Liberty University

Liberty University was founded in 1971 by Jerry Falwell Sr. and theologian Elmer L. Towns as Lynchburg Baptist College, an extension of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. The institution's founding vision was explicitly counter-cultural: Falwell wanted to create a fundamentalist alternative to what he saw as the liberal secular drift of American higher education — a university where the Bible was authoritative over every academic discipline and where graduates would be equipped to lead a Christian America. The name changed to Liberty Baptist College in 1976, and again to Liberty University in 1984, as the institution expanded its academic offerings and signaled broader aspirations. From the beginning, Liberty's existence was inseparable from Falwell's political project: the same year he founded the Moral Majority (1979), he was actively building Liberty into the institutional base for evangelical political organizing. Under Falwell Sr., Liberty grew steadily but remained financially precarious, at times facing serious debt. When Falwell Sr. died on May 15, 2007, the university enrolled approximately 27,000 students and had assets of around $259 million. Under Jerry Falwell Jr. (president 2007–2020), Liberty underwent a transformation of scale that made it a qualitatively different institution. The key mechanism was LU Online — Liberty's distance-education program — which grew from a small operation to enroll approximately 95,000 online students by 2016, alongside roughly 15,000 residential students. Liberty became, by total enrollment, the largest private nonprofit university in the United States and, by many measures, the largest Christian university in the world. Assets grew from $259 million in 2007 to over $2.5 billion by 2020. This financial scale had direct political consequences. It made Liberty's president one of the most powerful figures in evangelical institutional life, with the capacity to grant or withhold a credential of enormous symbolic significance: the imprimatur of the largest evangelical university in America. Falwell Jr. deployed this power most consequentially on January 26, 2016, when he endorsed Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, at a moment when Trump's evangelical authenticity was widely questioned. Liberty's academic programs directly serve the Religious Right's institution-building goals. The Liberty University School of Law (established 2004) trains lawyers in constitutional originalism with explicit religious liberty emphasis. The Helms School of Government prepares graduates for politics and policy work. Liberty's seminary and divinity school trains pastors, and its journalism program trains reporters for Christian and conservative media. The school's Graduate School of Business has ties to conservative Christian financial networks. Liberty holds accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACSCOC). Its residential Honor Code prohibits alcohol, tobacco, pre-marital sex, and LGBTQ expression. The institution's culture enforces a comprehensive conservative Christian moral framework as a condition of enrollment.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Education
• Political Strategy
• Politics & the Pulpit

Connections to Liberty University

• Jerry Falwell Jr. promoted (2007) — Falwell Jr. became Liberty's president upon his father's death in May 2007 and transformed it from a 27,000-student regional university ($259M assets) into the world's largest Christian university by enrollment (110,000+ students, $2.5B+ assets) through explosive online program growth. He resigned in August 2020 amid sexual scandal.
• Jerry Falwell Sr. founded (1971) — Jerry Falwell Sr. founded Lynchburg Baptist College in 1971 with Elmer L. Towns as an extension of his Thomas Road Baptist Church — a fundamentalist counter to secular higher education. It became Liberty Baptist College in 1976 and Liberty University in 1984.

Sources

• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 91–95, 249–265
• Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 30–45
• Billion-Dollar Blessings — ProPublica (2021)
• Virginia's Liberty transforms into evangelical mega-university — Washington Post (2013)