libU bak

capt 918<div>
</div><div>see fallwell jrm, advisory cncl=bb 6 23
liberty University's communications director Ryan Helfenbein says murderous dictators knew what they were doing when they shaped their education policies. See the video, which Helfenbein posted to his Twitter account, below.In an interview at a Faith and Freedom Coalition event, Helfenbein said, "This is an evangelistic movement on the left. And that's what's happening. It's indoctrination. They are proselytizing to the next generation. What we're discovering as parents and conservatives is, 'Wait a second! Education really is evangelism.' So if you don't control education, you cannot control the future. And Stalin knew that. Mao knew that, right? Hitler knew that. We have to get that back for conservative values."According to the website Inside Higher Ed, health, Helfenbein is the executive director of the <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2023/06/27/liberty-university-spokesperson-invokes-hitler" style="font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none;">Standing for Freedom Center </a>(formerly known as the Falkirk Center), which was founded by Liberty University's disgraced ex-president, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell_Jr.#Personal_life" style="font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none;">Jerry Falwell Jr.</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk#Promotion_of_falsehoods_and_conspiracy_theories" style="font-weight: 700; text-decoration-line: none;">conspiracy theorist Charlie Kirk</a>.=massive failure': Conservative Christian shocked by newest revelations on Jerry Falwell Jr scandalBrad Reed Raw Story January 25, 2022Conservative Christian David French this week found himself utterly appalled at scandalous new revelations surrounding Jerry Falwell Jr.'s tenure as the president of Liberty U=an 421l<a class="widgetheadline-text custom-post-headline" href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/jerry-falwell-jr-2652610261/" aria-label="Liberty University sues Jerry Falwell, Jr. for 'at least $30 million in damages' over sex scandal: report" data-type="text" style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" word-break="word-break" break-word="break-word" overflow-wrap="overflow-wrap" font-size="font-size" px="px" line-height="line-height">iberty University sues Jerry Falwell, Jr. for 'at least $30 million in damages' over sex scandal: report</a><div class="social-author clearfix" style="margin-top: 10px; color: rgb(31, 31, 31); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 17.6px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="social-authorname" href="https://www.alternet.org/author/alex-henderson" data-type="text" style="color: rgb(31, 31, 31); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; overflow-wrap: break-word; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.4; display: inline; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; position: relative; font-family: Cabin, sans-serif;">Alex Henderson</a></div><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body css-listicle-body-2652610261" style="margin-top: 10px; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; display: -webkit-box; color: rgb(49, 49, 49); text-overflow: ellipsis; line-height: 23px; -webkit-line-clamp: 3; font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; overflow: hidden; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="body-description">Before a sex scandal forced his resignation in 2020, former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. was among the most prominent White Christian fundamentalist evangelical...</div></div>==<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/falkirk/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/falkirk/</a>at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the Falkirk Center has been devoted to all things Trump—including the president's debunked conspiracy theories involving the 2020 presidential election. And according to <a href="https://thebulwark.com/the-falkirk-center-liberty-universitys-slime-factory/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Liberty University graduate Calem Best</a>, the Falkirk Center is such an embarrassment that even right-wing evangelical students want it gone from the campus.The Falkirk Center was founded by former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. and far-right Republican activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. Together, Falwell and Kirk promoted President Donald Trump relentlessly, which is ironic in light of the fact that Liberty University embodies a severe form of evangelical fundamentalist Christianity and Trump — according to his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, and many others — had extramarital affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal and paid them hush money to keep quiet.<div class="teadsNative" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div id="story_page_incontent_p2_target">In an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, Best explains, "If you're already thinking that a Fal–Kirk partnership sounds like the opposite of a good idea, you're correct. Liberty University is the Center's institutional home, providing it with funding, staff, office space, camera equipment, and tax-exempt status for receiving donations. In return, Falkirk churns out a steady stream of propaganda aimed at convincing Christian conservatives they are oppressed victims in society, church, politics, culture, child-rearing, and every other dimension of life."Falwell, Jr. was recently forced out of Liberty University, which was founded by his late father — the Moral Majority's Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr. — and the younger Falwell, according to Best, "is presumably now uninvolved with the Falkirk Center.""As one might expect, the Falkirk Center integrates its co-founders' specialties," Best explains. "From Falwell, a constant mixing of politics and religion and a nonchalant self-confidence. From Charlie Kirk, well, just memes and social media savvy. If you don't have the time or desire to engage with Falkirk's content, just imagine the Turning Point USA, #BigGovSucks style of graphics, but with less design acumen. Or PragerU, but with less sophistry and more naked appeals to religious nationalism."the  Falkirk Center has repeatedly promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that Trump really won the 2020 presidential election and was the victim of widespread voter fraud. In fact, President-elect Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive victory, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote."Much of Falkirk's content is facially ridiculous, deceptive, or easily debunked," Best observes. "But that's because Falkirk is not selling truth. Like any propaganda outlet, Falkirk melds partial truths with distortions to create a coherent worldview — one that comforts the audience while misleading it. There is no other way to explain the debunked claims of election fraud that Falkirk treats seriously, or the consistently shoddy interpretations of the Bible and history that would be considered sophomoric in Liberty's own undergraduate classes. The Falkirk Center doesn't even do a good job at creating alternate realities."Best adds that Falkirk "engages in revisionist mythmaking, implying that Jerry Falwell, Sr. started the Moral Majority to restore the morality of our nation, when in reality a power-hungry Falwell did it out of fury that he and his televangelist friends had lost tax-exempt status for thei...https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133" ...Falwell, Sr. was a major segregationist during the 1950s and 1960s, aggressively defending Jim Crow laws from the pulpit and insisting that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was unchristian for opposing them."The Falkirk Center is just another right-wing slime factory that undermines any good-faith conservative movement, and it's a slime factory that uses my alma mater and my faith as stamps of legitimacy," Best argues. " Like the hundreds of Liberty University students who recently signed a petition calling for Falkirk's dissolution, I've had to explain to countless people that I am not one of those Liberty University grads, not one of those Christians."Best, now a high school math teacher in Memphis, graduated from Liberty University in May 2020—and he founded an organization called Save71, described by The Bulwark as "an organization devoted to bringing reform to" the college he attended...."I don't put much stock in Liberty's board any longer, and it's disappointing that the former board chairman, who failed the school by letting Falwell run free for years, is now Liberty's acting president," Best explains. "But I remember when people told me that Falwell would be president forever, and they were wrong, so I have hope. The Falkirk Center should be excised like a tumor from Liberty University."... ARTICLES </div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div>=<a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/liberty-universitys-falkirk-center-celebrates-one-year-anniversary-as-fellows-promote-stolen-election-falsehoods-and-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/">https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/liberty-universitys-falkirk-center-celebrates-one-year-anniversary-as-fellows-promote-stolen-election-falsehoods-and-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/</a>liberty University’s Falkirk Center <a href="https://www.liberty.edu/news/2020/12/08/in-its-first-year-libertys-falkirk-center-establishes-firm-foundation-for-defending-faith-and-freedom/?fbclid=IwAR0oE-WPhIHN7mBixeB7Yl8JfEt0puEaSQpYBPXZ7MEmryvC6QNElSEkQk8" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">celebrated</a> its one-year anniversary this week. The Center describes its purpose as “educating, inspiring, and mobilizing Christians in the battle to preserve American liberty and rally citizens in an effort to shape government policies, national institutions, and American society through a Biblical worldview.”<div class="mce-content-body" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear;"><div class="layout-constrain--narrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 47.2222em; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">Like its bullying co-founders Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Charlie Kirk, the Center takes an aggressive posture in defense of a Christian nationalist vision and in opposition to secularism. “I don’t care what the winds of wokeism tell us,” said Executive Director Ryan Helfenbein in an <a href="https://www.liberty.edu/news/2020/12/08/in-its-first-year-libertys-falkirk-center-establishes-firm-foundation-for-defending-faith-and-freedom/?fbclid=IwAR0oE-WPhIHN7mBixeB7Yl8JfEt0puEaSQpYBPXZ7MEmryvC6QNElSEkQk8" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">article</a> on Liberty’s website. “We don’t just want to be an organization that barks; we want to be an organization that bites.”<p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">“The function and the moral mission of the Falkirk Center is to go on the offense in the name of Christian principles and in the name of exceptional, God-given American liberties,” says the Center’s website. “Accomplishing this end requires more than adding noise to the echo chamber. It requires an army of bold ambassadors equipped with Biblical and Constitutional knowledge to speak truth to believers and unbelievers alike in every professional field and public forum.”<p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">The leaders of Falkirk’s “army of bold ambassadors” are its <a href="https://www.falkirkcenter.com/our-team/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">fellows</a>, who include:<ul style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px 0px 0px 1.2em; line-height: 1.5; list-style: none;"><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">Kirk, head of right-wing youth organizing group Turning Point USA and a vocal ally of Christian nationalist and dominionist religious-right leaders. Kirk recently <a href="https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1334934350811471872?s=20" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">tweeted</a>, “There is more evidence of systemic voter fraud in America than ‘systemic racism’ yet which one do you think Democrats are more worried about?” He has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/us/politics/charlie-kirk-conservatives-coronavirus.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">portrayed</a> public health restrictions on church gatherings as a Democratic plot against Christianity.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">Sebastian Gorka, a Steve Bannon acolyte, pugnacious right-wing <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/sebastian-gorka-the-west-wings-phony-foreign-policy-guru-129772/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">pundit</a>, and former Trump White House aide.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">Eric Metaxas, author and pundit and promoter of pro-Trump conspiracy theories who will <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/eric-metaxas-will-emcee-national-right-wing-prayer-rally-to-overturn-presidential-election/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">emcee a right-wing rally</a> on the National Mall Dec. 12.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">Jenna Ellis, an attorney for Trump and the Trump campaign who has been joined at the hip with Rudy Giuliani as they press false and unsubstantiated claims that have been tossed out of one court after another; as special counsel to the religious-right Thomas More Law Center, she has represented churches defying COVID-19-related public health restrictions.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">David Brat, former member of Congress from Virginia.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">Darrell Harrison, a podcaster and dean of social media at Grace to You, a ministry of controversial outspoken evangelist John MacArthur.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">Virgil Walker, a pastor and seminary student who co-hosts Harrison’s “Just Thinking” podcast.</li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">David Harris, Jr., a right-wing social media figure who is on the board of Black Voices for Trump and Candace Owens’ BLEXIT.</li><li style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-bottom: 1em;">Erika Frantzve, a model, podcast host, “social entrepreneur,” and Liberty University doctoral student who recently <a href="https://www.thefocus.news/celebrity/erika-frantzve-charlie-kirk/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">became engaged to Kirk</a>.</li></ul><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">Among the first-year accomplishments cited by the Falkirk Center was its day-long “faith summit” called “Get Louder,” which <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/christian-reconstructionism-at-liberty-universitys-falkirk-center-get-louder-summit/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">featured Christian Reconstructionist Gary DeMar</a> as a speaker on a panel moderated by Metaxas.<p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">The celebratory post, written by Liberty communications staffer Logan Smith, mentioned that “Falkirk Podcast” guests have included Trump lawyer and national punchline Giuliani and Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who teaches that genuine Christians must adhere to a belief in a literal six-day Creation and a universe that is thousands of years old.<p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">It also placed the Falkirk Center firmly on the side of right-wing evangelicals who <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/cpac-panel-america-threatened-by-spread-of-social-justice-in-evangelical-churches/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">believe</a> that <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/thousands-of-evangelicals-denounce-social-justice-preaching-sparking-debate/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">conversations about social justice</a> and racism within the church are dangerous, <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pastor-warns-that-social-justice-is-evil-calls-on-southern-baptists-to-reject-it/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">evil</a>, and <a href="https://enemieswithinthechurch.com/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">enemies of the Gospel</a>. The article quotes a Liberty University parent praising Falkirk for “drawing attention to leftist thinking that is attacking the Church.”<p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">“The Falkirk Center fills a need deeply felt during this time of increasing wokeness and social justice inside the church, calling Christians and pastors to return to the true doctrine of God’s Word,” said Grant May, one of a growing number of Falkirk Center ambassadors from across the country, according to the Liberty blog post. “The center has inspired and encouraged me during the rising fad of cultural Christianity to truly dive into the Word and remember what Christ’s commands for the Church were, not modern-day pastors’ advice on how to be culturally relevant.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">The post also celebrates that the Falkirk Center “has consistently encouraged churches and pastors to defy” pandemic “lockdown orders.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;">The anniversary blog post included no mention of the Falkirk Center’s co-founder Jerry Falwell, Jr., the university’s <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/01/jerry-falwell-liberty-university-becki-self-dealing-sex-430207" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">disgraced</a> former president. The Falkirk moniker is a fusion of Falwell’s name and that of cofounder Charlie Kirk, who heads the right-wing youth organizing project Turning Point USA, as well as a <a href="https://www.falkirkcenter.com/why-falkirk/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">reference</a> to the battle of Falkirk, memorialized in the movie Braveheart.<p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; line-height: 1.5;"> <div class="at-below-post addthis_tool" data-url="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/liberty-universitys-falkirk-center-celebrates-one-year-anniversary-as-fellows-promote-stolen-election-falsehoods-and-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; line-height: 1.5;"><div class="layout-constrain--narrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; max-width: 47.2222em; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="tags" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; border-top: 5px solid rgb(239, 243, 243); margin-bottom: 2em; padding-top: 1em;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; font-weight: 700;">Tags: <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/charlie-kirk/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Charlie Kirk</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/darrell-harrison/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Darrell Harrison</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/david-brat/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">David Brat</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/david-harris/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">David Harris</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/eric-metaxas/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Eric Metaxas</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/erika-frantzve/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Erika Frantzve</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/jenna-ellis/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Jenna Ellis</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/jerry-falwell-jr/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Jerry Falwell Jr.</a><a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/sebastian-gorka/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Sebastian Gorka</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/virgil-walker/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Virgil Walker</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/christian-nation/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Christian Nation</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/topics/election-2020/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Election 2020</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/falkirk-center/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Falkirk Center</a> <a href="https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/liberty-university/" style="box-sizing: border-box; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform; transition-timing-function: linear; background-color: transparent; outline-offset: 0.111111em; text-decoration-line: none;">Liberty University</a></div></div>=<div>=</div><div><div>as in islamic extremist = terrorist?</div><div>
</div><div>irony as in overton hard shift to rt/ TP evangelicals</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/gop-purges-right-wing-members-from-congress-to-replace-them-with-even-more-radical-candidates">https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/gop-purges-right-wing-members-from-congress-to-replace-them-with-even-more-radical-candidates</a></div><div>Lnder cover of the coronavirus chaos and amid our national uprising, Republicans have quietly uprooted some of their most controversial right-wing members of Congress — only to replace them with even more radical contenders for federal office, including devotees of the nonsensical QAnon conspiracy theory, ahead of this fall’s election.More than 10 years after the Tea Party movement gave rise to the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus by targeting longtime incumbent Republicans who were deemed insufficiently right-wing, a recent set of wins by insurgent candidates over some of the most radical Republicans in Congress makes clear that the GOP has now passed every off-ramp on the road to extremism. While the mass Republican retirements ahead of the 2018 midterm elections greatly weakened the GOP, this cycle’s purging of incumbents in safe red districts, will likely serve to further radicalize the GOP caucus.On Saturday, in a novel case of voter suppression, a small group of Republicans in Virginia’s 5th district voted to oust Rep. Denver Riggleman, a far-right Freedom Caucus member who <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/denver-riggleman/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">voted with President Trump nearly 95% of the time</a> since winning a competitive 2018 race amid a Democratic wave.An Air Force veteran who favors the legalization of marijuana, but can hardly be described as a moderate, Riggleman ran afoul of his fellow Republicans when his libertarian leanings led him to officiate a same-sex wedding ceremony for two former campaign volunteers last year."I’d have been a coward if I didn’t,” <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/11/872398675/a-gop-congressman-officiated-a-same-sex-wedding-now-he-faces-a-primary-challenge" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Riggleman told NPR</a>. “The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, we’re the party of individual liberty.”“The Republican Party, when you look at the creed to protect civil liberties and religious liberties, could be the most inclusive party in the country,” <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/12/denver-riggleman-gay-wedding-314746" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Riggleman said on the campaign trail</a>. “And you know, why aren’t we a big-tent party? Why aren’t we looking at liberties first? Why aren’t we allowing people to live the way they want to live and stopping the government from reaching into every aspect of our lives?”Instead, after losing every statewide race in the past decade and losing the entire General Assembly, Virginia Republicans decided that fighting equal rights for the LGBTQ community was the hill to die on, during Pride month no less. Due to the coronavirus, and in a process Riggleman claims was engineered to hurt his campaign, roughly 2,500 party activists cast ballots in a drive-through format in a parking lot. Although the district is larger than New Jersey, Republicans only allowed voting at one location — a church in the winner’s home area.Bob Good, who defeated Riggleman in that primary, is a fundamentalist zealot and a former athletics director at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Good essentially ran for office because he was upset by Riggleman’s involvement in a gay wedding, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/11/872398675/a-gop-congressman-officiated-a-same-sex-wedding-now-he-faces-a-primary-challenge" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">calling</a> Riggleman “out of step with the base of the party.” A born-again evangelical Christian and staunch social conservative, Good wants to end birthright citizenship and opposes abortion for any reason — even if the mother’s life is in danger.Republicans have a six-point registration edge in Virginia’s rural 5th district, so in all likelihood Good will take office as an extremist backbencher who introduces wild bills that go nowhere. But there is a slim chance that Good won’t even make the general election ballot this fall, as the Washington Post explains:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">Good missed the Tuesday deadline for filing a key form related to his candidacy, but he hand-delivered the form to the state elections office on Friday afternoon, election officials said. The board of elections routinely offers extensions in cases like these, and changing election dates due to the coronavirus may have created confusion about the deadline.</blockquote>This may just be Republicans shooting themselves in the foot. The district has been re-gerrymandered to offset declines in rural populations and growth in urban populations in the last two cycles because it’s been harder and harder to maintain as a “safe” seat for the GOP each cycle. After Riggleman’s loss this weekend, the Cook Political Report announced it will move the Virginia 5th from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican.” If the GOP had just left this seat alone, it would have taken a lot for a Democrat to unseat Riggleman, even in another wave election. Good winning this primary means that there’s a slightly better chance for this seat to flip than there was before. It’s also conceivable Riggleman runs as a write-in Libertarian candidate, even just to play spoiler since he views the primary process as so rigged.The notorious Rep. Steve King of Iowa is another right-wing incumbent who has already been booted from office this cycle. King, who has represented Iowa’s 4th district in the northwestern part of the state since 2013, suffered a<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/02/us/elections/results-iowa-house-district-4-primary-election.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"> nearly double-digit defeat </a>at the hands of state Sen. Randy Feenstra, who outraised King in the first quarter of the year by nearly $400,000.It was the first defeat of King’s career, who has long been outspoken about his radical views. He <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveKingIA/status/777568225538088960" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">warned</a> on Twitter that “cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end” and cautioned that Americans cannot “restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”After winning re-election by only three points in a deep red district in 2018, the nine-term Republican congressman was finally removed from three committee assignments by the leaders in his own party after he questioned the offensiveness of the term “white supremacist” in an interview with The New York Times.Feenstra did not attack King for his racism, however, instead touting his A+ rating from the National Rifle Association and endorsements from the Chamber of Commerce, former Iowa governor Terry Branstad and the National Right to Life Committee. With King’s loss, the chances for a Republican pick-up appear further out of reach.Republicans also appear poised to send at least one QAnon believer to Congress this fall. Roughly 50 QAnon supporters are running for Congress this year, <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/here-are-qanon-supporters-running-congress-2020" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">according to Media Matters</a>.In May, Jo Rae Perkins won the Republican Senate primary in Oregon with more 49% of the vote against three other candidates. She <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/us/oregon-senate-perkins-qanon.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">told the New York Times</a>, referring to the “Q” conspiracy theories, that “as people put together more and more pieces of the puzzle, they can see, yeah, this is real.” She’s been endorsed by Republicans in the state legislature and by the Republican candidate vying for Oregon’s 4th congressional district.“Q is a patriot,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene in a YouTube video posted in 2017, referencing the anonymous seeder of the online theory that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of pedophile political elites.On Tuesday, Greene beat six Republican candidates running for the seat left vacated by retiring Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia, qualifying for an August runoff against an an opponent she led in the first round by 20 points. The district is a safe Republican seat, and Greene claims to have the endorsement of Rep Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the leading House Republicans.These Republican candidates — who believe in a satanic, pedophile deep state, and want to purge any member who even participates in a same-sex wedding — are supported by Republican officials and leadership, as well as the party’s voters. Forget what that says about these particular individuals and their campaigns — what does it say about the Republican Party?
salon</div></div><div></div>...=just boast? newsweek<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Johnnie Moore ?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@JohnnieM</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Such an honor to pray within the Oval Office for @POTUS & @VP .</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">6:08 PM - Jul 11, 2017</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">7,630</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">8,879 people are talking about this</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Twitter Ads info and privacy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Johnnie Moore, a Christian businessman and activist based in California, took the photo. Moore tells Newsweek that the occasion was an impromptu “time among friends” and that evangelicals feels like they can raise their concerns at the highest level in this administration—a contrast to the situation under former President Barack Obama.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I couldn’t get the Obama administration to do anything. They denied a visa to an Iraqi nun that was petitioned to testify in front of our Congress, and I took it all up the chain to the State Department. It was a fight every step of the way and the White House was trying to block it and it was just crazy,” says Moore, a former senior vice president for communications at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian college in the U.S. and the venue for a commencement speech by President Trump in May.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(The nun in question was Diana Momeka, whose visa to testify before a congressional hearing on the persecution of religious minorities by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) was initially denied by the State Department in 2015, but was later granted.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But things have changed under Trump, he says. “It’s a totally different time now. They’re not only on our speed dial, we’re on their speed dial. In my opinion, it’s good for America,” says Moore.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump at Liberty</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation at the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, on January 18, 2016.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Moore is a member of a board of evangelical advisers—in addition to Trump's board of Catholic advisers—first convened by Trump during the presidential campaign in June 2016. The evangelist says that members of the board are on first-name terms with many in Trump’s inner circle, including Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“A number of us...communicate with Jared Kushner every other day, and, back during the campaign, he was our principal point of contact and in many ways still is,” says Moore.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">With Trump in the Oval Office, evangelicals have a direct line of communication to express concerns about policy, says Moore. “We have an open relationship with the White House, we can and do express those reservations,” he says. “There’s been specific instances when things have been changed. You win some, you lose some, but we’re part of a conversation.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Evangelical Protestants form the largest single religious demographic in the United States and, in the 2016 election, were the biggest backers of Trump among faith groups. Eighty-one percent of white evangelical (or born-again) Christians voted for Trump, according to a Pew Research Center poll released the day after the election. (The poll did not give a breakdown of evangelical votes by race, and 24 percent of U.S. evangelicals are non-white.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Liberty University prayers</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Thousands of students, supporters and invited guests sing songs of Christian praise before then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation in the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia on January 18, 2016.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This support has continued throughout Trump’s first six months in office, according to Paul Djupe, an associate professor at Denison University who specializes in religion and politics. Djupe says he has collected data in recent months that shows that aside from traditional hot-button issues for evangelicals like abortion and religious liberty, the community has backed Trump through the scandals his administration has weathered. For example, evangelicals mostly supported Trump’s decision to fire ex-FBI director James Comey and do not believe that the multiple investigations into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia will uncover any wrongdoing, says Djupe.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Evangelicals, really, from the beginning of Trump’s campaign, have been working in symbiosis with the administration. They clearly have their own interests but they are all aboard the Trump train,” says Djupe.</div><div>...</div>https://www.vox.com/2018/4/18/17252510/online-degree-jerry-falwell-jr-liberty-university-propublica-nytimesburton<div class="c-entry-hero__header-wrap" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: flex; flex-flow: row nowrap; justify-content: space-between; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h1 class="c-page-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 0.6rem; padding: 0.6rem 0px 0px; flex: 1 1 0px; max-width: 1056px;">Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University makes millions of dollars from low-quality online courses</h1></div><h2 class="c-entry-summary p-dek" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 0.6rem; padding: 0px; font-weight: 400; max-width: 999px;">A ProPublica/New York Times Magazine investigation reveals shady practices at the university’s distance learning program. But its status as a nonprofit means federal crackdown is unlikely.</h2><div>Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college founded by the now-late Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, made headlines over the past few years because of its vocal institutional support for Donald Trump. But a recent <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/liberty-university-online-jerry-falwell-jr" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">ProPublica</a>/New York Times Magazine investigative piece by Alec MacGillis has brought Liberty into the spotlight for a different reason.According to MacGillis, Liberty’s luxurious campus — including a $7 million year-round ski resort and a $3 million shooting range — is essentially funded by the revenue stream brought in by Liberty University Online: an online learning system that, the students profiled by MacGillis uniformly say, falls significantly short of American academic standards.But unlike other online universities such as DeVry or the University of Phoenix, Liberty has secured a nonprofit status, making it far more difficult for federal regulators to crack down.Liberty has about 11,000 on-campus students — and approximately 95,000 students enrolled in the distance-learning program. According to MacGillis’s reporting, the online university features exam questions chosen at random, required textbooks failing to arrive, and a teaching faculty incapable of spelling words like “cite” or “exceptions.”Remote students are charged $455 per credit. (Assuming that 120 credits are necessary for a bachelor’s degree, that’s a total degree cost of about $54,600.) Meanwhile, Liberty spends on average $2,609 per full-time student per year (on campus and off campus combined) — about a tenth of what, for example, a private university like Notre Dame spends.MacGillis reports extensively on Liberty’s aggressive sales tactics, using a 300-strong team of recruiters and a $16.8 million Google advertising budget to target potential students before their for-profit competitors do:<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; line-height: 1.6; margin: 1.2rem 0px; padding: 0.6rem 1.2rem; border-left: 3px solid rgb(79, 113, 119); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); overflow: hidden;">At the front lines are the “admissions representatives,” some 300 phone recruiters working two shifts from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., deploying call lists that Liberty gets from websites where people register and search for information about online higher education, like BestCollegesOnline.com. There is such a race to get to customers before University of Phoenix and other rivals that the prospective students sometimes marvel at how little time has elapsed — just a handful of minutes — between their providing their information on a website and the call coming from Liberty. Liberty’s tax filings show that in 2016, the university paid Google $16.8 million for “admissions leads generation.” ...They get no more than 45 seconds between calls, and sometimes managers override even that short break. There are no formal quotas — a federal regulation that went into effect in 2011 forbids them. But as one former employee put it, the “highly motivated goal” is for each recruiter to sign up eight new students a day. Multiplied across 300 cubicles, that is 2,400 per day.</blockquote>But students who have been convinced to sign up for Liberty, MacGillis reports, have little recourse when things go wrong. The Obama-era crackdown on for-profit degree mills — including requirements that graduates be able to attain “gainful employment” — only served to help Liberty’s enrollment numbers by putting many of its competitors out of business. And new Trump-era policies under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have only made things easier for Liberty; DeVos is expected to roll back Obama-era regulations establishing higher standards for online-only learning.Liberty isn’t the only evangelical institution whose nonprofit status allows it to operate with less financial transparency than it would otherwise. Just this year, the conservative lobbying group Focus on the Family — which heavily advocates for anti-LGBTQ and anti–sex education policies, among others — <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/opinion/church-irs-tax-breaks.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">filed its 2017 taxes as a church</a>, allowing it to avoid laws about financial disclosure and to, for example, claim property tax exemption for its “clergy.”Whether the federal government intends to crack down on this intersection of religion and finance remains to be seen. But Trump’s repeated invocation of his desire to repeal the <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/2/16598906/republican-tax-bill-religious-right-johnson-amendment-trump" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600;">Johnson Amendment</a> — a provision prohibiting 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including churches, from explicitly endorsing political candidates — suggests that as far as the Trump administration is concerned, religious institutions should be granted as much tax-related leeway as possible.Read MacGillis’s <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/liberty-university-online-jerry-falwell-jr" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: inherit; vertical-align: inherit; font-style: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.1s ease 0s, background-color 0.1s ease 0s, fill 0.1s ease 0s; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; font-weight: 600; background-color: transparent !important;">full article here</a>.</div>ref  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/magazine/how-liberty-university-built-a-billion-dollar-empire-online.htmlno lnxNew York Times
Cover PhotoThe former Nationwide Insurance building that is now Liberty University Online’s headquarters. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York TimesHow Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire OnlineWith a hard sell to prospective students and huge amounts in taxpayer funding, Jerry Falwell Jr. transformed the evangelical institution into a behemoth.
By ALEC MacGILLIS/PROPUBLICAAPRIL 17, 2018
This article is a collaboration between The Times and ProPublica, the independent nonprofit investigative-journalism organization.
It was the start of the 2017 Fall Family Weekend at Liberty University, the school founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. 47 years ago in Lynchburg, Va., and the lines were especially long to get into the basketball arena for the mandatory thrice-weekly student convocation. There was a festive feel in the air — as usual, a live band kicked things off with some Christian rock.
Penny Nance, a newly named Liberty trustee who is the head of the socially conservative group Concerned Women for America, took the stage to say that with Donald Trump in the White House, the country was much closer to overturning Roe v. Wade and putting “true limits on the abortionist’s hand.” Tim Lee, a Texas preacher and evangelist who lost his legs in the Vietnam War, gave a sermon bemoaning “homosexuals and pornographers,” declaring that one problem with “pulpits today is that they’ve got a lot of girlie men in them.” A young man in front of me in a Nautica T-shirt clapped and shouted, “That’s right!”
Liberty is spread out on more than 7,000 acres overlooking Lynchburg, a former railroad-and-tobacco town on the James River below the Blue Ridge Mountains. The student body on campus is 15,500 strong, and the university employs more than 7,500 people locally. Throughout the university grounds, there is evidence of a billion-dollar capital expansion: mountains of dirt and clusters of construction equipment marking the site of the new business school; the $40 million football-stadium upgrade, to accommodate Liberty’s move into the highest level of N.C.A.A. competition; and the Freedom Tower, which at 275 feet will be the tallest structure in Lynchburg, capped by a replica of the Liberty Bell.
Jerry Falwell Jr., who has led the university since 2007, lacks the charisma and high profile of his father, who helped lead the rise of the religious right within the Republican Party. Yet what the soft-spoken Falwell, 55, lacks in personal aura, he has more than made up for in institutional ambition. As Liberty has expanded over the past two decades, it has become a powerful force in the conservative movement. The Liberty campus is now a requisite stop for Republican candidates for president — with George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney all making the pilgrimage — and many of Liberty graduates end up working in Republican congressional offices and conservative think tanks.
Liberty has also played a significant role in the rise of Donald Trump. Falwell was an early supporter of the reality-TV-star candidate, staying loyal through the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape and giving Trump a crucial imprimatur with white evangelical voters, who widely supported him at the polls. “The evangelicals were so great to me,” Trump said in an interview last year. The first commencement speech he gave as president, last spring, was at Liberty. And in August, Falwell stood by Trump following his much-criticized remarks on the violent rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, declaring on “Fox & Friends” that “President Donald Trump does not have a racist bone in his body.”
Such steadfast allyship has prompted ridicule even from some fellow evangelical Republicans. But it makes more sense in light of an overlooked aspect of Liberty: its extraordinary success as a moneymaking venture. Like Trump, Falwell recognized the money to be made in selling success — in this case, through the booming and lightly regulated realm of online higher education. Falwell’s university has achieved the scale and stature it has because he identified a market opportunity and exploited it.
The real driver of growth at Liberty, it turns out, is not the students who attend classes in Lynchburg but the far greater number of students who are paying for credentials and classes that are delivered remotely, as many as 95,000 in a given year. By 2015, Liberty had quietly become the second-largest provider of online education in the United States, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, its student population surpassed only by that of University of Phoenix, as it tapped into the same hunger for self-advancement that Trump had with his own pricey Trump University seminars. Yet there was a crucial distinction: Trump’s university was a for-profit venture. (This month, a judge finalized a $25 million settlement for fraud claims against the defunct operation.) Liberty, in contrast, is classified as a nonprofit, which means it faces less regulatory scrutiny even as it enjoys greater access to various federal handouts.
By 2017, Liberty students were receiving more than $772 million in total aid from the U.S. Department of Education — nearly $100 million of it in the form of Pell grants and the rest in federal student loans. Among universities nationwide, it ranked sixth in federal aid. Liberty students also received Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, some $42 million in 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available. Although some of that money went to textbooks and nontuition expenses, a vast majority of Liberty’s total revenue that year, which was just above $1 billion, came from taxpayer-funded sources.
And it was no secret which part of the university was generating most of that revenue, said Chris Gaumer, a Liberty graduate and former professor of English there. “When I was there, at faculty meetings the commentary was that online was funding the school, while they were trying to just break even on the residential side,” he said. “It was understood that on the online side, they were making a killing.”The main quadrangle of Liberty University. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York TimesJerry Falwell Sr. was raised in Lynchburg by a Christian mother and a nonbelieving father, whose knack for business gained him a small empire of restaurants, bus lines, nightclubs and gas stations and eventually carried him into bootlegging. Falwell cast this dual inheritance in the terms of a clash between God and the Enemy, but it was hard not to see his career as a successful fusing of his parents’ influences, salesmanship wrapped in Christian cloth.
He founded Thomas Road Baptist Church in the former offices of a bottling company in 1956 and soon began broadcasting recordings of his sermons on regional radio and television. In 1971, the same year his “Old Time Gospel Hour” went national, he founded Lynchburg Baptist College, subsidizing it with revenues from the show. “I believe there are thousands of young students who will catch the vision and who will carry what God is doing in Lynchburg to cities all over the continent and around the world,” he declared at the time, according to his 1996 autobiography. At first the college was scattered in rented spaces around town — a vacant high school, a Ramada Inn — but by 1977 it had been renamed Liberty Baptist College and moved up to an initial 2,000-acre swath of land on the mountain.
By 1984, nearly 400 local broadcasters around the nation were carrying “The Old Time Gospel Hour.” The toll-free number flashing on the screen reportedly helped bring in more than $72 million per year in donations. Some $10 million of those funds flowed to the college, which at that point numbered about 4,500 students. Another of Falwell’s enterprises pulled in about $12 million a year — the Moral Majority, an attempt to build a cross-denominational political coalition against the common foes of abortion rights and, as he later put it, “moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism.”
Liberty University, as it has been named since 1985, grew steadily, drawing families attracted by the “Liberty Way,” which forbade premarital sex, drinking, smoking and cussing. In 1987, it secured tax-exempt status, which Falwell described in his autobiography as an existential necessity: “If a tax exemption could not be granted us,” he wrote, “it would have been impossible to carry out the dream of a 50,000-student Christian university in Lynchburg.”
But another element of the business model — evangelical broadcasting’s aura of rectitude — was about to take a hit. That March, Jim Bakker resigned as head of the televangelist PTL ministry amid revelations of a sexual encounter with a former church secretary, Jessica Hahn, who received a payoff to keep quiet about it; Bakker later served just under five years in prison on a federal fraud conviction related to PTL’s fund-raising. In 1988, the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart declared, “I have sinned,” following reports of his consorting with a prostitute in New Orleans; three years later, the police pulled him over with another prostitute in Southern California.
No such scandals attached to Falwell, who succeeded Bakker as host of “The PTL Club.” But the bubble had burst. Amid what Falwell later referred to as the “credibility crunch” caused by the televangelist scandals, the college’s finances deteriorated. Within a few years, annual contributions dropped by $25 million; the college’s debt swelled to more than $100 million.In 1996, the accrediting body overseeing Liberty presented a list of more than 100 “recommendations” for staying accredited, including a demand that it reduce its debt. Falwell went on a 40-day liquids-only fast, praying for deliverance. “I am certain that we will become a world-class university training champions for Christ in every important field of study,” Falwell vowed in his autobiography. “And I am asking God to give me more time to guide and fund that dream.”
One educational novelty that Falwell dabbled in, starting in the mid-’70s, was an early form of distance learning. Liberty would mail lecture videotapes and course packets to paying customers around the country — at first just certificate courses in Bible studies, and by the mid-’80s, accredited courses in other subjects as well. By the time of Liberty’s financial embattlement, other education innovators had taken the idea much further — none more so than a man named John Sperling.
Sperling was an unlikely capitalist entrepreneur. The son of a failed farmer in the Missouri Ozarks, he joined the Merchant Marine, embraced socialism and ended up receiving a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge. He got a job teaching at San Jose State University, where he took over the faculty union and led a big strike in 1968. His humble origins and early socialist leanings had given him a jaundiced view of elite schools, and his experience teaching a course to police officers and teachers as part of a federally funded effort to reduce juvenile delinquency furthered his belief that traditional colleges were leaving out a whole swath of Americans eager for higher education. He decided to start a university of his own — not a nonprofit but a for-profit, and not in California, where he had clashed with skeptical accreditors, but in the laxer regulatory climate of Arizona.
In 1976, Sperling rented space in a boilermakers’ union hall in Phoenix and started offering weekly classes there to eight students — all adults who’d had some college education and were looking to complete their degrees. A decade later, University of Phoenix had 6,000 students. But things really took off three years later, in 1989, when Sperling started offering M.B.A.s online through Prodigy, the early electronic communications service. Sperling took the university’s parent company public in 1994; by 2000, enrollment had reached 100,000.
By the early 2000s, for-profit colleges were booming: Access to the internet was spreading, and the Bush administration was employing a notably light regulatory touch, even as the programs were devouring an ever-greater share of federal student aid. Among the adopters of Sperling’s model was Falwell, who in 2004 began expanding the family’s primitive distance-learning programs into what would become known as Liberty University Online.
In his autobiography, Falwell praised Jerry Jr.’s business instincts, crediting him with saving Liberty from ruin through his management of its debt. “God sent him to me just in time,” he wrote. “He is more responsible, humanly speaking, for the miraculous financial survival of this ministry than any other single person.” When Falwell died in 2007 at age 73, his younger son, Jonathan, took over the pulpit at Thomas Road Baptist, and Jerry Jr. took over the university — an indication of where the heart of the ministry now was.
As the Great Recession hit, laid-off Americans turned to online education to seek a new economic foothold. After years of trying to save Liberty by cutting costs, Falwell Jr. said, he adopted his father’s vision of saving it through increasing revenues. In a recent telephone interview, Falwell described the surge in online enrollment as a kind of revelation. “It took us about 20 years to perfect” the distance-learning model, he said, “but when we did, that was about when everyone started getting high-speed internet in their homes, and we were the only nonprofit poised to serve that huge adult market of people who had not finished college or needed a master’s degree to get a promotion.”
Liberty had another advantage over online competitors, he said: its status as a religious-based institution, “that long history of Liberty being a leader among Christian universities,” the “faith-based mission” that “makes us so unique and puts us in a class by ourselves.”
The River Ridge Mall spreads out on the flat ground below Liberty’s campus, among motels and fast-food restaurants. Like much commercial real estate in Lynchburg, it is majority-owned by Liberty University. In 2013, the mall lost one of its anchor tenants, Sears, which occupied a 112,000-square-foot space behind gray, nearly windowless walls. The retailer was replaced by Liberty University Online. When it first arrived inside the mall, the L.U.O. operation numbered 675 employees; it grew so large that in 2015 L.U.O. began moving its operation into a former Nationwide Insurance building several miles away.
At the front lines are the “admissions representatives,” some 300 phone recruiters working two shifts from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., deploying call lists that Liberty gets from websites where people register and search for information about online higher education, like BestCollegesOnline.com. There is such a race to get to customers before University of Phoenix and other rivals that the prospective students sometimes marvel at how little time has elapsed — just a handful of minutes — between their providing their information on a website and the call coming from Liberty. Liberty’s tax filings show that in 2016, the university paid Google $16.8 million for “admissions leads generation.” In other words, advertising Liberty to those searching online for degree options.
The recruiters work under intense pressure, according to several former L.U.O. employees I spoke with. They get no more than 45 seconds between calls, and sometimes managers override even that short break. There are no formal quotas — a federal regulation that went into effect in 2011 forbids them. But as one former employee put it, the “highly motivated goal” is for each recruiter to sign up eight new students a day. Multiplied across 300 cubicles, that is 2,400 per day. Of those, only a small fraction end up paying and starting courses, but that is still an extraordinary haul for any kind of education business.
Every day, according to the former employee, managers send out a report showing the previous day’s tallies. Recruiters who signed up four or fewer new students get their names in red, visible for all to see, and are sometimes subject to a disciplinary conversation. Monthly tallies are also scored as green, yellow or red. Top performers are in the running for a small raise from the base salary, which is about $30,000. “It was that carrot and stick,” the former employee told me.
A separate division of about 60 people focuses on courting members of the military, who have access to even greater federal tuition assistance, and then advising them on campus. A former employee in that division said that given the smaller crew, the work there was if anything even more intense than in the main branch: More than 30,000 L.U.O. students are from the military or military families.Liberty University took over an entire section of a shopping mall when Sears, an anchor tenant, went out of business. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York TimesTwo recruiters told me they were instructed to quote L.U.O.’s cost on a per-credit basis, rather than per-course, which makes it sound more affordable. Undergraduate courses for part-time students are $455 per credit, or $1,365 for a typical course; master’s courses are typically about $600 per credit. They are instructed not to press prospective applicants too hard on their academic qualifications. Applicants have to submit past transcripts, but any grade point average above 0.5 — equivalent to a D-minus — would suffice, said the former employee in the nonmilitary division. Recruiters, he told me, “would say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been accepted.’ They’d make it seem competitive.”
The two recruiters also said they were told not to mention Liberty’s Christian orientation until people agree to apply, when this fact is made clear in the user agreement they sign online. It also becomes clear at the moment that the recruiters sign up students for their first classes, typically an orientation class and three required Bible-studies classes. Students often can’t transfer credits for these courses to other colleges, which deters many from dropping out: Leaving L.U.O. without signing up for more courses would mean wasting the money spent on the first four.
Falwell and other top Liberty officials pushed back on some of these points in my interview with them, insisting, for instance, that the minimum G.P.A. for applicants is 2.0 and that recruiters are assessed according to “the same H.R. evaluation form that’s standard across the university.” But Ron Kennedy, the executive vice president for online enrollment management, acknowledged that the recruiters working under pressure to meet their targets might say otherwise. “It’s a call center,” he said.
In 2010, undercover investigators from the Government Accountability Office scrutinized 15 for-profit colleges, finding that every one of them had misled applicants and that four had encouraged them to lie on their federal student-aid forms. The Obama administration seized on the findings as it began a yearslong clampdown on for-profit education, which by 2013 was gobbling up a fifth of all federal student aid, more than $25 billion, despite enrolling only 10 percent of students — and also producing about a third of all federal student-loan defaults.
Liberty, too, was hugely reliant on federal money, in the form of Pell grants, Department of Veterans Affairs benefits and federally subsidized loans. By 2010, it had more than 50,000 students enrolled and was pulling in more than $420 million annually. But because Liberty was technically not for-profit, it was spared many of the administration’s new regulations, including its requirement that a certain threshold of graduates be able to attain “gainful employment,” which was designed to hit for-profit colleges much harder. It was also spared from the pre-existing rule that for-profit colleges could get no more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal sources.
If anything, Liberty benefited from the crackdown. The Obama administration’s actions helped put out of business large for-profit chains like Corinthian and ITT Technical Institute, clearing formidable competition from the field. Though there were other nonprofit institutions with online offerings — Arizona State, Southern New Hampshire and Western Governors, as well as premium players like Stanford and Duke — none were operating at Liberty’s scale. The university now touts itself on its website as “the largest private nonprofit university in the nation.” In a sense, said Ben Miller, who served as a senior policy adviser in Obama’s Department of Education, the crackdown on for-profits offered Liberty a “marketing advantage.”
Falwell was candid about the benefits of the nonprofit status. “It insulated us from the attack on the for-profits,” he told me. And it put him on the same footing with other, more established universities. “There’s no way that an Obama federal government that probably doesn’t care much for schools like Liberty can treat us different than Harvard or Yale or Indiana Wesleyan or the University of Maryland.”
Liberty’s ability to distance itself from for-profit colleges was especially notable given that, by several key metrics, it resembled them more closely than the private nonprofits it was grouped with. The rate of Liberty graduates who default on their loans within three years of graduating is 9.9 percent, several points higher than the average for nonprofit colleges, though still below that for for-profit colleges. Most striking, though, is how little the university spends on actual instruction. It does not report separate figures for spending on the online school and the traditional college. But according to its most recent figures, from 2016, the university reports spending only $2,609 on instruction per full-time equivalent student across both categories. That is a fraction of what traditional private universities spend (Notre Dame’s equivalent figure is $27,391) but also well behind even University of Phoenix, which spends more than $4,000 per student in many states. It is also behind other hybrid online-traditional nonprofit religious colleges like Ohio Christian University, which spends about $4,500. In 2013, according to an audited financial statement I obtained, Liberty received $749 million in tuition and fees but spent only $260 million on instruction, academic support and student services.
‘They were trying to break even on the residential side. It was understood that on the online side they were making a killing.’
By 2016, Liberty’s net assets had crossed the $1.6 billion mark, up more than tenfold from a decade earlier. Thanks to its low spending on instruction, its net income was an astonishing $215 million on nearly $1 billion in revenue, according to its tax filing — making it one of the most lucrative nonprofits in the country, based simply on the difference between its operating revenue and expenses, in a league with some of the largest nonprofit hospital systems.
Falwell, whose Liberty salary is nearly $1 million, does not apologize for those margins. Liberty, he said, is simply being shrewd about keeping costs down, while plowing revenue back into the university. He noted proudly that Liberty’s net assets are now $2.5 billion, up from just $150 million in 2007, when he took over. He said he was surprised more universities weren’t following Liberty’s example of increasing online enrollment by keeping instructional spending and tuition low. And he freely acknowledged that the online revenues were going to buttress the residential campus. From Falwell’s perspective, there was nothing wrong with the university’s benefiting so much from the online program. “As long as we’re keeping the quality up, we don’t think it’s a disservice to anyone,” he said. “All that is, is ensuring the future of the university.”
Students at Liberty often quote a favorite line of Falwell Sr.’s: “If it’s Christian, it ought to be better.” Even those who have misgivings about the university’s conservative culture are quick to defend the education they’ve received on campus. Yet despite its ambitions to become the “evangelical Notre Dame” that Falwell envisioned, Liberty is still ranked well behind that university and other religious-based institutions like Brigham Young and Pepperdine; U.S. News and World Report clumps Liberty in the lowest quartile of institutions in its “national universities” category. Some of its programs have strong reputations, among them nursing, engineering and flight school. But the college is limited in its ability to compete for premier faculty, not only because its politics are out of step with the greater academic community, but also because none of its programs, with the exception of its law school, offer tenure.
In his autobiography, Falwell made virtually no distinction between these students on the Lynchburg campus and those receiving their instruction remotely. All of them, in his telling, were being prepared for the same goal, to be “Champions for Christ,” as the Liberty motto had it. But many students on campus, at least, are openly dismissive of the online experience. They take some classes online, for the convenience of not having to drag themselves to class — and, they readily admit, for the ease of not having to study much. “People know it’s kind of a joke and don’t learn that much from it,” Dustin Wahl, a senior from South Dakota, told me. “You use Google when you take your quiz and don’t have to work as hard. It’s pretty obvious.” (Liberty says using Google during quizzes or exams is cheating.)
Campus students are especially scornful of the online discussion boards that are in theory meant to replicate the back and forth of a classroom, but that in reality tend to be a rote exercise, with students making only their requisite one post and two comments per week, generating no substantive discussion. “It’s very minimal engagement,” said Alexander Forbes, a senior from California. Recently, a satirical campus newspaper, The Flaming Bugle, ran an Onion-style article with the headline “Cat Playing on Keyboard Inadvertently Earns ‘A’ for Discussion Board Post.”
Chris Gaumer taught English courses both on campus and online at Liberty after getting his bachelor’s degree on campus in 2006. The difference between the two forms of teaching was startling, he told me. As an online instructor, he said, he was not expected to engage in the delivery of any actual educational content. That was all prepared separately by L.U.O.’s team of course designers and editors, who assemble curriculums and videotaped lectures by other Liberty professors. This leaves little for the instructor to do in the courses, which typically run eight weeks. “As professor, you show up and your job is to handle emails and grade,” Gaumer said. This helps explain why the instructors — the roughly 2,400 adjuncts scattered around the country, plus the Liberty professors who agree to teach online courses on the side — are willing to take on the task for what’s long been the going rate for the job: $2,100 per course. (Falwell Jr. said it will soon go up to $2,700.)
Until recently, the course designers and editors, a team of about 30 people, worked out of the old Thomas Road Baptist Church — the congregation moved out of the former bottling plant years earlier — in a concrete room that got so cold in winter that they sometimes kept scarves and hats on. For editors, starting pay is now around $11 per hour. As L.U.O. boomed in size, they became so overwhelmed by the challenge of shaping hundreds of courses that L.U.O. decided in 2015 to focus designers and editors on the hundred or so highest-enrollment courses per term, leaving the maintenance of the remaining hundreds of courses up to the instructors themselves. One former editor recalled having a professor send a syllabus along with, essentially, an apology for throwing something together at the last minute.
Gaumer, who now works at Randolph College in Lynchburg, said the steep drop-off in quality from the traditional college to the online courses was both openly acknowledged among Liberty faculty and not fully reckoned with. The reason was plain, he said: Everyone knew that L.U.O. was subsidizing the physical university. “The motivation behind the growth seems to be almost entirely economic, because it’s not as if the education is getting any better,” he said.Chris Gaumer, a former Liberty University English professor. “The motivation behind the growth seems to be almost entirely economic,” he said of Liberty’s online expansion. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York TimesFalwell acknowledged that Liberty’s faculty initially resisted the rise of the online program, fearing the degradation of academic standards. “The big victory was finding a way to tame the faculty,” he said. But he disputed that there was any great difference in quality. For one thing, he said, the university made sure that all of its online instructors “adhere to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, our doctrinal statement.” Physical distance was a challenge, he said, but online instructors overcame it by making an extra effort to reach out. “They spend a lot more time taking a personal interest in the students,” he said.
One of the 65,000 students who enrolled with L.U.O. in 2013 was Megan Hart, a woman from New Jersey with unflaggingly high spirits. Hart, who is in her 40s, started her working life at the glass company where her father worked, too, until he was laid off. From there, Hart made her way into education, teaching communications at the local community college and the local prison. Adjunct courses at the college paid just $525 per credit, netting her only about $5,000 per semester, so she got a low-level administrative job there, too.
Her first marriage, to the father of her daughter, ended in divorce. In January 2012, her second husband suddenly vanished. Hart and her daughter, then 9 years old, lost their home shortly afterward, and she filed for bankruptcy. She and her daughter moved into her parents’ basement and got by with donations from her local Assemblies of God church, where she was active. In 2013, she signed up to take three courses at L.U.O. that would provide her with a certificate in communications, allowing her to become a full-time instructor at the community college, which would reimburse her L.U.O. tuition.
Hart, who had a master’s in communications and leadership through Pat Robertson’s Regent University, chose L.U.O. because of its affordability and Christian cachet. But in her years of teaching and taking courses, she said, she had never seen anything as flimsy as what L.U.O. passed off in its supposedly graduate-level courses. She had little interaction with the instructor, and the questions for the midterm and final exams were so arbitrary that it seemed to Hart as if they had been randomly generated by a computer program. She spent the open-book exams wildly flipping back and forth through the textbook and course materials trying to find the relevant passages. It was, she wrote to L.U.O. officials later, like “looking for Waldo.”
When she wrote the instructor for the second class to ask about the test, he responded: “As to exam question, I have no clue how the final is run.” He said he’d get back to her. He ended his note, “Do remember that God is in control and he works all things for our good.”
When Hart emailed the instructor for her third course, which had a closed-book exam, she confirmed Hart’s suspicions: “The exam questions are random.” Hart got good grades in the first two courses but was increasingly convinced she was paying for a meaningless experience. She sent an email outlining her concerns to the instructor and an L.U.O. academic mentor, adding that she might quit the third course. “We will certainly take your input very seriously,” the mentor responded. “May the Lord bless you richly in your studies and future endeavors.”
Finally, Hart told the officials that she was withdrawing from the third course, even though she had been informed that she would still have to pay 25 percent of the cost. “My spirit has been so sick over what I have experienced,” she wrote. In late 2013, she filed a complaint with a little-known government agency called the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, which oversees the state’s colleges.
Between 2009 and summer 2017, L.U.O. students filed 49 complaints with the council, more than for any other institution in the state. For some, the problem was administrative bungling — L.U.O. registered them for the wrong class, or required a class it turned out they didn’t need, and so on. For some, it was endless technical or logistical troubles that kept them from being able to submit their assignments or get textbooks. For others, it was disputes about tuition and financial aid that left them feeling as if L.U.O. was demanding more money than was fair, and withholding their transcripts until they paid up.
Several complainants said they were particularly taken aback by their L.U.O. experiences because of Liberty’s religious underpinnings. “I just expected that Liberty University being a Christian university,” they’d be more helpful, wrote a complainant who went to prison and then became homeless after a stint enrolled in L.U.O. He had been seeking to have his transcript released despite his still having a balance at L.U.O., so that he could resume his education elsewhere; Liberty responded by recommending homeless shelters. “Liberty’s motto is they are a Christian school that is training champions for Christ and they are the light of the world,” another student wrote six years ago. “That motto needs to be revised.”
The anodyne responses the students received from L.U.O. were frequently glossed with Christian bromides. To a student whose financial aid was suspended in 2015 after the student failed a course because the textbook didn’t arrive in time, an instructor sent “quiz tips that may help” that included “Eat a healthy meal before taking your quiz” and “Pray before beginning each quiz!” Other L.U.O. responses included language errors so extreme that they bordered on confusing: One administrator wrote in 2014 about a complainant’s having submitted work that “appeared to have been copied from an unsighted source,” while a professor responded to a student in 2012 that “no other acceptions will be made.”
Other students were left simply to flounder, contrary to Falwell’s claims of close attention from distant instructors. Lydia Terry-Dominelli, who lives in a suburb of Albany, N.Y., signed up with Liberty in 2013, when it looked as if she and her husband were headed for divorce and she was worrying about how she could support herself and her 9-year-old daughter. She decided to get her teacher’s certification and chose Liberty partly because she was an observant Anglican. “I was ready for something that had some kind of value system,” she told me.
In 2015, Terry-Dominelli failed a graduate-level education course when, she said, one of the assignments she submitted vanished from Blackboard, the online system used by Liberty. After twice failing a writing course and puzzling over what she was doing wrong, she asked the course instructor for an explanation. He wrote back to suggest that she might do better if she found a “new work space” like the local library. After she assured him that her apartment sufficed and the conversation continued, he wrote: “I wonder if you can’t find a great prayer group through L.U.O.?”
Terry-Dominelli struggled further with confusing assignments in another graduate-level education course. She was starting to feel helpless over the lack of guidance. “I have prayed very hard, and what I keep being told is I am in the wrong place,” she wrote to the education instructor in late October of 2015.
“Bless your heart. I am so sorry,” the instructor responded. “I will join you in prayer for you to have wisdom and discernment.”
In early 2016, Terry-Dominelli was unable to access online the spring-semester courses she had registered for. She took it as a final sign and left Liberty, just a few courses short of the master’s degree she had borrowed more than $20,000 to pay for. In August 2016, having failed to establish a decent income, she moved back in with her husband. Lacking certification, she took a part-time job as an aide at a local elementary school. Unable to afford the loans she’d taken out, she filed for help under the U.S. Department of Education’s Borrower Defense program, which is intended for students who have incurred student debt after being misled by higher-education programs. (Her application is still pending.)
She also filed a complaint with the Virginia agency: “I feel that I was being pushed out of the program and I need to know why,” she had written to one of her professors. The agency declined to take action, finding no clear violations by Liberty. “What’s killing me is that I went into this program to try to change my situation,” she told me, “and I’m worse off than I was at the beginning.”
The Trump-Falwell bond has if anything grown even stronger in recent months. In October, Falwell Jr. told Breitbart News that Trump could “be the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln” and urged an evangelical army to rise up against the “fake Republicans” standing in his way. In December, he joined Trump in promoting Roy Moore’s Senate candidacy, quoting the song “Sweet Home Alabama” in a tweet on the eve of Election Day: “AL voters are too smart to let the media & Estab Repubs & Dems tell them how to vote. I hope the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd is alive/well in AL. ‘A southern man don’t need them around anyhow & Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you, tell me true?’?” In late February, he joined in on Trump’s mau-mauing of Jeff Sessions, calling the attorney general a “coward” in a tweet for his handling of the Russia investigation.
But on campus, Falwell has proved a more divisive leader than his father. In May 2016, conflict over his pro-Trump stance prompted the resignation of the chairman of the university board of trustees’ executive committee, Mark DeMoss, whose father was a major donor to the university. DeMoss previously told The Washington Post that “the bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense — and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ.” It also prompted students on campus, including Wahl and Forbes, to gather hundreds of signatures in opposition to Trump following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. After Falwell’s support for Trump following Charlottesville, several Liberty graduates mailed back their degrees in protest. One protester was Laura Honnol, a banking officer in Lubbock, Tex., who attended from 2003 to 2007. “There’s been a huge climate shift from Falwell Senior to Falwell Junior,” she told me. “You felt like you disagreed with Senior, but he had good intentions and just didn’t do it right sometimes. But Junior came along, and it’s become more of a profit machine and a numbers machine.”
The Trump connection is not without risk for Falwell. Some people who worked for L.U.O. in late 2016 and early 2017 blamed it for a dip in applications at the time and said the decline led to an April 2017 leadership overhaul and the departure of many employees. Falwell told me that Liberty has deliberately brought online enrollment down to around 85,000, explaining that “we wanted to make sure we kept the student quality at a certain standard.” And he said that his alliance with Trump has only helped the university: “For every student we lost because of political concerns, we picked up two or three inquiries who support us because of that political stand.”
A relationship with Trump could benefit Falwell Jr. and Liberty in other ways too. One of the top orders of business for Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has been to roll back Obama-era regulations on online-degree providers. She named a former official from for-profit DeVry University to lead the D.O.E. unit that polices fraud in higher education. Claims for student-debt relief under the Borrower Defense program are being considered at a far slower rate under DeVos, who is delaying by two years an Obama rule that would make it easier to file debt-relief claims. And DeVos is expected shortly to roll back several key regulations geared toward online providers: ones giving states regulatory powers over distance-learning programs, establishing clear standards for a credit-hour and requiring “regular and substantive” interactions between online instructors and students. Falwell told me that Liberty officials have had a major hand in some of DeVos’s actions: “A lot of what we sent them is actually what got implemented,” he said.
Photo
As Liberty University rapidly expands, there is a lot of construction on the campus and in the area directly adjacent. Credit Glenna Gordon for The New York TimesAfter the convocation on the first weekend in November, I met with Dustin Wahl in Liberty’s student center, overlooking the campus quad. He said that the unbridled success of the online program couldn’t help putting him in mind of the profit-seeking tradition within American Christianity, which is closely aligned with evangelical Christianity’s prosperity gospel — the notion that financial success, far from distracting us from the higher values, is an affirmation of godliness. Wahl told me he’d frequently heard people justify the school’s new wealth in these terms. “A lot of people just talk about it generally, how God has blessed us,” he said.
Falwell rejects such prosperity-gospel talk. “I’m not going to tell you that we’ve done better because we’re better people,” he told me. “What I will say is that we’ve always operated from a business perspective. We’ve treated it like a business.” And that’s what first drew him to Trump, he said: the kinship of one businessman to another. “I thought to myself, if there’s one thing this country needs, it’s exactly the methods we employed at Liberty to save the school and make it prosper, and that’s just basic business principles.”As I sat with Wahl, the spoils of that prosperity were visible all around us: not just gleaming new buildings like the $50 million library with its robotic book-retrieval system, but also, up the mountain, a $7 million “Snowflex Centre,” with a polymer surface for year-round skiing — the only one of its kind at any university in the country. Elsewhere, the university is completing a $3 million shooting range. But, Wahl said, once you knew about the thousands of people far from Lynchburg who funded this splendor, it was hard to take your mind off them, and off the faith with which they signed up for L.U.O. “You get a phone call,” he said, “and it’s God telling you, ‘I’ll give you an education.’?”
When we spoke before my visit, Wahl raved about the campus: “It’s beautiful,” he said. Then he added: “And it’s funded by the online program that’s sold to people who can’t really afford college.”
Alec MacGillis is a reporter for ProPublica. He last wrote for the magazine about Jared Kushner’s Baltimore-area real estate.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.
A version of this article appears in print on April 22, 2018, on Page MM46 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Billion-Dollar Blessings.<a href="https://www.alternet.org/liberty-university-online-goldmine-inside-jerry-falwells-billion-dollar-blessings">https://www.alternet.org/liberty-university-online-goldmine-inside-jerry-falwells-billion-dollar-blessings</a>Liberty University Is an Online Goldmine: Inside Jerry Falwell's Billion-Dollar Blessings
How one of the religious right’s most powerful institutions transformed into a wildly lucrative online empire.By Alec MacGillis / ProPublica April 18, 2018, 4:52 AM GMT
It was the start of the 2017 Fall Family Weekend at Liberty University, the school founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. 47 years ago in Lynchburg, Virginia, and the lines were especially long to get into the basketball arena for the mandatory thrice-weekly student convocation. There was a festive feel in the air — as usual, a live band kicked things off with some Christian rock.Penny Nance, a newly named Liberty trustee who is the head of the socially conservative group Concerned Women for America, took the stage to say that with Donald Trump in the White House, the country was much closer to overturning Roe v. Wade and putting “true limits on the abortionist’s hand.” Tim Lee, a Texas preacher and evangelist who lost his legs in the Vietnam War, gave a sermon bemoaning “homosexuals and pornographers,” declaring that one problem with “pulpits today is that they’ve got a lot of girlie men in them.” A young man in front of me in a Nautica T-shirt clapped and shouted, “That’s right!”Liberty is spread out on more than 7,000 acres overlooking Lynchburg, a former railroad-and-tobacco town on the James River below the Blue Ridge Mountains. The student body on campus is 15,500 strong, and the university employs more than 7,500 people locally. Throughout the university grounds, there is evidence of a billion-dollar capital expansion: mountains of dirt and clusters of construction equipment marking the site of the new business school; the $40 million football stadium upgrade, to accommodate Liberty’s move into the highest level of N.C.A.A. competition; and the Freedom Tower, which at 275 feet will be the tallest structure in Lynchburg, capped by a replica of the Liberty Bell.Jerry Falwell Jr., who has led the university since 2007, lacks the charisma and high profile of his father, who helped lead the rise of the religious right within the Republican Party. Yet what the soft-spoken Falwell, 55, lacks in personal aura, he has more than made up for in institutional ambition. As Liberty has expanded over the past two decades, it has become a powerful force in the conservative movement. The Liberty campus is now a requisite stop for Republican candidates for president — with George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney all making the pilgrimage — and many of Liberty graduates end up working in Republican congressional offices and conservative think tanks.
Liberty has also played a significant role in the rise of Donald Trump. Falwell was an early supporter of the reality-TV-star candidate, staying loyal through the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape and giving Trump a crucial imprimatur with white evangelical voters, who widely supported him at the polls. “The evangelicals were so great to me,” Trump said in an interview last year. The first commencement speech he gave as president, last spring, was at Liberty. And in August, Falwell stood by Trump following his much criticized remarks on the violent rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, declaring on “Fox & Friends” that “President Donald Trump does not have a racist bone in his body.”
Such steadfast allyship has prompted ridicule even from some fellow evangelical Republicans. But it makes more sense in light of an overlooked aspect of Liberty: its extraordinary success as a moneymaking venture. Like Trump, Falwell recognized the money to be made in selling success — in this case, through the booming and lightly regulated realm of online higher education. Falwell’s university has achieved the scale and stature it has because he identified a market opportunity and exploited it.
The real driver of growth at Liberty, it turns out, is not the students who attend classes in Lynchburg but the far greater number of students who are paying for credentials and classes that are delivered remotely, as many as 95,000 in a given year. By 2015, Liberty had quietly become the second-largest provider of online education in the United States, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, its student population surpassed only by that of University of Phoenix, as it tapped into the same hunger for self-advancement that Trump had with his own pricey Trump University seminars. Yet there was a crucial distinction: Trump’s university was a for-profit venture. (This month, a judge finalized a $25 million settlement for fraud claims against the defunct operation.) Liberty, in contrast, is classified as a nonprofit, which means it faces less regulatory scrutiny even as it enjoys greater access to various federal handouts.
By 2017, Liberty students were receiving more than $772 million in total aid from the Department of Education — nearly $100 million of it in the form of Pell grants and the rest in federal student loans. Among universities nationwide, it ranked sixth in federal aid. Liberty students also received Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, some $42 million in 2016, the most recent year for which figures are available. Although some of that money went to textbooks and nontuition expenses, a vast majority of Liberty’s total revenue that year, which was just above $1 billion, came from taxpayer-funded sources.
And it was no secret which part of the university was generating most of that revenue, said Chris Gaumer, a Liberty graduate and former professor of English there. “When I was there, at faculty meetings the commentary was that online was funding the school, while they were trying to just break even on the residential side,” he said. “It was understood that on the online side, they were making a killing.”
Jerry Falwell Sr. was raised in Lynchburg by a Christian mother and a nonbelieving father, whose knack for business gained him a small empire of restaurants, bus lines, nightclubs and gas stations and eventually carried him into bootlegging. Falwell cast this dual inheritance in the terms of a clash between God and the Enemy, but it was hard not to see his career as a successful fusing of his parents’ influences, salesmanship wrapped in Christian cloth.
He founded Thomas Road Baptist Church in the former offices of a bottling company in 1956 and soon began broadcasting recordings of his sermons on regional radio and television. In 1971, the same year his “Old Time Gospel Hour” went national, he founded Lynchburg Baptist College, subsidizing it with revenues from the show. “I believe there are thousands of young students who will catch the vision and who will carry what God is doing in Lynchburg to cities all over the continent and around the world,” he declared at the time, according to his 1996 autobiography. At first the college was scattered in rented spaces around town — a vacant high school, a Ramada Inn — but by 1977 it had been renamed Liberty Baptist College and moved up to an initial 2,000-acre swath of land on the mountain.
By 1984, nearly 400 local broadcasters around the nation were carrying “The Old Time Gospel Hour.” The toll-free number flashing on the screen reportedly helped bring in more than $72 million per year in donations. Some $10 million of those funds flowed to the college, which at that point numbered about 4,500 students. Another of Falwell’s enterprises pulled in about $12 million a year — the Moral Majority, an attempt to build a cross-denominational political coalition against the common foes of abortion rights and, as he later put it, “moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism.”
Liberty University, as it has been named since 1985, grew steadily, drawing families attracted by the “Liberty Way,” which forbade premarital sex, drinking, smoking and cussing. In 1987, it secured tax-exempt status, which Falwell described in his autobiography as an existential necessity: “If a tax exemption could not be granted us,” he wrote, “it would have been impossible to carry out the dream of a 50,000-student Christian university in Lynchburg.”But another element of the business model — evangelical broadcasting’s aura of rectitude — was about to take a hit. That March, Jim Bakker resigned as head of the televangelist PTL ministry amid revelations of a sexual encounter with a former church secretary, Jessica Hahn, who received a payoff to keep quiet about it; Bakker later served just under five years in prison on a federal fraud conviction related to PTL’s fund-raising. In 1988, the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart declared, “I have sinned,” following reports of his consorting with a prostitute in New Orleans; three years later, the police pulled him over with another prostitute in Southern California.No such scandals attached to Falwell, who succeeded Bakker as host of “The PTL Club.” But the bubble had burst. Amid what Falwell later referred to as the “credibility crunch” caused by the televangelist scandals, the college’s finances deteriorated. Within a few years, annual contributions dropped by $25 million; the college’s debt swelled to more than $100 million.In 1996, the accrediting body overseeing Liberty presented a list of more than 100 “recommendations” for staying accredited, including a demand that it reduce its debt. Falwell went on a 40-day liquids-only fast, praying for deliverance. “I am certain that we will become a world-class university training champions for Christ in every important field of study,” Falwell vowed in his autobiography. “And I am asking God to give me more time to guide and fund that dream.”One educational novelty that Falwell dabbled in, starting in the mid-70s, was an early form of distance learning. Liberty would mail lecture videotapes and course packets to paying customers around the country — at first just certificate courses in Bible studies, and by the mid-80s, accredited courses in other subjects as well. By the time of Liberty’s financial embattlement, other education innovators had taken the idea much further — none more so than a man named John Sperling.Sperling was an unlikely capitalist entrepreneur. The son of a failed farmer in the Missouri Ozarks, he joined the Merchant Marine, embraced socialism and ended up receiving a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge. He got a job teaching at San Jose State University, where he took over the faculty union and led a big strike in 1968. His humble origins and early socialist leanings had given him a jaundiced view of elite schools, and his experience teaching a course to police officers and teachers as part of a federally funded effort to reduce juvenile delinquency furthered his belief that traditional colleges were leaving out a whole swath of Americans eager for higher education. He decided to start a university of his own — not a nonprofit but a for-profit, and not in California, where he had clashed with skeptical accreditors, but in the laxer regulatory climate of Arizona.In 1976, Sperling rented space in a boilermakers’ union hall in Phoenix and started offering weekly classes there to eight students — all adults who’d had some college education and were looking to complete their degrees. A decade later, University of Phoenix had 6,000 students. But things really took off three years later, in 1989, when Sperling started offering MBAs online through Prodigy, the early electronic communications service. Sperling took the university’s parent company public in 1994; by 2000, enrollment had reached 100,000.By the early 2000s, for-profit colleges were booming: Access to the internet was spreading, and the Bush administration was employing a notably light regulatory touch, even as the programs were devouring an ever-greater share of federal student aid. Among the adopters of Sperling’s model was Falwell, who in 2004 began expanding the family’s primitive distance-learning programs into what would become known as Liberty University Online.In his autobiography, Falwell praised Jerry Jr.’s business instincts, crediting him with saving Liberty from ruin through his management of its debt. “God sent him to me just in time,” he wrote. “He is more responsible, humanly speaking, for the miraculous financial survival of this ministry than any other single person.” When Falwell died in 2007 at age 73, his younger son, Jonathan, took over the pulpit at Thomas Road Baptist, and Jerry Jr. took over the university — an indication of where the heart of the ministry now was.As the Great Recession hit, laid-off Americans turned to online education to seek a new economic foothold. After years of trying to save Liberty by cutting costs, Falwell Jr. said, he adopted his father’s vision of saving it through increasing revenues. In a recent telephone interview, Falwell described the surge in online enrollment as a kind of revelation. “It took us about 20 years to perfect” the distance-learning model, he said, “but when we did, that was about when everyone started getting high-speed internet in their homes, and we were the only nonprofit poised to serve that huge adult market of people who had not finished college or needed a master’s degree to get a promotion.”Liberty had another advantage over online competitors, he said: its status as a religious-based institution, “that long history of Liberty being a leader among Christian universities,” the “faith-based mission” that “makes us so unique and puts us in a class by ourselves.”The River Ridge Mall spreads out on the flat ground below Liberty’s campus, among motels and fast-food restaurants. Like much commercial real estate in Lynchburg, it is majority-owned by Liberty University. In 2013, the mall lost one of its anchor tenants, Sears, which occupied a 112,000-square-foot space behind gray, nearly windowless walls. The retailer was replaced by Liberty University Online. When it first arrived inside the mall, the L.U.O. operation numbered 675 employees; it grew so large that in 2015 L.U.O. began moving its operation into a former Nationwide Insurance building several miles away.
At the front lines are the “admissions representatives,” some 300 phone recruiters working two shifts from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., deploying call lists that Liberty gets from websites where people register and search for information about online higher education, like BestCollegesOnline.com. There is such a race to get to customers before University of Phoenix and other rivals that the prospective students sometimes marvel at how little time has elapsed — just a handful of minutes — between their providing their information on a website and the call coming from Liberty. Liberty’s tax filings show that in 2016, the university paid Google $16.8 million for “admissions leads generation.” In other words, advertising Liberty to those searching online for degree options.
The recruiters work under intense pressure, according to several former L.U.O. employees I spoke with. They get no more than 45 seconds between calls, and sometimes managers override even that short break. There are no formal quotas — a federal regulation that went into effect in 2011 forbids them. But as one former employee put it, the “highly motivated goal” is for each recruiter to sign up eight new students a day. Multiplied across 300 cubicles, that is 2,400 per day. Of those, only a small fraction end up paying and starting courses, but that is still an extraordinary haul for any kind of education business.
Every day, according to the former employee, managers send out a report showing the previous day’s tallies. Recruiters who signed up four or fewer new students get their names in red, visible for all to see, and are sometimes subject to a disciplinary conversation. Monthly tallies are also scored as green, yellow or red. Top performers are in the running for a small raise from the base salary, which is about $30,000. “It was that carrot and stick,” the former employee told me.
A separate division of about 60 people focuses on courting members of the military, who have access to even greater federal tuition assistance, and then advising them on campus. A former employee in that division said that given the smaller crew, the work there was if anything even more intense than in the main branch: More than 30,000 L.U.O. students are from the military or military families.
Two recruiters told me they were instructed to quote L.U.O.’s cost on a per-credit basis, rather than per-course, which makes it sound more affordable. Undergraduate courses for part-time students are $455 per credit, or $1,365 for a typical course; master’s courses are typically about $600 per credit. They are instructed not to press prospective applicants too hard on their academic qualifications. Applicants have to submit past transcripts, but any grade point average above 0.5 — equivalent to a D-minus — would suffice, said the former employee in the nonmilitary division. Recruiters, he told me, “would say, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been accepted.’ They’d make it seem competitive.”The two recruiters also said they were told not to mention Liberty’s Christian orientation until people agree to apply, when this fact is made clear in the user agreement they sign online. It also becomes clear at the moment that the recruiters sign up students for their first classes, typically an orientation class and three required Bible studies classes. Students often can’t transfer credits for these courses to other colleges, which deters many from dropping out: Leaving L.U.O. without signing up for more courses would mean wasting the money spent on the first four.
Falwell and other top Liberty officials pushed back on some of these points in my interview with them, insisting, for instance, that the minimum G.P.A. for applicants is 2.0 and that recruiters are assessed according to “the same H.R. evaluation form that’s standard across the university.” But Ron Kennedy, the executive vice president for online enrollment management, acknowledged that the recruiters working under pressure to meet their targets might say otherwise. “It’s a call center,” he said.
In 2010, undercover investigators from the Government Accountability Office scrutinized 15 for-profit colleges, finding that every one of them had misled applicants and that four had encouraged them to lie on their federal student-aid forms. The Obama administration seized on the findings as it began a yearslong clampdown on for-profit education, which by 2013 was gobbling up a fifth of all federal student aid, more than $25 billion, despite enrolling only 10 percent of students — and also producing about a third of all federal student loan defaults.
Liberty, too, was hugely reliant on federal money, in the form of Pell grants, Department of Veterans Affairs benefits and federally subsidized loans. By 2010, it had more than 50,000 students enrolled and was pulling in more than $420 million annually. But because Liberty was technically not for-profit, it was spared many of the administration’s new regulations, including its requirement that a certain threshold of graduates be able to attain “gainful employment,” which was designed to hit for-profit colleges much harder. It was also spared from the pre-existing rule that for-profit colleges could get no more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal sources.
If anything, Liberty benefited from the crackdown. The Obama administration’s actions helped put out of business large for-profit chains like Corinthian and ITT Technical Institute, clearing formidable competition from the field. Though there were other nonprofit institutions with online offerings — Arizona State, Southern New Hampshire and Western Governors, as well as premium players like Stanford and Duke — none were operating at Liberty’s scale. The university now touts itself on its website as “the largest private nonprofit university in the nation.” In a sense, said Ben Miller, who served as a senior policy adviser in Obama’s Department of Education, the crackdown on for-profits offered Liberty a “marketing advantage.”
Falwell was candid about the benefits of the nonprofit status. “It insulated us from the attack on the for-profits,” he told me. And it put him on the same footing with other, more established universities. “There’s no way that an Obama federal government that probably doesn’t care much for schools like Liberty can treat us different than Harvard or Yale or Indiana Wesleyan or the University of Maryland.”
Liberty’s ability to distance itself from for-profit colleges was especially notable given that, by several key metrics, it resembled them more closely than the private nonprofits it was grouped with. The rate of Liberty graduates who default on their loans within three years of graduating is 9.9 percent, several points higher than the average for nonprofit colleges, though still below that for for-profit colleges. Most striking, though, is how little the university spends on actual instruction. It does not report separate figures for spending on the online school and the traditional college. But according to its most recent figures, from 2016, the university reports spending only $2,609 on instruction per full-time equivalent student across both categories. That is a fraction of what traditional private universities spend (Notre Dame’s equivalent figure is $27,391) but also well behind even University of Phoenix, which spends more than $4,000 per student in many states. It is also behind other hybrid online-traditional nonprofit religious colleges like Ohio Christian University, which spends about $4,500. In 2013, according to an audited financial statement I obtained, Liberty received $749 million in tuition and fees but spent only $260 million on instruction, academic support and student services.
By 2016, Liberty’s net assets had crossed the $1.6 billion mark, up more than tenfold from a decade earlier. Thanks to its low spending on instruction, its net income was an astonishing $215 million on nearly $1 billion in revenue, according to its tax filing — making it one of the most lucrative nonprofits in the country, based simply on the difference between its operating revenue and expenses, in a league with some of the largest nonprofit hospital systems.
Falwell, whose Liberty salary is nearly $1 million, does not apologize for those margins. Liberty, he said, is simply being shrewd about keeping costs down, while plowing revenue back into the university. He noted proudly that Liberty’s net assets are now $2.5 billion, up from just $150 million in 2007, when he took over. He said he was surprised more universities weren’t following Liberty’s example of increasing online enrollment by keeping instructional spending and tuition low. And he freely acknowledged that the online revenues were going to buttress the residential campus. From Falwell’s perspective, there was nothing wrong with the university’s benefiting so much from the online program. “As long as we’re keeping the quality up, we don’t think it’s a disservice to anyone,” he said. “All that is, is ensuring the future of the university.”
Students at Liberty often quote a favorite line of Falwell Sr.’s: “If it’s Christian, it ought to be better.” Even those who have misgivings about the university’s conservative culture are quick to defend the education they’ve received on campus. Yet despite its ambitions to become the “evangelical Notre Dame” that Falwell envisioned, Liberty is still ranked well behind that university and other religious-based institutions like Brigham Young and Pepperdine; U.S. News and World Report clumps Liberty in the lowest quartile of institutions in its “national universities” category. Some of its programs have strong reputations, among them nursing, engineering and flight school. But the college is limited in its ability to compete for premier faculty, not only because its politics are out of step with the greater academic community, but also because none of its programs, with the exception of its law school, offer tenure.
In his autobiography, Falwell made virtually no distinction between these students on the Lynchburg campus and those receiving their instruction remotely. All of them, in his telling, were being prepared for the same goal, to be “Champions for Christ,” as the Liberty motto had it. But many students on campus, at least, are openly dismissive of the online experience. They take some classes online, for the convenience of not having to drag themselves to class — and, they readily admit, for the ease of not having to study much. “People know it’s kind of a joke and don’t learn that much from it,” Dustin Wahl, a senior from South Dakota, told me. “You use Google when you take your quiz and don’t have to work as hard. It’s pretty obvious.” (Liberty says using Google during quizzes or exams is cheating.)
Campus students are especially scornful of the online discussion boards that are in theory meant to replicate the back and forth of a classroom, but that in reality tend to be a rote exercise, with students making only their requisite one post and two comments per week, generating no substantive discussion. “It’s very minimal engagement,” said Alexander Forbes, a senior from California. Recently, a satirical campus newspaper, The Flaming Bugle, ran an Onion-style article with the headline “Cat Playing on Keyboard Inadvertently Earns ‘A’ for Discussion Board Post.”
Chris Gaumer taught English courses both on campus and online at Liberty after getting his bachelor’s degree on campus in 2006. The difference between the two forms of teaching was startling, he told me. As an online instructor, he said, he was not expected to engage in the delivery of any actual educational content. That was all prepared separately by L.U.O.’s team of course designers and editors, who assemble curriculums and videotaped lectures by other Liberty professors. This leaves little for the instructor to do in the courses, which typically run eight weeks. “As professor, you show up and your job is to handle emails and grade,” Gaumer said. This helps explain why the instructors — the roughly 2,400 adjuncts scattered around the country, plus the Liberty professors who agree to teach online courses on the side — are willing to take on the task for what’s long been the going rate for the job: $2,100 per course. (Falwell Jr. said it will soon go up to $2,700.)
Until recently, the course designers and editors, a team of about 30 people, worked out of the old Thomas Road Baptist Church — the congregation moved out of the former bottling plant years earlier — in a concrete room that got so cold in winter that they sometimes kept scarves and hats on. For editors, starting pay is now around $11 per hour. As L.U.O. boomed in size, they became so overwhelmed by the challenge of shaping hundreds of courses that L.U.O. decided in 2015 to focus designers and editors on the hundred or so highest-enrollment courses per term, leaving the maintenance of the remaining hundreds of courses up to the instructors themselves. One former editor recalled having a professor send a syllabus along with, essentially, an apology for throwing something together at the last minute.
Gaumer, who now works at Randolph College in Lynchburg, said the steep drop-off in quality from the traditional college to the online courses was both openly acknowledged among Liberty faculty and not fully reckoned with. The reason was plain, he said: Everyone knew that L.U.O. was subsidizing the physical university. “The motivation behind the growth seems to be almost entirely economic, because it’s not as if the education is getting any better,” he said.
Falwell acknowledged that Liberty’s faculty initially resisted the rise of the online program, fearing the degradation of academic standards. “The big victory was finding a way to tame the faculty,” he said. But he disputed that there was any great difference in quality. For one thing, he said, the university made sure that all of its online instructors “adhere to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, our doctrinal statement.” Physical distance was a challenge, he said, but online instructors overcame it by making an extra effort to reach out. “They spend a lot more time taking a personal interest in the students,” he said.
One of the 65,000 students who enrolled with L.U.O. in 2013 was Megan Hart, a woman from New Jersey with unflaggingly high spirits. Hart, who is in her 40s, started her working life at the glass company where her father worked, too, until he was laid off. From there, Hart made her way into education, teaching communications at the local community college and the local prison. Adjunct courses at the college paid just $525 per credit, netting her only about $5,000 per semester, so she got a low-level administrative job there, too.
Her first marriage, to the father of her daughter, ended in divorce. In January 2012, her second husband suddenly vanished. Hart and her daughter, then 9 years old, lost their home shortly afterward, and she filed for bankruptcy. She and her daughter moved into her parents’ basement and got by with donations from her local Assemblies of God church, where she was active. In 2013, she signed up to take three courses at L.U.O. that would provide her with a certificate in communications, allowing her to become a full-time instructor at the community college, which would reimburse her L.U.O. tuition.
Hart, who had a master’s in communications and leadership through Pat Robertson’s Regent University, chose L.U.O. because of its affordability and Christian cachet. But in her years of teaching and taking courses, she said, she had never seen anything as flimsy as what L.U.O. passed off in its supposedly graduate-level courses. She had little interaction with the instructor, and the questions for the midterm and final exams were so arbitrary that it seemed to Hart as if they had been randomly generated by a computer program. She spent the open-book exams wildly flipping back and forth through the textbook and course materials trying to find the relevant passages. It was, she wrote to L.U.O. officials later, like “looking for Waldo.”
When she wrote the instructor for the second class to ask about the test, he responded: “As to exam question, I have no clue how the final is run.” He said he’d get back to her. He ended his note, “Do remember that God is in control and he works all things for our good.”
When Hart emailed the instructor for her third course, which had a closed-book exam, she confirmed Hart’s suspicions: “The exam questions are random.” Hart got good grades in the first two courses but was increasingly convinced she was paying for a meaningless experience. She sent an email outlining her concerns to the instructor and an L.U.O. academic mentor, adding that she might quit the third course. “We will certainly take your input very seriously,” the mentor responded. “May the Lord bless you richly in your studies and future endeavors.”
Finally, Hart told the officials that she was withdrawing from the third course, even though she had been informed that she would still have to pay 25 percent of the cost. “My spirit has been so sick over what I have experienced,” she wrote. In late 2013, she filed a complaint with a little-known government agency called the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, which oversees the state’s colleges.
Between 2009 and summer 2017, L.U.O. students filed 49 complaints with the council, more than for any other institution in the state. For some, the problem was administrative bungling — L.U.O. registered them for the wrong class, or required a class it turned out they didn’t need, and so on. For some, it was endless technical or logistical troubles that kept them from being able to submit their assignments or get textbooks. For others, it was disputes about tuition and financial aid that left them feeling as if L.U.O. was demanding more money than was fair, and withholding their transcripts until they paid up.
Several complainants said they were particularly taken aback by their L.U.O. experiences because of Liberty’s religious underpinnings. “I just expected that Liberty University being a Christian university,” they’d be more helpful, wrote a complainant who went to prison and then become homeless after a stint enrolled in L.U.O. He had been seeking to have his transcript released despite his still having a balance at L.U.O., so that he could resume his education elsewhere; Liberty responded by recommending homeless shelters. “Liberty’s motto is they are a Christian school that is training champions for Christ and they are the light of the world,” another student wrote six years ago. “That motto needs to be revised.”
The anodyne responses the students received from L.U.O. were frequently glossed with Christian bromides. To a student whose financial aid was suspended in 2015 after the student failed a course because the textbook didn’t arrive in time, an instructor sent “quiz tips that may help” that included “Eat a healthy meal before taking your quiz” and “Pray before beginning each quiz!” Other L.U.O. responses included language errors so extreme that they bordered on confusing: One administrator wrote in 2014 about a complainant’s having submitted work that “appeared to have been copied from an unsighted source,” while a professor responded to a student in 2012 that “no other acceptions will be made.”
Other students were left simply to flounder, contrary to Falwell’s claims of close attention from distant instructors. Lydia Terry-Dominelli, who lives in a suburb of Albany, New York, signed up with Liberty in 2013, when it looked as if she and her husband were headed for divorce and she was worrying about how she could support herself and her 9-year-old daughter. She decided to get her teacher’s certification and chose Liberty partly because she was an observant Anglican. “I was ready for something that had some kind of value system,” she told me.
In 2015, Terry-Dominelli failed a graduate-level education course when, she said, one of the assignments she submitted vanished from Blackboard, the online system used by Liberty. After twice failing a writing course and puzzling over what she was doing wrong, she asked the course instructor for an explanation. He wrote back to suggest that she might do better if she found a “new work space” like the local library. After she assured him that her apartment sufficed and the conversation continued, he wrote: “I wonder if you can’t find a great prayer group through L.U.O.?”
Terry-Dominelli struggled further with confusing assignments in another graduate-level education course. She was starting to feel helpless over the lack of guidance. “I have prayed very hard, and what I keep being told is I am in the wrong place,” she wrote to the education instructor in late October of 2015.
“Bless your heart. I am so sorry,” the instructor responded. “I will join you in prayer for you to have wisdom and discernment.”
In early 2016, Terry-Dominelli was unable to access online the spring semester courses she had registered for. She took it as a final sign and left Liberty, just a few courses short of the master’s degree she had borrowed more than $20,000 to pay for. In August 2016, having failed to establish a decent income, she moved back in with her husband. Lacking certification, she took a part-time job as an aide at a local elementary school. Unable to afford the loans she’d taken out, she filed for help under the Department of Education’s Borrower Defense program, which is intended for students who have incurred student debt after being misled by higher education programs. (Her application is still pending.)
She also filed a complaint with the Virginia agency: “I feel that I was being pushed out of the program and I need to know why,” she had written to one of her professors. The agency declined to take action, finding no clear violations by Liberty. “What’s killing me is that I went into this program to try to change my situation,” she told me, “and I’m worse off than I was at the beginning.”
The Trump-Falwell bond has if anything grown even stronger in recent months. In October, Falwell Jr. told Breitbart News that Trump could “be the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln” and urged an evangelical army to rise up against the “fake Republicans” standing in his way. In December, he joined Trump in promoting Roy Moore’s Senate candidacy, quoting the song “Sweet Home Alabama” in a tweet on the eve of Election Day: “AL voters are too smart to let the media & Estab Repubs & Dems tell them how to vote. I hope the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd is alive/well in AL. ‘A southern man don’t need them around anyhow & Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you, tell me true?’” In late February, he joined in on Trump’s mau-mauing of Jeff Sessions, calling the attorney general a “coward” in a tweet for his handling of the Russia investigation.
But on campus, Falwell has proved a more divisive leader than his father. In May 2016, conflict over his pro-Trump stance prompted the resignation of the chairman of the university board of trustees’ executive committee, Mark DeMoss, whose father was a major donor to the university. DeMoss previously told The Washington Post that “the bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense — and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ.” It also prompted students on campus, including Wahl and Forbes, to gather hundreds of signatures in opposition to Trump following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. After Falwell’s support for Trump following Charlottesville, several Liberty graduates mailed back their degrees in protest. One protester was Laura Honnol, a banking officer in Lubbock, Texas, who attended from 2003 to 2007. “There’s been a huge climate shift from Falwell Senior to Falwell Junior,” she told me. “You felt like you disagreed with Senior, but he had good intentions and just didn’t do it right sometimes. But Junior came along, and it’s become more of a profit machine and a numbers machine.”
The Trump connection is not without risk for Falwell. Some people who worked for L.U.O. in late 2016 and early 2017 blamed it for a dip in applications at the time and said the decline led to an April 2017 leadership overhaul and the departure of many employees. Falwell told me that Liberty has deliberately brought online enrollment down to around 85,000, explaining that “we wanted to make sure we kept the student quality at a certain standard.” And he said that his alliance with Trump has only helped the university: “For every student we lost because of political concerns, we picked up two or three inquiries who support us because of that political stand.”
A relationship with Trump could benefit Falwell Jr. and Liberty in other ways too. One of the top orders of business for Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has been to roll back Obama-era regulations on online-degree providers. She named a former official from for-profit DeVry University to lead the D.O.E. unit that polices fraud in higher education. Claims for student debt relief under the Borrower Defense program are being considered at a far slower rate under DeVos, who is delaying by two years an Obama rule that would make it easier to file debt relief claims. And DeVos is expected shortly to roll back several key regulations geared toward online providers: ones giving states regulatory powers over distance-learning programs, establishing clear standards for a credit hour and requiring “regular and substantive” interactions between online instructors and students. Falwell told me that Liberty officials have had a major hand in some of DeVos’s actions: “A lot of what we sent them is actually what got implemented,” he said.
After the convocation on the first weekend in November, I met with Dustin Wahl in Liberty’s student center, overlooking the campus quad. He said that the unbridled success of the online program couldn’t help putting him in mind of the profit-seeking tradition within American Christianity, which is closely aligned with evangelical Christianity’s prosperity gospel — the notion that financial success, far from distracting us from the higher values, is an affirmation of godliness. Wahl told me he’d frequently heard people justify the school’s new wealth in these terms. “A lot of people just talk about it generally, how God has blessed us,” he said.
Falwell rejects such prosperity-gospel talk. “I’m not going to tell you that we’ve done better because we’re better people,” he told me. “What I will say is that we’ve always operated from a business perspective. We’ve treated it like a business.” And that’s what first drew him to Trump, he said: the kinship of one businessman to another. “I thought to myself, if there’s one thing this country needs, it’s exactly the methods we employed at Liberty to save the school and make it prosper, and that’s just basic business principles.”
As I sat with Wahl, the spoils of that prosperity were visible all around us: not just gleaming new buildings like the $50 million library with its robotic book-retrieval system, but also, up the mountain, a $7 million “Snowflex Centre,” with a polymer surface for year-round skiing — the only one of its kind at any university in the country. Elsewhere, the university is completing a $3 million shooting range. But, Wahl said, once you knew about the thousands of people far from Lynchburg who funded this splendor, it was hard to take your mind off them, and off the faith with which they signed up for L.U.O. “You get a phone call,” he said, “and it’s God telling you, ‘I’ll give you an education.’?“
When we spoke before my visit, Wahl raved about the campus: “It’s beautiful,” he said. Then he added: “And it’s funded by the online program that’s sold to people who can’t really afford college.”
ProPublica<div>=</div><div>
</div><div><div>no pix link</div><div>
</div><div>After President Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era executive order that offers work permits to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, many religious communities responded with resounding disapproval. In addition to faith-based groups that physically protested the move, a staggering number of faith groups from across the theological spectrum issued statements condemning the decision, arguing it did not reflect a religious call to compassion and describing it as “immoral,” “reprehensible,” or “cruel.”</div><div>
</div><div>Members of Trump’s own evangelical advisory board — a loose band of more than 20 conservative Christian pastors and advocates who have advised the president since his campaign days — took a decidedly different stance.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Rev. Tony Suarez, a vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) and a member of the board, said Trump’s announcement was actually a victory for faith-based advocacy. He pointed to the president’s inclusion of a six-month window allowing recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to apply for an extension as evidence the White House had been convinced to moderate its stance on immigration policy.</div><div>
</div><div>“[The DACA decision] is a major win for the faith advisory council,” Suarez told ThinkProgress over the phone. “I thought it was vindication.”</div><div>
</div><div>The DACA decision was “a major win for the faith advisory council…I thought it was vindication.”</div><div>
</div><div>The yawning ideological gap between Trump’s faith advisers and the rest of the American religious community has been widening for some time. Pastors who publicly advised Trump’s campaign told ThinkProgress they have endured near-constant calls to step down from their consulting positions for months. Some reported a flood of angry emails and phone calls last month after the president compared white supremacists to counter-protesters who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. One described being heckled at baseball games. Nonetheless, only one board member has officially resigned.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Why have so few religious advisers abandoned Trump? While the loyalty of some faith leaders can be traced to the belief that America should be restored as a “Christian nation,” many board members cite a far more practical reason: unprecedented access to a notoriously independent president.</div><div>
</div><div>The precise list of faith leaders who serve on the board is unclear even to participants. But advisers who spoke to ThinkProgress paint a complicated picture of Trump’s inner circle of religious confidantes, where conservative evangelical faith leaders vie for the attention of the president and his staff.</div><div>
</div><div>President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, May 4, 2017, before signing his "religious liberty" executive order. From second from left are, Cardinal Donald Wuerl is the Archbishop of Washington, Pastor Jack Graham, Paula White, senior pastor of New Destiny Christian Center and Vice President Mike </div><div>
</div><div>Layers of access to the president</div><div>Trump’s faith board is technically unofficial. Whereas the lists of people serving on the real estate mogul’s various business councils were made public — and some CEOs made news for publicly resigning from their posts after Charlottesville — the faith board exists largely outside of official government structures.</div><div>
</div><div>Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told ThinkProgress this informal status is likely an attempt to avoid violating the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the establishment of any state religion.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>“I don’t think the [faith] council could have any official role in the U.S. government consistent with the First Amendment of the Constitution,” Painter said, referring to the fact that the board is entirely evangelical.</div><div>
</div><div>Nevertheless, board members have managed to carve out a considerable level of access to the president and his staff.</div><div>
</div><div>“Some people like politics, I don’t,” the advisory group’s de facto spokesman, Johnnie Moore, told ThinkProgress in an email. “I love people, and — unfortunately — politics is the only way to influence the systems that effect people.”</div><div>
</div><div>Moore doesn’t carry the name recognition of some conservative Christian megapastors on the board. But the 33-year-old is well-known in evangelical circles, where he has built a pedigree that includes stints as a vice president at the right-wing Liberty University, an advocate for persecuted Christians abroad, and a faith adviser to Dr. Ben Carson’s campaign for president. His involvement with Trump’s evangelical advisory board dates back to its inception in 2016, when campaign officials asked him to help organize it.</div><div>
</div><div> </div><div>Johnnie Moore ?</div><div>@JohnnieM</div><div>Such an honor to pray within the Oval Office for @POTUS & @VP .</div><div>
</div><div>5:08 PM - Jul 11, 2017</div><div> 5,657 5,657 Replies   3,362 3,362 Retweets   7,783 7,783 likes</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Since then, the scope of the board’s potential influence on policy decisions has become strikingly broad. In addition to serving several officials in a ministerial capacity, groups of pastors have met with representatives and policy experts from the White House, State Department, and the National Security Council, among other government groups. Moore said these conversations can be exhaustive.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>“Some have lasted an hour and one lasted seven hours,” Moore said, referring to a meeting with the White House Public Liaison office. “In each meeting certain staff members from the executive office of the president have attended, addressed the group, or taken questions.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Trump faith adviser regrets saying the president was anointed by God, insists he isn’t racist</div><div>She clarified that she believes Trump is anointed, but so was Barack Obama.</div><div>
</div><div>The board’s wide reach reflects Trump’s longstanding reliance on evangelical Christians to shore up his coalition. Faith-based resistance to Trump was common before and after his rise to power, but many conservative Christian leaders stood by him despite numerous controversies that dogged his campaign. Some even endorsed Trump after a tape emerged of him bragging about sexual assault, and roughly 80 percent of white evangelical Protestants ultimately backed Trump on Election Day in 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>That support has been reciprocal.</div><div>
</div><div>“After the strong support of evangelicals during the campaign, the White House surely pays a great deal of attention to what issues evangelicals are passionate about,” Suarez said. “We found that when we can voice our praise or concern directly to the president, he certainly considers it, takes it to heart, and takes it to prayer.”</div><div>
</div><div>“If we were in relationship and I was your pastor… I could call you, or you could call me.”</div><div>
</div><div>Getting things “directly to the president” isn’t always easy. Most board meetings are with administration officials, not the president himself. But at least one member is understood to have special access to Trump: Florida-based megapastor Paula White.</div><div>
</div><div>Sometimes referred to as the president’s “God whisperer,” White often recounts how Trump called her on a whim roughly 15 years ago after seeing her on a Christian television show, telling her she was “fantastic.” White, who stumped for Trump on the campaign and prayed at his inauguration, says the two have been close ever since, and right-wing pastor Jim Bakker recently declared that White can walk into the White House “anytime she wants.”</div><div>
</div><div>The claim seemed audacious. But when asked by reporters at the 2017 Religion News Association (RNA) conference about the quip, White did not dispel the notion that she has special access to the president, reiterating that she has a “long-term relationship” with Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>Later, White privately insisted to ThinkProgress that her advisory role is the product of a genuine connection with the president — and one rooted in ministry.</div><div>
</div><div>“Obviously there are many times [I advise the president] in person. Many times there are phone calls,” White said. “If we were in relationship and I was your pastor… I could call you, or you could call me.”</div><div>
</div><div>Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a church service at Great Faith Ministries, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)</div><div>DONALD TRUMP SPEAKS DURING A CHURCH SERVICE AT GREAT FAITH MINISTRIES IN 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>Using the DACA fight to test lobbying muscles</div><div>
</div><div>In the aftermath of tensions in Charlottesville and controversy over how the president responded to the events there, the fight over DACA turned out to be a key moment for the evangelical board to flex its muscle and win back some good favor with the public.</div><div>
</div><div>According to polling firm PRRI, a majority of evangelicals—including white evangelicals—support policies similar to DACA. Members of Trump’s advisory board, particularly Latino evangelicals, were already vocal supporters of the program.</div><div>
</div><div>So after Texas and several other states threatened to sue the Trump administration if it did not end DACA by September 5, and the White House signaled that Trump planned to acquiesce, Suarez reportedly worked with other faith leaders — including NHCLC head Samuel Rodriguez, Georgia megapastor Jentezen Franklin, and Paula White — to press Trump into rethinking his pledge to abolish the program.</div><div>
</div><div>Most details of these discussions with Trump have not been divulged, but board members claim in-person conversations between the president and advisers were key to steering him towards a less hardline position.</div><div>
</div><div>“The DACA issue proved what Rev. Rodriguez said, which is ‘Access leads to conversations which leads to conviction which leads to compassion; with God’s Spirit, hearts and minds can be changed.’”</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, Suarez and Rodriguez also used their positions to lift up more traditional forms of activism. Suarez told ThinkProgress the two pastors made sure administration officials were aware of letters signed in defense of DACA by thousands of faith leaders organized by groups such as the Evangelical Immigration Table and the NHCLC.</div><div>
</div><div>Taken together, Suarez says the team was able to convince the White House to include the six-month delay that allows Congress time to pass a legislative solution for DACA recipients, often called DREAMers.</div><div>
</div><div>“The DACA issue proved what Rev. Rodriguez said, which is ‘Access leads to conversations which leads to conviction which leads to compassion; with God’s Spirit, hearts and minds can be changed,’” Suarez said. “We were able to humanize the plight of these DREAMers, and the president’s reaction was that of a father and grandfather. And he showed great compassion.”</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Meet the Latino evangelical pastor who just endorsed Trump</div><div>
</div><div>“I believe he is a Christian.”</div><div>
</div><div>But the moment also shows the profound limits of the faith board’s ability to persuade Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>At the end of the day, DACA was still rescinded—a deeply unpopular decision that puts hundreds of thousands of DREAMers in jeopardy—and Franklin couldn’t even assure the Washington Post that Trump would sign a DACA-like bill if Congress ends up passing one.</div><div>
</div><div>Faith advisers were also hardly the only voice demanding that Trump maintain DACA, as they were joined by a chorus of activists and even GOP lawmakers who encouraged the president to keep the policy in place.</div><div>
</div><div>In this photo taken May 13, 2017, President Donald Trump stands with Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell, and an early backer of Trump, said the president had made a “bold truthful statement” about the demonstration. Falwell said the president’s remarks were a clear repudiation of white supremacists, Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. </div><div>
</div><div>PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP STANDS WITH LIBERTY UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT JERRY FALWELL JR. IN MAY 2017 IN LYNCHBURG, VA.</div><div>
</div><div>What happens when agendas clash?</div><div>Although virtually all members of the loose board are evangelicals, they hail from different and sometimes competing faith traditions, and often have conflicting priorities when it comes to domestic and foreign policy.</div><div>
</div><div>The board is not unanimous when it comes to DACA, for instance. While speaking to reporters at the RNA conference, Moore noted there were “people who agree, people who disagree” on the issue.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s decision to ban transgender Americans from the military represents another policy clash. The New York Times reported in September that Tony Perkins, the head of the right-wing Family Research Council, was one of the driving forces behind Trump’s decision to announce this ban. Perkins’ relationship to the board, like many others who attend their meetings, is somewhat amorphous. But he reportedly broached the topic of the ban in a meeting of faith advisory board members just days before Trump announced the change on Twitter. Other members of the board such as Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., Robert Jeffress, and James Dobson publicly praised the transgender ban.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The emerging alliance between Putin and Trump’s God squad</div><div>
</div><div>The unlikely partnership is years in the making.</div><div>
</div><div>Moore, meanwhile, insisted to ThinkProgress that board members “weren’t involved in the transgender issue,” saying, “We have been consulted on dozens of issues, and we have spent more time on criminal justice reform and religious liberty issues, for instance, than any social issue.”</div><div>
</div><div>Moore later explained to ThinkProgress that the board has almost functioned as a “network,” where a group that is “more than double or maybe triple” the original list is often invited into meetings.</div><div>
</div><div>No matter who initiated the conversation, the episode exposes the potential for tension.</div><div>
</div><div>“I think everyone has different issues that are their priority. My priority is immigration,” Saurez told ThinkProgress. “Someone else’s battle might not be my priority. That doesn’t mean someone is going to block or work against what someone else is working on, but they might not be an active voice for that issue.”</div><div>
</div><div>Paula White, for example, is hardly the ideal champion of the traditional Religious Right priorities long trumpeted by other board members such as Falwell and Faith and Freedom Coalition head Ralph Reed.</div><div>
</div><div>Though she has at times tried to distance herself from this characterization, White—along with fellow faith advisers Mark Burns and Gloria and Kenneth Copeland—is widely considered to be a preacher of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” a religious movement that teaches followers they can become wealthy and successful through faith?, often by giving money to their church. Other members of the board have been deeply critical of the theology.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>How Trump’s presidency reveals the true nature of Christian nationalism</div><div>Scholars say Christian nationalism isn’t dead yet. It could be more powerful than ever.</div><div>
</div><div>Still, board members work to show a united front. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, most of them published statements condemning racism, but stopped short of criticizing Trump — and a few, such as Jerry Falwell, Jr., leaped to his defense. And when New York megapastor A.R. Bernard left the council over the media firestorm, his fellow members were careful not to cast aspersions on their ministerial colleague.</div><div>
</div><div>They also often protect and promote each other. Moore, for instance, owns the KAIROS Company, a media relations group that specializes in “elevating reputations and growing circles of influence.” He’s made ample use of his media savvy to help craft the board’s public-facing image: Though the KAIROS website does not list clients, Moore said he represents several evangelical board members, including Robert Jeffress, James Dobson, and Paula White.</div><div>
</div><div>Moore’s public relations skills were on full display earlier this month during the RNA conference. The multi-day event included a panel discussion with White, who rarely engages with reporters and who was still reeling from a deeply controversial exchange on the Jim Bakker show. (Many interpreted her on-air remarks as implying that resistance to Trump is an affront to God. She has since worked to clarify her comments, telling ThinkProgress she regretted some of her words.) Moore repeatedly spoke on White’s behalf during exchanges with the press, sometimes amending her comments with his own thoughts.</div><div>
</div><div>“[When] she was on the Jim Bakker Show… she wasn’t prepared, she wasn’t thinking through that moment,” Moore said to a gaggle of reporters as White nodded along. “She called me [after the show] and said, ‘I said what?’ And I said, ‘Go watch the video!'”</div><div>
</div><div>Members also say differences in opinion are less important than shared ideals.</div><div>
</div><div>“I think there is more agreement than disagreement, because everyone realizes the special moment that this is for evangelicals, for faith leaders,” Suarez said. “We’ve come together with the sense that we’re going to make America great again. That group has laid doctrinal differences aside to help the country.”</div><div>
</div><div>Faith leaders pray with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. </div><div>
</div><div>Access comes at a cost</div><div>
</div><div>Even with the evangelical advisory board’s power, it would be a mistake to equate proximity to the president with broad influence over his decision making. As several former White House staffers can attest, access does not always equal desired levels of influence, nor does it guarantee long-term loyalty from Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>It’s also possible that short-term “wins” can cost board members access in other places. In the wake of the DACA decision, reports emerged of Rodriguez, Suarez, and other NHCLC members being blocked from White House meetings about Hispanic issues not exclusively tied to faith.</div><div>
</div><div>It remains to be seen how the faith council will change over time. The White House has met with a number of faith leaders that have never claimed affiliation with the board since Trump was inaugurated, and key influencers will likely shift depending on what issue is up for debate.</div><div>
</div><div>No matter what happens, evangelical faith leaders are unlikely to give up seats at Trump’s table. And Trump, who still needs the support of their followers, is equally unlikely to dismiss their concerns–even if he doesn’t always end up turning them into policy.</div><div>
</div><div>For many, a listening ear is what matters most.</div><div>
</div><div>“I personally believe Christians have always had an influence on politics,” White told reporters at RNA. She later added: “Our president is…an incredible listener."</div></div><div>=</div>=lib U law school dean siad he did not think BO antiC, but got why other ppl thot so 75  mat staver <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/liberty-counsel/">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/liberty-counsel/</a>wilks $Liberty Counsel, a legal advocacy group affiliated with Liberty University, is home to right-wing legal activist Mat Staver and the increasingly unhinged Matt Barber. Liberty Counsel promotes extreme anti-Obama and anti-gay rhetoric, warning that the country is descending into religious tyranny and on the verge of revolution.  Staver and Barber support laws criminalizing homosexuality and call the Obama administration’s opposition to such laws in other countries “immoral.”---4. Glenn Beck at Liberty University, 2012Liberty University teaches its students that the Earth is 5,000 years old and that dinosaur bones washed up in Noah’s flood. So it’s little wonder that the school would not only select the loony and fact-averse Glenn Beck to address its graduating seniors (which included his daughter), but award him an honorary doctorate, a gesture that gave Beck the weepies.“We live in a time when it seems truth is on the run,” said Beck, an observation that no doubt stemmed from watching reruns of his Fox TV show (since canceled). The man who says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking, as Jon Stewart aptly described Beck, began with various meditations on the evilness of Barack Obama and then launched into a tidal wave of homilies, which included a mandate that students always ”<a href="http://mediamatters.org/video/2010/05/15/becks-advice-to-his-daughter-liberty-u-grads-in/164793">shoot to kill</a> [6].” This from a man who was constantly warning of the inherent violence of the left. =Chancellor <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jerry_Falwell,Jr.&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Jerry Falwell, Jr. (page does not exist)">Jerry Falwell, Jr.</a> writes: "Liberty University is the largest private non-profit university in the nation, the largest university in Virginia, and the largest Christian university in the world. Liberty was founded in 1971 by my father, the late Dr. <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jerry_Falwell,Sr." title="Jerry Falwell, Sr." class="mw-redirect">Jerry Falwell, Sr.</a>, with a vision to train Champions for Christ as a world class university." <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_University#cite_note-0" title="">[1]</a><table id="toc" class="toc" summary="Contents"><tbody><tr><td><div id="toctitle"><h2>Contents</h2>[<a class="internal" id="togglelink">hide</a>]</div><ul><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_University#Contact">1 Contact</a></li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_University#Resources_and_articles">2 Resources and articles</a><ul><li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_University#Related_Sourcewatch">2.1 Related Sourcewatch</a></li><li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_University#References">2.2 References</a></li></ul></li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table><a name="Contact" id="Contact"> </a><h2>Contact</h2>URL: <a href="http://www.liberty.edu/" class="external free" title="http://www.liberty.edu" rel="nofollow">http://www.liberty.edu</a><a name="Resources_and_articles" id="Resources_and_articles"> </a><h2>Resources and articles</h2><a name="Related_Sourcewatch" id="Related_Sourcewatch"> </a><h3>Related Sourcewatch</h3><ul><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Beverly_LaHaye" title="Beverly LaHaye">Beverly LaHaye</a></li><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Carolyn_Malenick" title="Carolyn Malenick">Carolyn Malenick</a></li><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mark_DeMoss" title="Mark DeMoss">Mark DeMoss</a></li><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Matt_Barber" title="Matt Barber">Matt Barber</a></li><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver" title="Mathew Staver">Mathew Staver</a></li><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Invisible_Children" title="Invisible Children">Invisible Children</a></li><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Concerned_Women_for_America" title="Concerned Women for America">Concerned Women for America</a></li><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Arlington_Group" title="Arlington Group">Arlington Group</a></li></ul><a name="References" id="References"> </a><h3>References</h3><ol class="references"><li id="cite_note-0"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_University#cite_ref-0" title="">↑</a> Liberty University <a href="http://www.liberty.edu/aboutliberty/" class="external text" title="http://www.liberty.edu/aboutliberty/" rel="nofollow">About</a>, organizational web page, accessed April 17, 2012.</li></ol><div id="catlinks" class="catlinks"><div id="mw-normal-catlinks"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:Categories" title="Special:Categories">Categories</a>: <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:Academia" title="Category:Academia">Academia</a> | <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:Religion" title="Category:Religion">Religion</a></div></div>  =Liberty Counsel is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit" title="Non-profit" class="mw-redirect">non-profit</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_interest" title="Public interest">public interest</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_firm" title="Law firm">law firm</a> and ministry that provides free legal assistance in defense of "Christian religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, and the traditional family."<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Counsel#cite_note-tribune-0">[1]</a> Liberty Counsel is headed by attorney <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathew_D.Staver" title="Mathew D. Staver" class="mw-redirect">Mathew D. Staver</a>, who founded the legal ministry with his wife, Anita, in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989" title="1989">1989</a> and currently serves as its Chairman. Anita L. Staver, his wife, serves as President of Liberty Counsel. A close partnership exists between <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_University" title="Liberty University">Liberty University</a>, which was founded by the Rev. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell" title="Jerry Falwell">Jerry Falwell</a>, and Liberty Counsel; Staver serves as Liberty University's law school Dean.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Counsel#cite_note-tribune-0">[1]</a> In 2004, Liberty Counsel became affiliated with Liberty University/Falwell Ministries and Liberty Counsel opened an office at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.Liberty Counsel describes its practice as a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution" title="First Amendment to the United States Constitution">First Amendment</a> practice, focused on religious liberties, freedom of speech, church/state issues in public schools and in the public square.=== <h1 id="firstHeading" class="firstHeading">Mathew Staver</h1><div id="bodyContent"><div id="contentSub">Mathew Staver is the chairman of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_Alliance_Action" title="Liberty Alliance Action">Liberty Alliance Action</a>, a U.S.-based conservative lobby group.Staver has issued public statements supporting <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_McCain" title="John McCain">John McCain</a>'s selection of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin" title="Sarah Palin">Sarah Palin</a> as his vice-presidential running mate<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#cite_note-Palin-0" title="">[1]</a> and opposing the Democratic Party policy on abortion.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#cite_note-1" title="">[2]</a>Media releases he has issued also refer to him as "Chairman of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_Counsel" title="Liberty Counsel">Liberty Counsel</a> and Dean of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Liberty_University" title="Liberty University">Liberty University</a> School of Law.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#cite_note-Palin-0" title="">[1]</a><table id="toc" class="toc" summary="Contents"><tbody><tr><td><div id="toctitle"><h2>Contents</h2>[<a class="internal" id="togglelink">hide</a>]</div><ul><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#Contact_Details">1 Contact Details</a></li><li class="toclevel-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#Articles_and_resources">2 Articles and resources</a><ul><li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#Related_SourceWatch_articles">2.1 Related SourceWatch articles</a></li><li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#References">2.2 References</a></li><li class="toclevel-2"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#External_articles">2.3 External articles</a></li></ul></li></ul></td></tr></tbody></table><a name="Contact_Details" id="Contact_Details"> </a><h2>Contact Details</h2>Liberty Alliance Action
Phone: 888-761-2574
 <a name="Articles_and_resources" id="Articles_and_resources"> </a><h2>Articles and resources</h2><a name="Related_SourceWatch_articles" id="Related_SourceWatch_articles"> </a><h3>Related SourceWatch articles</h3><ul><li><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Sarah_Palin" title="Sarah Palin">Sarah Palin</a></li></ul><a name="References" id="References"> </a><h3>References</h3><ol class="references"><li id="cite_note-Palin-0">↑ <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#cite_ref-Palin_0-0" title="">1.0</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#cite_ref-Palin_0-1" title="">1.1</a> <a href="http://www.earnedmedia.org/laa0829.htm" class="external text" title="http://www.earnedmedia.org/laa0829.htm" rel="nofollow">"The Selection of Gov. Sarah Palin has Electrified the Electorate"</a>, Media Release, August 29, 2008.</li><li id="cite_note-1"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver#cite_ref-1" title="">↑</a> Liberty Alliance Action, <a href="http://www.visionamericaaction.us/article/proposed-democratic-platform-is-rotten-at-its-core/" class="external text" title="http://www.visionamericaaction.us/article/proposed-democratic-platform-is-rotten-at-its-core/" rel="nofollow">"Proposed Democratic Platform is Rotten at its Core"</a>, Media Release, August 15, 2008.</li></ol><a name="External_articles" id="External_articles"> </a><h3>External articles</h3><table style="margin: 0.5em 0.57em 0.5em 0.7em; border-collapse: collapse; background: rgb(255, 250, 205); border: 1px solid rgb(218, 210, 109);"><tbody><tr><td width="100%" style="padding: 0.25em;">This article is a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub">stub</a>. You can <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub">help</a> by <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver&action=edit" class="external text" title="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mathew_Staver&action=edit" rel="nofollow">expanding it</a>.</td><td>
 </td></tr></tbody></table><div id="catlinks" class="catlinks"><div id="mw-normal-catlinks"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Special:Categories" title="Special:Categories">Categories</a>: <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:Politics_%28US%29" title="Category:Politics (US)">Politics (US)</a> | <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Category:Stubs" title="Category:Stubs">Stubs</a></div></div></div> --<h2 class="title"><a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-prays-supreme-court-overturn-health-care-reform">Religious Right Prays for the Supreme Court to Overturn Health Care Reform</a></h2><div class="submitted">Submitted by Brian Tashman on Mon, 03/26/2012 - 12:50pm</div><div class="content">With the Supreme Court <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-supreme-court-healthcare-20120325,0,3562084.story">hearing arguments</a> on the constitutionality of the health care reform law this week, conservative groups are reviving the apocalyptic rhetoric they developed when the law was passed.Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver and Matt Barber discussed the case on today’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NV_JW06dl4">Faith & Freedom</a>, where Staver said that if the court did not overturn the law it would set “an incredibly bad precedent that allows huge power grabs, not just in this medical insurance issue but in every place else.”

</div> </div></div></div></div></div>