Liberty University

I have to say that I have not been overly impressed with the efforts of the right-wing supergroup known as The Freedom Federation.  After making a big splash when it announced the formation of the coalition last summer, the group hasn't done very much outside of releasing a few statements opposing healthcare reform.

But that doesn't mean the group doesn't have big plans, but apparently they do, which is why it is hosting a two-day summit in April at Liberty University: 

The Freedom Federation announces its first annual Freedom Federation Summit to be held on April 15-16, 2010. The Freedom Federation is a federation of some of the nation’s largest multiracial, multiethnic, and multigenerational faith-based and policy organizations. The Summit will bring together national leaders and activists to address social, economic, domestic, and national defense concerns.

The Summit will be held on the beautiful campus of Liberty University, which is nestled in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Liberty University is the world’s largest Christian university, with 12,000 students on the Virginia campus and more than 50,000 worldwide.

The Freedom Federation Summit will include plenary speakers and briefings on social, economic, national defense, and foreign policy issues facing our nation. Participants will be able to choose from several different tracks, including, but not limited to, training to run for public office, managing a campaign, and building a grassroots organization. Other tracks will focus on social, economic, and national defense topics.

Mathew Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, remarked: “There is a groundswell of concerned citizens rising up in America who are tired of government policies that disrespect human life, expand government, tax and spend, and undermine national security at home and abroad. The Freedom Federation is a unique federation of organizations and leaders, representing people of all races, ethnic origins, and generations. We are united by core values and are determined to work together to build a better America.”

Last year, Jerry Falwell Jr. declared that he wanted to see Liberty University "go down in history as the college that elected a president" and set about registering students to vote, canceling classes on election day, and busing them to the polls. 

It didn't matter, as John McCain lost the state of Virginia, but Falwell was undetered and decided to do the same thing this year, canceling classes and busing students to the polls:

Liberty senior Caleb Mast, chairman of the College Republican club at Liberty University, worked past 4 a.m. Tuesday putting up campaign signs on campus and at Heritage Elementary School.

He returned to Heritage — the voting site for on-campus Liberty students — by 6:45 a.m. to greet student voters arriving by the busload.

As many as 3,200 LU students were eligible to vote. Mast said he kept an unofficial tally at Heritage and counted upwards of 800 student voters when he left at 5 p.m. More than 2,300 votes were cast at the precinct altogether.

To encourage a high turnout, Liberty cancelled classes and ran buses between the campus and the voting precinct every few minutes. The school did not keep track of how many students went to the polls, said Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr.

And while there was no presidential election at stake this time around, Mat Staver, Dean of Liberty University School of Law, declares that their efforts were responsible for delivering the local House of Delegates race for the Republican candidate:

In dramatic fashion, Virginia ushered in three pro-life, pro-family, conservative Republican candidates -- Governor-elect Bob McDonnell, Lt. Governor Bill Bolling, and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Conservative Republican candidates picked up five state House of Delegates seats, including a dramatic come-from-behind victory for Scott Garrett in Lynchburg, who unseated the Democratic incumbent, Shannon Valentine. Valentine was ahead by about 1,400 votes after 19 of the 20 precincts were counted. After the final precinct votes were counted at Heritage Elementary School, Garrett jumped ahead by 210 votes. The stunning victory is attributed solely to the voting block of the students, faculty and staff at Liberty University. Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. encouraged the students at Liberty to register and vote locally, resulting in more than 3,000 new voters. The majority of the students vote in Precinct 20 at Heritage Elementary School. The students voted for pro-life and pro-family values and for limited government.

Kevin Roose, author of the new book "The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University" about his time at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, has a new piece up in Esquire explaining that there are two types of classes at the school:

I'm finding that my favorite courses, like Old Testament and Theology, have something in common: they're surveys, classes in which the professor's goal is simply to introduce a body of new information. The information always has a literalist slant, of course, but on the whole, the classes are fairly straightforward. You'd find the same thing at a hundred other Christian colleges and Bible study groups. There's another type of class, though — the agenda-driven class. In these courses, professors aren't teaching new knowledge so much as teaching students how to think about the world around them.

The second type of classes, known as General Description of the Contemporary Issues or GNED, are designed to "establish undergraduate students in the Christian worldview, and to equip them to apply it through a biblically centered decision making process in relation to various contemporary issues."

Roose provides some insight into what such classes entail:

A week or two before spring break, I started sitting in on GNED II, a mandatory second-semester extension of my GNED course. I'm only at Liberty for one semester, so I'll never get to take GNED II for a grade, but people on my hall kept talking about it, and I wanted to get the flavor. The GNED II class I've been going to, like my GNED I class, is taught by Dr. Parks. In it, Liberty students are taught to view sociopolitical topics like homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia through an ultraconservative Christian lens. And unlike its first-semester counterpart, GNED II pulls no punches. Its workbook contains fill-in-the blank sections like:

In today's GNED II class, Dr. Parks announces that we will be talking about gender roles in the evangelical world. Dr. Parks spends the first ten minutes of class laying out the two main positions evangelical Christians take on gender issues. The first position, egalitarianism, means exactly what you'd expect it to mean — men and women are equal, both in the church and in the home. Women can be pastors of a church, they can teach Sunday school, and husbands and wives share equal authority in marriage. The second position, called complementarianism, means, in Dr. Parks's words, that "God created man and woman with different roles that complement each other." Complementarians believe that only men can be pastors, that only men can teach Sunday school or other Christian education classes (unless it's an all-female class). Complementarians also maintain that the husband should be the head of the household. They quote Ephesians 5:24, "As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything (NIV)."

"You can obviously tell where I am on this," Dr. Parks says. "I am definitely a complementarian, without apology. I think the egalitarian view is greatly skewed."

Dr. Parks clicks a few buttons on his laptop to start a PowerPoint slideshow. The text is accompanied by photos of white, midthirties couples clutching each other, loving gazes plastered on their faces. As the presentation plays, we fill in the blanks in our workbooks:

Dr. Parks realizes that to a nonevangelical, the complementarian view of gender roles can sound misogynistic, but he assures us that it's not. Women can still hold high-power jobs under the complementarian model, he says, and they should still get equal pay for equal work. But when push comes to shove, a woman's priority should be her family. "For a woman," Dr. Parks says, "if the career is most important, and the family gets left out, that's a problem."

As Roose says, these classes are the types of class "a liberal secularist would invent if he were trying to satirize a Liberty education. It's as if Brown offered a course called Secular Hedonism 101: How to Smoke Pot, Cross-dress, and Lose Your Morals. But unlike that course, GNED II actually exists."

• Like pretty much every Republican before him, Michael Steele is pledging to turn around the GOP's dismal showing when it comes to getting votes from African Americans.
• The easy applause line at CPAC was to attack "socialism."
• As it has been threatening, on Friday the Liberty Counsel filed suit to force the Florida Bar to remain neutral in the case regarding the state's ban on adoption by gay couples.
• At CPAC, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty called upon those in attendance to ensure that God remains at the “forefront of the values, principles and issues” of the conservative movement.
• The New York Times reports that a new video and other incidents are reviving questions about the role that religion is playing in the military and whether a pro-Christian culture permeates the armed forces.
• When life gives you Buttars, turn it into "Buttars-Palooza."
• Kevin "Musclehead Revolution" McCullough tries to goad Rachel Maddow into covering him by explicitly comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.
• Finally, the Washington Post's "On Faith"blog interviewed Liberty University basketball coach Ritchie McKay and asked if he'd ever considered recruiting a player who was an atheist, to which he replied with this non sequitur:

I don't think Dr. Falwell would have ever excluded anyone from attending his university, and I don't think it would bother me if [the player] didn't have the same beliefs as me. Now, if he was practicing some type of illegal or immoral or unethical behavior, then he can't be a member of our team.