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Originally Posted by Clever_Iggy
Unreal. I know a person who is planning on going to Liberty University next year. He's pretty fired up about it, but the more I hear him talk about what campus is like, the more I think it's closer to a cult/Bible camp than a legitimate university.
Anyone else have more information about Liberty?
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Well, before the Caner altercation, LU has been a hotbed for recent controversy, even within its own Southern Baptist Convention. For the first time in its history, the SBC is beginning to see a sharp decline in its membership. It is widely speculated that this is a result of an increasing political migration within the US away from Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" and towards the centre. (
http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/...nd-in-decline/). Jerry Falwell was not universally loved within the SBC (he joined from out of the Baptist Bible Fellowship), and in the wake of his recent death, I would expect that the more moderate members from within the Convention will begin to be more vocal. One of the reasons that the University has been so unflinching in its defense of Ergun Caner is because he is a tremendously popular figure: he appears "counter-cultural", is brash and confrontational in his speaking, and has fashioned his own image into something that appeals widely to the under-forty crowd.
Within my own field of academic religious studies, we are beginning to hear rumblings that Liberty is beginning to undergo a sharp division within its own faculty along the lines of the controversies in Princeton in the early 20th century that resulted in the resignation of dozens of its professors and the founding of Westminster Theological Seminary. If the fundamentalist core is ousted from the SBC, and if the hyper-inerrantists are deposed from Liberty, then this will create a crisis both within the Convention and the University; it could very well mean the dismantling of the latter, as this theological shift will cause a DRAMATIC impact on virtually every department, which is moulded according to fundamentalist ideals.
LU is notoriously, staunchly entrenched in politics, and along with the SBC represents the current power-base within the Republican National Convention. This has led to a number of political controversies and problems. Last year, LU "banned" the Democratic Club for its support of non-pro-Life candidates:
http://www2.newsadvance.com/lna/news...ic_club/16172/
For an inside-look at LU from the outside, by a senior at Brown:
http://www.newsweek.com/2009/04/17/a...ith-jesus.html