Jerry Falwell, Jr. Says He Will Raise His Granddaughter as a Girl, Some Liberty University Students Protest

No fan of JFJ, but I feel bad for him. Any day now I expect to see the headline: Jerry Falwell Jr. Exhales: Students Protest

With 30 current Liberty students publicly protesting Genesis 1-2 and ridiculing their leadership for standing up against the sexual revolutionaries, one wonders what the admission standards are for this Christian University. Shocking!

[Mike Harding]

With 30 current Liberty students publicly protesting Genesis 1-2 and ridiculing their leadership for standing up against the sexual revolutionaries, one wonders what the admission standards are for this Christian University. Shocking!

Admission standards: They’ve got 100,000 students. 30 of 100,000 is 0.0003. Statistically insignificant! If the expelled them they would be sued

…is that the protesters are testing the system at Liberty to see where they get. At this point, Falwell’s best choice is to simply state what he’s already said and challenge the students involved in the protests to check their Bibles to see if they find anything different.

For reference, here’s the student handbook at Liberty—it does not seem to contain a lot of the rules that we’d associate with a typical fundamental Bible college. The campus living guide has a few more rules, but it’s not comprehensive by any means. I personally think they’re in a reasonably good place, as my faith really prospered in my undergraduate days as it was challenged.

Chickens coming home to roost?

Take a look at the original (?) source and look at the girl in the middle. She’s not clearly about LGBTQ, but is presenting reasons victims of childhood sexual assault do not report. Look also at the young lady in the upper right; “Time’s Up” is not a LGBT slogan, either, but a #MeToo.

And it turns out that half the protest was against Donald Trump, Jr., about an offhand joke about “Me Too” referring to raising his children in their biological sex. Finally, it’s worth noting that only three students are named as such—at least one of the others was a coordinator at the Lynchburg Diversity Center, which suggests that a lot of the protesters were coordinated not from campus, but there.

So my best guess is that 3-10 of the demonstrators were actually current students. Understood that at many schools, this might get you expelled, but in my view, the big issue is what current student (and apparent non-demonstrator) Caleb Utz hinted at; “will it change anything? No”. In other words, there may be a fairly significant portion of students that is clearly of the view that Falwell et al are pretty much force-feeding their views to students. We saw a bit of that in the 2016 campaign, too.

And accreditation being an issue? Nah. BJU, Faith, Pensacola, and others are going through it, and as far as I’ve heard, nobody’s been told to change student policies. Clearly defined expectations are actually a positive thing for accreditation.

Liberty doesn’t have 100,000 students on campus, so 30 students on campus protesting IS significant. These are the ones who were willing to do so openly. I suspect more would like to. As far as accreditation, that is a problem waiting to happen (even if they have been able to navigate the issue successfully so far). Christian schools that participate in accreditation should be thinking and planning on what they will do when loss of accreditation is used as the tool to deal with “hateful” Christian schools. Will they “adjust” policies in order to maintain accreditation and the resulting financial pipeline, while claiming not to have changed their beliefs, or will they choose to abandon accreditation, accept the inevitable smaller enrollment, and be able to sleep at night and one day face Christ with integrity? Anyone who doesn’t think that day is coming hasn’t been paying attention.

Just so. I’ll admit that my comment above was a bit too cute to be helpful

Wally, regarding accreditation, one one side you’ve got accrediting bodies and the DoED (as well as state governing bodies) trying to tell you what to do, and on the flip side, you’ve got employers saying “your degree counts for nothing if it’s not accredited.” Just ask Pensacola grads who don’t live within a few hours of the school—HR has been burned too often by diploma mills.

So if you want to have a Christian school that does more than train pastors and missionaries (where accreditation is so far not an issue), you’ve got to play the game. Part of that game starts with distinctly Christian agencies, and another part of it is to watch how accrediting agencies treat others who follow similar patterns—Muslims, Jews, Mormons, etc.—and drawing attention to any discrepancies in how they’re treated. Yes, lawsuits if necessary.

My take is that I tend to agree that the walls will come in in terms of what we’re allowed to do, avoiding accreditation when we’re going beyond basic seminary doesn’t help us—it just accelerates the demise of Bible colleges, colleges, and universities.

Wally, I am currently the chairman of the academic committee at BJU. I know firsthand what we went through to receive regional Accreditation. Fortunately, we are enjoying our religious liberty under the current Department of Education in the Trump Administration. Altogether it took seven years to receive our regional Accreditation, a boatload of expense, and a 17,000 page application representing tens of thousands of hours by our dedicated teachers and staff. At the same time, we continue to meet all the national Accreditation standards under TRACS, just in case your predictions come true. If we get a new “Pharaoh who knew not Joseph”, then the DOE as well as other Federal Agencies may come crashing down on us.

I have also been the Superintendent of Bethany Christian School for 35 years. We are accredited by four separate agencies. In Michigan we have just elected a leftist governor and a hard left Attorney General. Together they are initiating a thought-police investigation upon any and all whom they perceive as anti-LGBTQ. By God’s grace we will not cave to the sexual revolutionaries in government and culture.

Bert: I am not against accreditation for liberal arts Christian colleges, especially in medical training. I am aware of the dilemma Christian colleges face today from employer desires for accreditation as a way to help them get properly taught/trained employees (although accreditation does not guarantee that - consider the uneducated graduates of Ivy League schools). It’s not an easy situation for Christian schools to be in. But I submit that the day is coming when accredited Christian colleges will have to decide which is more important - accreditation and the money which comes from that status or following Biblical principle (obeying God rather than man). And I submit that many Christian colleges will find a way to appease secular demands in order to keep the money flowing, and, while doing so, compromise Biblical moral teaching even while claiming they are not compromising Biblical moral teaching. As far as accrediting seminaries: I’ve never seen the value in that. People who don’t know Christ supervising the academics of our seminaries - there must be a better way.

Mike: Thanks for the insight into your involvement. I hope you are not a minority. I just hope that the current leadership at BJU (and other Christian colleges) have the same convictions. But, even more importantly, will the leaders who follow them have those convictions? That, of course, is a question we cannot answer now.