On a recent afternoon at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Virginia, Karen Swallow Prior was leading a discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” for the seventeen students enrolled in her English course on Victorian literature. Prior, who is fifty-three and was wearing a high-necked floral-print dress, looked as if she might have stepped out of “Great Expectations,” except for her startling magenta lipstick, and her hair, which is dyed bright orange at the crown and a paler blond around her face, resembling an upside-down flame. On the whiteboard behind her in the windowless classroom, she’d written, “Colonialism, Imperialism, Darwinism, Orientalism, Eurocentrism / Anglocentrism.”
She read aloud, “Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need,” then noted, “Kipling was encouraging the United States to use Christianity as a tool of empire.” The aggressive spread of the faith was an ideal of the Victorian age, she went on, but that doesn’t mean that the Bible supports imperialism. During the nineteenth century, Christianity was used as a justification for secular political projects, and this collapse continues today. “So much of what we think is Biblical Christianity is really Victorian,” she said. For example, contemporary Christians often claimed that traditional notions of proper gender roles—such as that a woman’s place was in the home—came from scripture, when, in fact, they were largely products of nineteenth-century European thought. “It’s super important to learn to distinguish between Victorianism and Biblical Christianity,” she said. It was the last day of classes before the Christmas break, and, outside, among the red-brick buildings, carols played from speakers on lampposts hung with wreaths. Students might have been forgiven for paying scant attention to the Victoriana, but Prior’s earnest-looking students, most of them women, were so engrossed in her lecture that, when the class ended, they lingered around her, reluctant to leave.
Liberty, which has fifteen thousand students on campus and another eighty-five thousand “distance learners” who take classes online, is one of the largest Christian universities in the country. Over the past several years, its size has forced the university into the national spotlight; last year, an investigation by ProPublica and the Times called into question the quality of the school’s online degree program. The school has also drawn attention for its politics. In 2016, Jerry Falwell, Jr., the university’s president, publicly endorsed Donald Trump, a decision that divided the campus. Soon after, Mark DeMoss, a Liberty graduate who was then the chairman of the university’s executive committee, criticized the endorsement. “Donald Trump is the only candidate who has dealt almost exclusively in the politics of personal insult,” DeMoss told the Washington Post. “The bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense—and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ.” DeMoss was asked to step down from Liberty’s executive committee and soon resigned from the board. The issue is still a contentious one, and he is reluctant to speak about it. “I regret that publicly saying I thought Jerry’s public Presidential endorsement was a mistake could have possibly resulted in fracturing a forty-year relationship my family and I have had with Liberty,” he told me.
Despite mounting scandal in the Trump Administration, Falwell continues to defend the President and his policies. Last week, he told the Washington Post, “I almost laugh out loud when I hear Democrats saying things like ‘Jesus said suffer the little children to come unto me’ and try to use that as the reason we should open up our borders.” In May, 2017, Falwell invited President Trump to Liberty to give the commencement speech. “In America, we don’t worship government,” Trump said. “We worship God.” This winter, about a week before I arrived, Melania Trump came to Liberty to take part in a panel discussion about opioid addiction. Yet Falwell often claims that Liberty is more open to debate than liberal universities, and cites the fact that, in September, 2015, Bernie Sanders came to Liberty to speak.
Prior is proud that Liberty hosted Sanders, though she doesn’t share most aspects of his politics. She is a conservative evangelical, and a member of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, which is led by Jonathan Falwell, Jerry’s brother. In her twenties, her faith was galvanized by the fight against abortion, and she believes that Roe v. Wade “could and should” be overturned. “I don’t think it’s any more settled law than Dred Scott,” she told me. Prior believes that homosexual sex is a sin. But she is also a committed Never Trumper who has decried the President’s positions on immigration, race, and women. She has called for protections for undocumented youth and defended Black Lives Matter. In May, when Paige Patterson, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, came under fire for having counselled women to remain with their abusive partners, Prior helped organize thousands of women to speak out against his leadership; Patterson was later removed as the head of a Southern Baptist seminary in Texas.
To outsiders, these views might seem contradictory, but within conservative circles Prior stands at the vanguard of a new movement of Christians looking to reclaim their faith from the regressive racist and misogynistic politics that have co-opted it. To underscore this distinction, she and others call themselves “orthodox” rather than conservative. Although Prior believes, as most evangelicals do, that the only way to Heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ, she challenges other commonly held positions as cultural rather than Biblical. This includes the Billy Graham rule, a practice followed by male pastors, as well as Mike Pence, which forbids them from being alone with women other than their wives. To Prior, this is encoded sexism. “It would be very amusing if it didn’t represent such potential harm to the Church,” she said. She noted that, according to this formulation, men are either powerless over their urges or too weak to fight off alluring women. “I think more of men, and I think the Church should, too,” she said. “In Genesis, God’s design was to create human beings as male and female—both reflect God’s image.”
Prior believes that one legacy of the Church’s history of sexism is that women tend to receive less formal theological education than men, which forces them to seek answers on their own. “They’re often being discipled by the blogosphere and by the latest, greatest celebrity,” Prior told me. This leaves them vulnerable to people who distort scripture to serve their own ends. Prior was dismayed by the success of “Girl, Wash Your Face,” a Christian mega-best-seller that intersperses self-help advice with Biblical verses, which has sold more than a million copies since February. “There’s a whole genre of Christian self-help books that emphasize a Christianity that’s more informed by the American Dream and therapy than the Bible,” she told me. She didn’t like to see her religion commercialized in this way. The distortion is especially harmful when scripture is distorted for political ends. Some conservative Christian men have gone so far as to argue that, according to the second book of Timothy, which grants men “Biblical headship” over women, female police officers have no authority.
When Trump was elected with some eighty per cent of white evangelical support, including that of many evangelical women, despite his history of alleged sexual violence, Prior saw it as a call to address the problems within the evangelical community. “We recognized that the real problem wasn’t Trump,” she told me. “It was the need to clean our own house.” Last month, along with twenty female leaders from different denominational traditions—including Baptist, Messianic Jewish, and Anglican—Prior launched the Pelican Project, an effort to provide orthodox women with scriptural guidance. The group plans to serve as a resource for evangelical women, and for pastors looking for help in educating their female parishioners.
One evening, Prior and I were driving in her Subaru Outback on a highway in rural Virginia when we passed a billboard that read “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season.” She reminded me that this was the Bible Belt, and that the culture here was very different from the one where she grew up. Prior was born in Monmouth, Maine, to a family of Methodists, not evangelicals—although, when she was in grade school, her family began to attend an independent Baptist church where the pastor was taking correspondence courses with a Bible institute in Lynchburg, Virginia, that would later become Liberty University. By eleven, Prior was teaching Sunday school in the back corner of the one-room church. “I don’t remember the day, the hour, that I asked Jesus into my heart, the way that evangelicals are supposed to,” she told me. “I just know that when I was baptized, at five, I knew that Jesus was my savior.”
Prior’s church taught that having sex before marriage, drinking alcohol, and using drugs were sinful acts. At home, however, Prior’s mother encouraged her to ask questions about anything she was curious about—including what “oral sex” was, after she heard the term used on the radio. Prior’s first scripture wasn’t the Bible; it was literature. She devoured books like “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” and “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” As she grew older, these texts seemed increasingly at odds with the teachings of her church. “I just got the impression that I had to choose between the two, and that Christianity, or evangelicalism, was not compatible with the life of the mind and intellect,” she said. As a teen-ager, Prior chose the intellect. She still attended church, but she also did drugs with her friends and lost her virginity—a decision she later came to regret. Attending a small liberal-arts college in Buffalo, she was introduced to Flaubert and Flannery O’Connor and decided that she wanted to become an English professor.
At nineteen, she married Roy Prior, a soft-spoken self-described redneck who played guitar in a local rock band. Together they began attending a nearby fundamentalist Baptist church, while Prior started graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo. One night, in 1987, their pastor screened “The Silent Scream,” a controversial film that portrays a fetus in utero during an abortion. “I had always thought of abortion as, I don’t know, just a pregnancy dissolves, or something,” Prior told me. “I did not know that there was a little tiny being with arms and legs that was being pulled apart.” Prior became deeply involved in the fight against abortion. She protested outside of clinics, worked as a counsellor at crisis pregnancy centers, and was arrested several times after approaching pregnant women on the street as they tried to enter the clinic, a tactic that is euphemistically called “sidewalk counselling.” Prior doesn’t like the term, because she’s precise with words and finds it misleading. “I know people think it’s extreme and coercive, but, to me, it was a form of social protest,” she told me. She was unprepared for the hostile reaction from her classmates and teachers. “My face was on the news,” she said. “My professors hated me.” She still thinks that people at liberal-arts colleges claim to defend free speech but often shut down voices of dissent. Sometimes, when her students become disheartened by Liberty’s conservative political bent, they ask her why she stays. “And I tell them, honestly, I went to a liberal university. I know what it’s like. I mean, it’s not perfect here, but it’s better.”
Despite her adherence to most conservative beliefs, Prior has always been willing to risk being an outsider in mainstream evangelical circles. Her willingness to stand up to the Christian right is rooted in her belief that critical thinking can be a moral act. Prior began to question the influence of secular culture on the Christian right while protesting outside abortion clinics. She was often annoyed by her fellow-protesters, who would ignore or harass those on the other side of the issue. “If we have the truth, then we have nothing to fear,” she said. Around 1996, she became involved in Common Ground, an initiative that brought pro-choice and anti-abortion protesters together to talk. And, in 2008, when Obama was elected, although she “deplored his liberalism,” she believed that the election of the first black President was an essential step in addressing and beginning to undo the legacy of racism in America. “In some ways, that victory for the human race seemed more important,” she said. Obama’s election marked a shift in the politics of the student body at Liberty. “Many students supported him,” she said. And then, in reaction, came Trump.
One early evening at Liberty, Prior and I stopped for a coffee at an on-campus Starbucks located in the Jerry Falwell Library. This past summer, Prior had been hit and almost killed by a bus. She had fractured her spine, pelvis, ribs, and shoulder, and most of both of her lungs had collapsed; she still tires easily. The healing process had been humbling, she told me, a lesson in how to suffer with grace. Afterward, alone, I climbed a set of stairs to a study room, where I met several of Prior’s students. Jonathan Hart, a twenty-two-year-old grad student, had majored in English as an undergraduate at Liberty and stayed on to pursue a master’s degree in literature. Rebecca Pickard, a twenty-year-old undergrad, was working on a thesis on Dostoyevsky. Their propensity to pull apart texts had led them, in different ways, to interrogate their evangelical faith. Hart, moved by the poetry of Thomas Merton, among others, had recently decided to leave the Protestant tradition and join the Catholic Church. He was tired of the dogmatic certainties of Protestantism. “There’s this beauty within mystery within the Catholic tradition,” he said. “There’s not comprehending something and that being O.K.” Rebecca Pickard had also moved away from evangelicalism, in favor of Anglicanism, after reading “The Brothers Karamazov,” which had made her think differently about the role of the body in religious devotion. She was frustrated by the evangelical emphasis on the spiritual aspects of belief, rather than the embodied ones. “The physical action of taking Communion has led me to think about my heart more than any preaching,” she told me. She added, however, “I can’t be Catholic, because I can’t do the Pope.”
Alongside their religious reflection, the students had also come to question the role that politics plays at Liberty University. “The most alive issue here on campus is the role of Christians in politics,” Pickard said. Both she and Hart are religiously conservative but uncomfortable with how the school is portrayed in the media. Twice a week, residential students are required to attend a convocation in the basketball stadium, where high-profile speakers address the student body. Students are allowed two skips per year, which many recently used to opt out of watching a film by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative conspiracy theorist. One recent speaker was Candace Owens, a vocal critic of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Some students resented that, on broadcasts of the events, it might look like the more than ten thousand students in the stadium supported the political beliefs being espoused. And they took issue in particular with Falwell’s vocal opposition to immigration. Hart noted that Catholic churches had helped provide water and food to the so-called migrant caravan. “I’ve been provoked and inspired by all of it,” he said. As Liberty students, they were taught to be “Champions for Christ,” but, in these times, they wanted to be sure that they weren’t serving secular interests instead.
Later that evening, at around 9 P.M., Prior drove me to her home, in Amherst, Virginia, about twenty-five minutes north of Liberty. She and Roy live in a brick farmhouse built in 1912, where they keep two dogs, two horses, and four chickens that are currently refusing to lay eggs. When Prior first arrived at Liberty, in 1999, she was worried that she might find the cultural strictures of the Bible Belt challenging. In her early years there, a student’s father objected to the fact that the English department was teaching a story by Margaret Atwood called “Rape Fantasies.” Prior, the chair at the time, was taken aback when he told her that he read all of his daughter’s assignments in advance and blacked out the portions that he didn’t want her to read. Part of Prior’s role, as she saw it, was to teach her students how to defend their love of art and literature against those who would call such pursuits “sinful.” Prior is an admirable writer in her own right, and the author of four books. Her most recent, “On Reading Well,” is about developing moral virtue through close reading. Prior took particular pleasure in the title of one review: “Girl, Read a Great Book.”
The next morning, we shared a breakfast of scrambled eggs with some venison that Roy had killed and cooked. A high-school building-trades teacher, Roy is bright and supportive, and he and Prior have now been married for thirty-four years. In the kitchen, the talk turned to Trump, and, although Roy, who was raised in central New York, understands the grievances of many rural Americans, he had little time for the President. “How do you trust anyone with a rug like that?” Roy asked. He poured boiling water over coffee grinds for his wife. He didn’t drink coffee himself, but he had perfected her preferred pour-over method while Prior was recovering from her recent injuries. Prior had been hit by the bus on the same day that Paige Patterson, the Baptist leader she had organized against, had been removed from his position at the seminary. She found the timing of the incident “eerie”; a friend had suggested that the brokenness of Prior’s body symbolized the brokenness of women under patriarchy in the Church. Being hit by a bus had been an extreme experience in vulnerability, and, within that, she’d found a larger lesson for the Church. “Evangelicalism tends to separate the spiritual and the physical, and that’s wrong,” she told me. The Church, like a person, has a body, and both could be broken. There could be no healing without first exposing the wounds.
