Liberty circa the mid-Eighties 2

The mid-Eighties was a great time to be at Liberty University. The school made the transition from being Liberty Baptist College during the summer of 1985, the Pastor’s Scholarships made the incoming freshman classes of 1985 and 1986 much bigger than the outgoing senior classes those years, the first floor of the Arthur DeMoss building opened, a bunch of new brick dorms were built on the south end of campus, and both North Campus and Liberty Broadcasting Network (LBN) came and went. The campus was still closed and watched over by the guard shack, and the Ericsson/GE complex still belong to either GE or Ericsson. Chandler’s Station and the Vines Center were still in the future, and LCA still stood for Lynchburg Christian Academy and was still located on Thomas Road. Oh, and the Old Time Gospel Hour was still a going concern and provided lots of mid-quality employment for Liberty students.

The dress code was a bit stricter than it is today; hair gel and mousse were still frowned on for men, mustaches and beards were very rare even among faculty, and it was against the rules to wear jeans to class. I dressed mostly off the Chess King discount rack and wore the same one or two ties day after day. My clothes weren’t just bad; they were bad Eighties bad.

Chapel was an hour and a half at 9:00 AM three days a week, and Jerry himself usually presided on Wednesdays, and he usually arrived with an impressive list of lieutenants in tow. Roughly once a semester Jerry gave us the history of TRBC/Liberty in brief, including the Donald Duck bottling plant, the size of his original Sunday School class, etc. As at least one person has pointed out to me, his own personal salvation story generally doesn’t figure in this story: it’s entirely a church-growth (or more accurately, ministry-growth) story. I would love to find a transcript or two of this story. At the time I started at Liberty it more or less ended with the “I Want That Mountain” days.

The other two chapels a week were kind of a mixed bag: sometimes we had guest speakers (I recall Bill Bennett, Steve Bell of ABC News, trucking magnate J. B. Hunt) but most of the time the speaker was someone from within the ministry: the campus pastor, whose name escapes me altogether, staff evangelist C. Sumner Wemp, Ed Dobson, or Gary Adridge. The only ones who made much of an impression on me were Wemp, who was an old school hit-and-run tract-and-handshake personal evangelist, and Dobson. Dobson left shortly after I arrived, and I would almost swear he single-handedly killed chapel when he left. In all the chapels I attended during the year I spent on campus Dobson is the only one who ever seemed to have anything to say. The rest of them made no impression whatsoever.

There was at least one and possibly two other chapel services on Monday and Friday; ministry chapel and School of Religion chapel. There was a persistent rumor that the speakers at ministry chapel were really good; I decided to devote my energy to finding a way to skip chapel altogether.

Liberty circa the mid-Eighties 1

I attended a Christian high school in the Lynchburg area, and during my time there the sponsoring church took a swing in a more Fundamentalist direction when our pastor left and the deacons hired a replacement who was a graduate of Hyles-Anderson College. Where we had been more or less of the truly independent strain of fundamentalists (where our pastors tended to be self-taught) or had been of the Bob Jones family, we gradually became a Jack Hyles church. This meant among other things that where before we had no real bias toward one college or another, there was now a tendency for the church to encourage the top-flight students to at least consider Hyles-Anderson.

During roughly the same time Jerry Falwell added a focus to the ministry at Thomas Road Baptist Church; where Thomas Road had previously been one of the fastest-growing churches in America, or one of the fastest-growing Sunday Schools in America, Jerry added an emphasis that Liberty be the fastest-growing college in America. This shift in focus included a building boom on Chandler’s Mountain/Liberty Mountain and a substantial scholarship program. This caused some tension inside our church and school; Hyles was the school of choice, but Liberty was more attractively priced (especially if the first two years were nearly free) and doctrinally sound.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Liberty was already parting ways at multiple levels with its fundamentalist roots. While the Liberty faculty generally had credible fundamentalist credentials, with lots of graduates of Cedarville, Dallas Theological Seminary, Tennessee Temple, Pensacola, Bob Jones, etc. not to mention a fair number of unaccredited Bible college graduates and the occasional truly gray diploma mill graduate, Liberty itself was a peer to Bob Jones and Tennessee Temple; students often chose between these schools in pairs, so rumors traveled more or less freely between the two schools. We later heard from Bob Jones that Daryl Hall and John Oates had played a concert in the convocation center (not true) and that Liberty faculty returning to Bob Jones for alumni weekends with Liberty stickers on their cars were disfellowshipped by letter and told never to return (unconfirmed).

Hyles, oddly, was in a different orbit within fundamentalism; students who were true believers in the Hyles point of view rarely ended up at Liberty, even if attracted by the price. Those who did rarely stayed. Bob Jones people often left Liberty for Bob Jones after a year or two; rarely did people do a year or two at BJU and then transfer to Liberty, despite the fact that this was an effective way to launder credits from an unaccredited institution and get an accredited degree.

This was something of a touchy subject in the fundamentalist-evangelical nexus; many programs at Bob Jones were top-flight, but graduates sometimes faced difficulties landing jobs or getting admitted to graduate school, while Liberty graduates supposedly had less trouble. Lack of accreditation was a badge of honor for BJU, and at least at some administrative level they considered themselves more distinctively Christian for not having being accredited by a secular accrediting body.