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 No. 22 Syracuse in the biggest home football game in school history.
Signs offering football ticket discounts cover the campus, and posters of the team's new coach, Hugh Freeze, encourage the effort to "Rise With Us." Clearly, there is room at Liberty for the country's Saturday religion.
Falwell Sr. had a vision of Liberty being for Evangelical Christians what Notre Dame is for Catholics and Brigham Young is for Mormons, and the newest team in major college football is not subtle with its imagery. The Flames wear red, white and blue. Their mascot is a bald eagle.
With so much at stake for Liberty football, there can be no rest on the Sabbath. Inside the immaculate indoor training facility, which Jerry Jr. approved for $29 million, the players gather for a team meeting before practice.
It has been an odd week. The team hasn't seen Freeze since he left practice more than a week before because of back pain so bad he could hardly get out of his truck when he got home. The last they heard, Freeze had developed a severe staph infection requiring emergency surgery.
"Hey guys," Jim Nichols, Freeze's chief of staff, says as the players settle into a meeting room, "we have a special guest with us today."
Freeze has Skyped in from his hospital bed in Charlottesville to talk to his team for the first time since his health scare. The players are silent, looking up at a weary, grizzled figure wearing a white gown and red Liberty baseball cap.
"I just wanted to see you, men," Freeze says. "Because it's driving me crazy not to be with you. I miss the heck out of you."
His players have seen him humbled before. Everyone has. In the summer of 2017 Freeze, who had taken Mississippi football to new heights, was fired when it was revealed that he had made calls to escort services across the Southeast from his university cellphone. This news painted Freeze, who had proselytized as a God-fearing and Jesus-loving man throughout his ascent in coaching, as a huckstering fraud.
But Evangelicals love a redemption tale. Freeze, who came to Lynchburg last December, had lost everything but was a proven winner, and Liberty was going to win big in football, just like everything else the Falwells set their gaze on.
With Freeze's body attacking him from within, Jerry Jr. put the full weight of his clout into motion. He flew a specialist in from Arizona on his private jet, a story that Jerry Jr. would later connect back to his support of Trump.
Freeze does not share with his players the political twist of how their school's president helped him, but he wants them to know something important about the place they've chosen for college football.
"This university loves you," Freeze says.
