the Press in 2004

Jerry, there are millions and millions of Christians who want the nation to know that you don’t speak for them…