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SAN JOSE — College basketball fans might cast Liberty University as that small-time evangelical school that occasionally enjoys a brief NCAA tournament appearance.
They would be wrong on one account.
Little that goes on at the Virginia school co-founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. is “small-time.” Liberty, which opens the basketball extravaganza Friday in San Jose, is the pulsating educational heart of America’s religious right.
The bustling campus nestled in a Blue Ridge Mountains valley is at the intersection of collegiate sports and Christianity, where a mega event like March Madness serves as a big-tent opportunity to promote its core mission.
“Liberty has been on the cutting edge as seeing sports as another form of ministry,” said Joseph C. Spears, Jr., a sports management professor at Liberty and Bowie State in Maryland. “They see March Madness as a platform to reach the world in more innovative ways that are not so religious.”
This is the time of the year when offbeat schools share the stage with sports blue bloods such as Duke, Kentucky and North Carolina, who, in their way, also use sports as a branding mechanism, much the way Liberty does. It’s just that the brands most schools are promoting are not as polarizing — or as inviting of criticism — as Liberty’s, especially at such a divisive moment in American politics.
The school is known for an honor code, called the “Liberty Way,” that prohibits premarital sex or private interactions between members of the opposite sex and opposes same-sex relations.
Liberty’s Flames (28-6) are one of eight teams to play this weekend at SAP Center in the ultra-liberal Bay Area. The 12th-seeded school faces No. 5 Mississippi State (23-10), in what is expected to end in a first-round defeat like its three previous Division 1 tournament appearances in 1994, 2004 and 2013.
“It will be a tall wall to scale, but I wouldn’t put anything past our group,” Liberty coach Ritchie McKay said the other day.
The coach’s optimism underscores the kind of faith coursing through Liberty’s veins on the court. The Flames may not have five-star talent but they have a bond that gives them a collective strength that goes beyond scoring and rebounding.
Senior guard Zach Farquhar, of Cincinnati, said this week the players’ goal is “to reach a broader audience and allow people to see Jesus through the way that we play and just the way that we hold ourselves on a higher platform.”
Sports offers a backdoor for Liberty to proselytize. One of the world’s largest Christian universities, its enrollment is about 15,000 at its Lynchburg, Virginia, campus, with another 85,000 in the online curriculum that has been the tap-root of its financial success. Athletic director Ian McCaw reinforced what a Flames assistant coach recently said: “Our players look at basketball as an opportunity to worship.”
In 1971, Falwell Sr. executed his plan to transform Virginia farmland into a pristine campus where students would be trained to become “Champions for Christ.” Falwell said in 1985 that the school’s goal was to become the Harvard of academics, the Notre Dame of athletics and the Brigham Young of religious schools. He viewed athletics and music as two vehicles to help him achieve those goals.
School president Jerry Falwell Jr., the founder’s son, told the Washington Post in 2014 that while athletics isn’t the campus mission, “it has the potential to shine a light on our mission like nothing else ever can.”
The school has sent some of its sports teams to the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Israel as ambassadors to the cause.
“It’s part of the fabric of the school,” athletic director McCaw said.
But Liberty didn’t invent the integration of sports and religion. Consider Notre Dame and its campus mural known as “Touchdown, Jesus.”
And at least in the past, the Flames have had a share of star power. Their most famous basketball player is the brother of Warriors star Steph Curry.
Alas, Seth Curry transferred to Duke after being named Atlantic Sun’s freshman of the year in 2009.
A year later, the school launched a nearly $1 billion campus transformation project that poured millions into facilities to help Liberty move into the top level of collegiate sports.
“People tell us we have Power Five level facilities,” McCaw said, a reference to the top five basketball conferences in the country, a group that includes the Pac-12.
In a savvy move that shows how much campus leadership tries to relate to youth, it constructed a winter sports center with three artificial ski runs as well as an indoor skateboarding facility.
But the school mostly has focused on elevating its athletic profile through major sports. Last year, Liberty became an independent in the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision, known as FBS. It has scheduled Syracuse, Virginia, Brigham Young and New Mexico for the upcoming 2019 season.
The school also faced the fallout of big-time college sports when hiring a new football coach last year. Hugh Freeze exposed Liberty to scrutiny because he left Ole Miss in 2017 after officials learned of his use of a school-issued phone to call escort services.
McCaw endured his own problems at Baylor University, resigning in 2016 in the wake of allegations about the school’s handling of sexual assault cases involving players.
“We have high standards, and need to uphold them,” McCaw said. “People at Liberty aren’t perfect, but we are faithful people and we put our trust in the Lord.”
With the prestige of March Madness comes a megaphone for Liberty’s critics.
Campus Pride, a group that promotes a safe environment for LGBTQ youth on college campuses, has included Liberty and another tournament participant, Abilene Christian, on its “shame list.” The group condemned Liberty “because it has a long and well-documented history of anti-LGBTQ discrimination, including placing students in conversion therapy; denying tuition discounts to same-sex and trans spouses of military personnel, despite offering those discounts to heterosexual and cisgender spouses; and formal affiliation with the dangerously anti-LGBTQ Liberty Counsel.”
But Falwell Jr. also is not afraid to address sensitive issues when they trespass on the school’s mission. The president said in September the school would consider withdrawing from a new six-year Nike contract over the shoe company’s alignment with former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose act of taking a knee during the national anthem engendered angry debate about patriotism.
Bill Carr, a Florida sports consultant who helped Liberty administrators join the FBS, said the attacks are unavoidable in today’s climate — particularly when some cannot separate the school from Falwell Sr., a polarizing conservative figure.
“It is so misunderstood,” said McKay, in his second tenure as Flames basketball coach. “If there is ever don’t judge a book by its cover, it’s Liberty University.”