When I was a student at Liberty University, from 2012 to 2016, I had to take two semesters of a “Christian worldview” class. It consisted essentially of bullet-point lists of ethical issues, with quizzes to make sure we knew the right answers: How did we feel about abortion? What about gay marriage? We were required to take two Bible classes and two theology classes, which included plenty of information about sexual ethics and basic Christian beliefs about caring for the poor and marginalized.
Yet the more powerful education we received was through thrice-weekly “convocations” — gatherings that frequently featured Republican pundits and politicians. In place of what many Christian schools call “chapel,” all on-campus students were required to attend an hourlong meeting that included worship and a guest speaker. We sang songs about the power of the gospel, often followed by moving speeches about saving our country from socialists or protecting our borders from invading masses.
What does all this have to do with the strange, sordid saga of Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife and a much younger man? A great deal.
Late on Tuesday, Mr. Falwell officially resigned as president of Liberty University. His tenure was marked by various scandals: In 2015, following the San Bernardino shooting, he encouraged concealed-carry on campus to “end those Muslims”; this spring, several Black students and faculty members wrote an open letter in response to Mr. Falwell tweeting a racist photo. But the scandals culminated this week in a particularly tawdry story of a yearslong sexual relationship between his wife and Giancarlo Granda, who claims Mr. Falwell knew and sometimes watched. Much of the Liberty community has greeted the news of his resignation with relief.
Liberty University is one of the largest Christian universities in the world and arguably the most prominent example of Christian higher education in America. But under Mr. Falwell, it has not been a good example of Christian higher education.
There is a long history in Christian education that focuses on the formation of the affections, alongside the training of the intellect. This reflects one of the religion’s foremost insights about human nature. Augustine famously wrote, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” That is, humans navigate our way through the world via the things we love — the stories about the world that captivate us, the desires that motivate us, the material or spiritual goods that attract us — and we need guidance to make sure that the things we love are ordered beneath our ultimate love of God. Christians have often described sin as misdirected love — loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way.
Christian education, then, has historically focused not merely on delivering the right information, but also on giving students the tools — music, prayer, storytelling — to shape our loves. Yet evangelicals — and Liberty, in particular — have often neglected this focus, falsely believing that if we know the right information, we will act rightly. What we’re seeing in Mr. Falwell now are the consequences of that neglect. How does a man who knows all the right answers come to do so much wrong? By underestimating the power of the loves in our lives — in this case, political power — to shape our actions and alter our moral commitments.
At Liberty, our minds may have been receiving correct content, but our hearts were being trained to love wrongly: to love political power, physical security and economic prosperity as higher goods than they are. The leaders of the university may have believed that we could be immersed in the stories and values of the Republican Party while maintaining any theological truths incompatible with them, but the power of our affective education was stronger. The ethics we learned in a classroom were not nearly as powerful as the emotion and desire created in a stadium full of people singing, praying and hearing stirring messages about making America great again.
With each succeeding Falwell scandal, the failure of this approach becomes clearer. For Liberty University as a whole, and for Mr. Falwell as an individual leader, there’s compelling evidence that proximity to power is its own kind of education. It shapes who you are and what you desire in life. A thirst for political power — and sometimes, obtaining that power — begets more than corruption: It often involves sexual immorality, degraded moral judgment and financial malpractice.
Power never affects just one area of people’s lives; it leads them to believe they can determine right and wrong for themselves. And it never affects just those individuals. A school that has such a strong legacy of immersion in political power and mechanisms for achieving or maintaining it will of course be shaped by it.
If Liberty as an institution and scholarly community has been formed by its history of proximity to cultural and political power — and the accompanying desire to maintain it — it should come as no surprise that it has an outsize role in Americans’ understanding of Christian education. An institution that has become a central feature in our polarized political climate will of course capture the broader attention of the world. But by its very political capitulation it denies some central features of Christian education.
The best of Christian higher ed, which is generally to be found at smaller schools and seminaries, has a unique gift to offer: a reminder that creating healthy communities and citizens requires training the heart as much as minds. I’m now a student at a conservative evangelical seminary, engaged in education that is faithful to both the content of the Christian faith and its form: music and prayer, public reading of Scripture, service to the poor and marginalized.
But the miseducation of Liberty students should inspire reflection instead of ridicule. None of us are immune to the power of what our hearts have grown to love.
Kaitlyn Schiess (@kaitlynschiess) is a student at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of the forthcoming book “The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor.”
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