After shocking many in the evangelical movement by endorsing Donald Trump over other Republicans for the 2016 presidential nomination, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. pumped millions of the nonprofit religious institution’s funds into Republican causes and efforts to promote the Trump administration, blurring the lines between education and politics.
The culmination of his efforts was the creation of a university-funded campus “think tank” — which has produced no peer-reviewed academic work and bears little relation to study centers at other universities — that ran pro-Trump ads, hired Trump allies including former adviser Sebastian Gorka and current Trump attorney Jenna Ellis to serve as fellows and, in recent weeks, has aggressively promoted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.
The think tank — called the Falkirk Center, a portmanteau of Falwell’s name and that of GOP activist Charlie Kirk, who co-founded it — purchased campaign-season ads on Facebook, at least $50,000's worth of which were designated by the network as political ads, that promoted Trump and other Republican candidates by name.
“Pray For Our President,” declared one, featuring a photo of Trump with his hands clasped in prayer.
“Be a radical for our republic,” said another Facebook ad that ran over the summer with a photo of a beaming Madison Cawthorn, the rising GOP star and congressional candidate from North Carolina who spoke at Trump’s convention.
Liberty’s actions, detailed for the first time by POLITICO, suggest the university is pushing the boundaries of its status as a nonprofit organization under section 501c(3) of the federal tax code, which forbids spending money on political campaigns. Liberty’s actions also go well beyond the traditional role of a university as a politically neutral institution of higher learning.
“The apparatus of the university has turned more and more towards political ends and concerns,” said Marybeth Baggett, a Liberty graduate who taught at the school from 2003 until this past spring. “Obviously the school is conservative, yes. But I don’t feel like it was ever so agenda-driven as it was in the last four of five years.”
Falwell resigned from his post in August, in the wake of a series of reports about his and his wife’s personal lives and use of university funds on businesses associated with friends and family members. Now, Liberty’s board of trustees appears torn over his use of Liberty resources for political activities.
The trustees have kept a veil of secrecy over their deliberations since Falwell’s departure, and are skeptical of the media, which many see as anti-evangelical. But according to interviews with three people who have been in recent communication with board members, trustees are divided over whether to maintain Liberty’s role in conservative politics or refocus on the university’s evangelical roots.
“The board is split,” said one person in contact with board members. “There are those who want the school to be part of the conservative political conversation.”
Other board members, however, think Liberty should shut down the Falkirk Center, the person said, and “don’t think it helps the school in maintaining a high academic standard. You can’t really call something a think tank, and yet it doesn’t put out academic research, or papers, or any kind of scholarship.”
The think tank retains support from some of the university’s most politically involved leaders, including the 75-year-old acting president, Jerry Prevo, a retired minister and longtime supporter of conservative causes, one of the people who speaks with Liberty board members said. But it prompts an angry response from many other university stakeholders, who saw Falwell’s work during his final years at Liberty as out of step for a supposedly nonpartisan university.
"The Falkirk Center, to me, represents everything that was wrong with Liberty when Jerry [Falwell] was there,” said Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at Liberty for 21 years who left at the end of last school year. “It's brazenly partisan."
Swallow Prior said she has contacted two board members about the Falkirk Center, but received no response.
Falwell, who blamed his political enemies at Liberty and beyond for seizing on news of his wife’s affair to drum him out of his job, did not respond to a request for comment. Kirk, a 27-year-old conservative activist and chair of Students for Trump, also declined to comment.
Scott Lamb, a spokesperson for Liberty University, said, “While any academic think tank will have its detractors, the University and the Center have received hundreds of supportive emails” since Falwell left Liberty in September.
Liberty’s donations to other politically-focused organizations “are consistent with the mission and focus of Liberty University as an evangelical Christian university” and went towards nonpartisan activities such as voter registration, Lamb said.
But the Falkirk Center, which Falwell created in late 2019 as part of Liberty and which draws on Liberty funds, has consistently advocated for Republican politicians and Trump in particular.
Over the summer, Falkirk repeatedly promoted Trump as a pro-Christian candidate on its podcast and on social media, where the center has more than 165,000 followers and regularly draws thousands of views to its posts. On one Falkirk Center podcast episode that aired shortly after the Republican National Convention in September, titled “The Christian case for voting President Trump,” Republican consultant Ralph Reed discussed how Trump has lived up to evangelicals’ hopes for him during the 2016 election and dangled the prospect that the president could nominate additional pro-life Supreme Court justices if elected to a second term.
“It’s not just about voting in one candidate over another. It’s really about the future of this country,” said Falkirk director Ryan Helfenbein, a former Liberty vice president of communications who previously worked for former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican.
“I can’t recall a time … where there has been such a stark contrast between the two choices,” Reed replied.
“Even if you have reservations, or there are things about what Donald Trump says, does, or tweets that you do not like, that’s not what this election is about,” Reed said later in the podcast. “It’s not a personality or popularity contrast. It’s, which of those competing and contrasting agendas will advance the most good?”
The podcast with Reed was just one of many moments when the center promoted the president to listeners. In the days following the election, the Falkirk Center and its fellows repeatedly distributed information on instances of alleged voter fraud, which have not proven to be true. The Falkirk Center has devoted three of its in-house podcast's seven episodes since the election to the issue, including one featuring Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and another featuring Jesse Morgan, a postal service contractor in Pennsylvania who said he witnessed election fraud.
In early December, a Liberty professor appeared on the podcast and encouraged state legislatures to ignore vote totals and appoint their own electors to the electoral college, or consider blowing off the mid-December electoral college meeting deadline for another date.
“Remember, these legislators are where the real power rests. They select the electors who will be voting,” said the professor, Phill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general who is a Republican. “They have the constitutional power and the right to have electors in dispute, to send two sets of electors — which then lets Congress decide [the election outcome] — or to decide their own set of electors.”
Last week, Falkirk Center and Liberty leaders gathered with Virginia pastors and evangelical leaders for a two-day event at Liberty to discuss Virginia’s upcoming 2021 elections, according to an event agenda obtained by POLITICO.
Topics of discussion at the event included “Potential involvement in VA in 2021,” “Discussion of VA landscape in 2021” for state and local elections, “Number of potential volunteers and/or staff for ground game,” and “General Assembly influence,” according to the agenda documents. Speakers at the event included GOP congressman-elect Bob Good, whose district neighbors Lynchburg, and a state Republican senator. There were no Democratic speakers on the agenda.
Lamb, the Liberty spokesperson, said, “These pastors and leaders engage in nonpartisan voter education efforts on issues of importance to evangelical Christian conservatives. The ‘ground game’ means the nonpartisan strategy for how to communicate and educate the next generation about conservative principles, issues and policies.”
Universities and other nonprofits are not supposed to promote candidates. Tax law specialists said it was not clear, from either the agenda or Lamb’s statement about educating people on “about conservative principles, issues, and policies,” whether the activities being planned on Liberty’s campus were nonpartisan.
“Just because you throw in the word ‘nonpartisan’ doesn’t make it permissible,” said Adav Noti, a former counsel at the Federal Election Commission. “It depends on the actual content. This question comes up a lot, and often it turns on the real details of who was in the room and what was said.”
Universities are not allowed to back candidates or be involved in elections because of their status as 501c(3) nonprofits, which exempts institutions like Liberty from paying income tax and allows donors to deduct their donations from their taxes.
“There’s this enormous government subsidy to 501c(3)’s that no one else gets,” Noti said. Universities and other nonprofits “can’t engage in electoral activity, because it would essentially be government-sponsored electoral activity.”
In 2018, Liberty gave $2.2 million to Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition for “nonpartisan voter education,” and made smaller donations to the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying arm and to Citizens United, the conservative nonprofit run by Trump ally David Bossie.
Falwell spent the millions in university funds without alerting some university board members, some of whom had been uncomfortable with his endorsement of Trump, a thrice-married real estate developer with no serious religious affiliation, over many Republican candidates with strong evangelical ties, one person in regular contact with Liberty board members said.
“The full board did not know or approve that spending,” said the person who speaks regularly to Liberty board members.
Nonetheless, Lamb said, Liberty’s seven-member executive board — which can act without informing the rest of the board — approved the payments.
Falwell assumed the Liberty presidency in 2007, after the death of his father, Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., who founded the university in 1971. The elder Falwell was also known as the co-founder of the Moral Majority, which amassed political influence in conservative circles in the 1980s before being disbanded after a spate of scandals involving evangelical leaders. The elder Falwell lowered his political profile in his later years, partly to concentrate on the educational mission of Liberty, which he envisioned as an evangelical counterpart to the Catholic University of Notre Dame and the Mormon Brigham Young University.
After succeeding his father, the younger Falwell spent many years building the university’s student body to more than 100,000 in-person and online students and raising its endowment to more than $1 billion. Then, in 2015, he started to elevate his own profile in the world of politics, playing kingmaker in backing Trump over other Republicans.
After Trump became president, Liberty became a destination for people in the administration and others in the GOP, who would speak before regularly scheduled student “convocations.”
The Falkirk Center opened in late 2019, after Kirk — a frequent campus speaker who has not graduated college himself — pitched the idea of starting an on-campus think tank to Falwell. The goal of the center, Falwell and Kirk said at the time, was to have “an elite team of influencers and authors” promoting a Christian, conservative point of view.
“Young people don’t understand that the whole idea of the American experiment was based on the Judeo-Christian ethic, was based on the idea of free enterprise, limited government,” Falwell said while promoting the Falkirk Center on "Fox & Friends" in December 2019.
Falkirk brought on fellows who ranged from former "Bachelor" star Josh Murray to Antonia Okafor, the spokesperson for Gun Owners of America, to Erika Frantzve, Kirk’s fiancé and a doctorate student at Liberty, and Ellis, who in recent weeks has dominated headlines as a member of Trump’s combative post-election legal team. Dave Brat, the former GOP congressman who now serves as dean of Liberty’s business school, is also a Falkirk fellow and a frequent contributor, making him one of the few points of connection between the think tank and Liberty’s faculty.
Over the course of 2019, several of Falkirk’s fellows — including Murray and Okafor — stopped participating in the Falkirk Center, while others, including Gorka, joined.
Unlike most think tanks, Falkirk has not produced academic studies. The center focuses on podcasts, social media and live events. Falkirk also engages in online advertising. Some of those ads ran during the final weeks before the 2020 election and featured photos of Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Cawthorn, who had been accused by four women of inappropriate sexual behavior during his campaign in North Carolina. (He denied the allegations.)
Lamb, the Liberty spokesperson, said the Falkirk Center does plan to publish writing in the future.
“While much of the Falkirk content is focused on digital branding, we have been building a pipeline of material for print publication in 2021 that includes writings from various Christian professors and researchers both at Liberty University and from around the country,” Lamb said.
The ads featuring Trump and other politicians align with Falkirk’s mission because Falkirk needs to build an audience so it can “educate and inform citizens about principles and core beliefs that are central to the Christian and Conservative worldview,” Lamb said. The ad featuring Trump that said “Pray For Our President” “will be a recurring ad or meme no matter what party sits in the White House,” Lamb said, and is based on Bible verse.
One major Falkirk event, a two-day summit focused on China policy last July, was held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event featured interviews with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), among others. No Democrats were featured speakers at the event.
The Falkirk Center has also echoed Trump’s line in dismissing governors’ stay-at-home orders and other safety recommendations related to the coronavirus.
“The government has absolutely no authority to tell you if or how to celebrate Thanksgiving. Defy the petty tyrants and their foolish dictates, and go enjoy a time of Thanksgiving with your loved ones,” read a November 19 Falkirk Center tweet.
The Falkirk Center took Liberty by storm at the same time as the university made cuts to some of its humanities programs, slashing the number of positions at its divinity school in 2019 and eliminating its philosophy department entirely in 2020. To former faculty like Baggett, the changes signaled that Liberty was trying to market itself to parents as a “safety net place where [students] won’t be challenged by liberal ideas.”
“All of these deep cuts are happening in humanities departments, departments that are dedicated to the intellectual life and thinking hard about complicated questions. Falkirk offers very very easy, simple answers,” added Baggett, who taught English.
Think tanks have proliferated on college campuses in recent years as universities have looked for new ways to pull in new money from donors, especially conservatives looking for an ideological counterpoint to left-leaning academia. There is no official definition of what constitutes a think tank, but most such institutes — such as Stanford’s Hoover Institution — focus on academics.
Over the course of the year, concerns have grown among faculty and administrators who noticed the Falkirk Center didn’t seem to play much of a role on campus, two former Liberty officials told POLITICO. Its activities seemed aimed at messaging for the broader conservative movement, rather than educating Liberty students.
Some of the same faculty and administrators pointed to the university’s contributions of $2.2 million to Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition and $300,000 each to Citizens United, the Christian activist group Vineyard Outreach America and Heritage Action, the lobbying affiliate of the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“These are examples of Jerry’s freewheeling, unchecked spending authority,” said one former Liberty administrator. “The interesting question moving forward would be, OK, so the board didn’t know about these things in 2018, 2019 or 2020 — would you permit them now? Should the Falkirk Center exist?”
Though the organizations that received the donations have a conservative tilt, Lamb, the Liberty spokesperson, said the grants went towards a variety of activities that were nonpartisan, including “voter education efforts on issues of importance to evangelical Christian conservatives,” get-out-the-vote efforts for evangelical Christian conservatives, and “legal action to promote government transparency, civil rights, and the proper interpretation of the Constitution.”
But Liberty has a responsibility to ensure its funds help further the university’s educational mission — and most universities steer clear of donations to groups that are as political as Reed’s Faith & Freedom, said Marcus Owens, a nonprofit lawyer and former IRS attorney.
“The organizations he’s associated with are politically inclined, and that’s unusual for a university,” Owens said of Reed, a longtime GOP activist and former head of the Christian Coalition. “It would seem to be difficult to fit that into a university’s educational mission — it’s not promoting the education of the student body.”
The IRS, however, has been reluctant to monitor donations and other activities that may reflect political agendas at institutions like Liberty. The reasons are multifold: A lack of resources, the 2013 Tea Party scandal — in which the IRS was accused of unfairly targeting conservative groups — and, more recently, because of the Trump administration, tax experts said.
“Enforcement generally changes as the office changes. It depends on the interest of those in power,” said Daniel Romano, who leads nonprofit services at the accounting firm Grant Thornton. “They follow whatever marching orders they have.”
