Look out Notre Dame, the Falwells have big plans for Liberty football
LYNCHBURG, Va. - Sundays in this sensuous stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains come with a sense of tradition and inevitability. The hills have seen their share of tragedy, of death and rebirth, but for one family, they have forever cradled divine promises.
Jerry Falwell Sr. may be gone, but order is kept. A Falwell has had the pulpit at Thomas Road Baptist Church for more than a half-century, and the faithful file in past the red brick facade and the Jeffersonian white columns to hear the youngest son, Rev. Jonathan Falwell.
"This world is full of untruths," he will say. "People will mock what you believe."
The Falwells like to think vision is in their DNA, passed from their English ancestors who traversed these hills in the 1600s looking for land to own. That's the part of the family legacy Jerry Falwell Jr., the older boy, has taken on. He reminds a visitor, even while talking passionately about sinners and his brand of Christianity, that he's not a pastor but a businessman. He figured out how to monetize a "Christ-centered" college education, although he is known more for his hand in electing President Donald Trump - 81% of Evangelical Christians voted for Trump in 2016 - than being the president of Liberty University.
If you knew this place in 1971 when Falwell Sr. founded it as Lynchburg Baptist College, you wouldn't believe your eyes. If you knew Liberty in 2007 when he died and left it to his oldest son to run, you probably wouldn't either. Jerry Jr. has built $1.6 billion of infrastructure where there was once nothing but trees and grass, a campus created not from a nation's yearning for forgiveness but rather from an online learning cash cow.
The first building that can be seen when approaching the university from the winding Richmond Highway is a towering football palace. On this "Welcome Weekend" Sunday morning in August, hundreds of students are lining up outside Williams Stadium in scorching heat to score a ticket for the season opener when the Liberty Flames host
