Liberty University is an exception to the stereotype of universities as left-wing indoctrination factories. It is an arch-conservative, very evangelical Christian university founded by Jerry Falwell, a prominent Southern Baptist preacher, megachurch founder, and televangelist.
Liberty is a conservative school in every sense of the word and is ranked by Best Colleges as the most conservative college in America.
So you would think there would be no place for a left-leaning politician or Democrat at Liberty. And for a long time, there wasn’t — until Bernie Sanders went to speak at Liberty, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to speak at Liberty.
First of all, what did Bernie Sanders have to gain from his visit to Liberty? Well, according to Harry Bruinius at the Christian Science Monitor, young evangelicals these days don’t always meet the stereotype of being ultra-conservative Republicans. There were more politically liberal-minded evangelical Christians, which sounds like an oxymoron, but not when you consider the actual content of Sanders’s speech.
So while a bunch of evangelical Christian students at the most conservative college in America might seem like a waste of time for a Democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders to reach out to, I have gone back to his speech time and time again and been impressed. Sanders spoke about morality, but he started the speech by acknowledging the differences between what he believed and what many in the Liberty University student body believed:
And let me start off by acknowledging what I think all of you already know. And that is the views that many here at Liberty University have and I, on a number of important issues, are very, very different. I believe in a woman’s rights….
And the right of a woman to control her own body.
I believe gay rights and gay marriage.
But Sanders then talked about the necessary battle to hold civil discourse with people who think differently. He said there was too much “shouting at each other” and too much “making fun of each other.” It’s easy to give a speech to the choir — but it was more difficult to communicate with people who don’t agree with you.
Sanders then tied morality to religion. He gave Liberty the respect of trying to live by the values of the Bible, and how to teach students to “behave with decency and with honesty.” He cites Matthew 7:12 and Amos 5:24 as two Bible verses to hammer home his talking points on his 2016 presidential campaign.
The rest of the speech tied in with morality, and Sanders went with his usual campaign talking points about the economy, income inequality in the richest country of the world, and health care.
He tries the best he can to appeal to the religious values of the Liberty student body. He appeals to the talking point of “family values,” and hammers home the point that America is the only developed country that does not have paid family and medical leave.
With themes of justice and morality, Bernie Sanders did his best to appeal to the Liberty student body. I could be biased, but I think he did a pretty good job — as someone who goes to church on a weekly basis, it felt like a sermon.
Of course, 2015 is a very different political environment than today in 2022. Speaking at Liberty University is considered political suicide for any Democratic politician, and if Bernie did the same today, he would be accused of both-sidism.
Also, Bernie Sanders almost won the 2020 Democratic Primary until Joe Biden rallied. In retrospect, Bernie had a blind spot in one salient social and cultural issue that the left embraced whole-heartedly: race. Medicare for all is not as salient of an issue as fighting systemic racism and police brutality, especially after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests.
“The disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on black Americans, combined with the galvanizing death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis, have heightened the call to address systemic racism and police brutality, uniting Democrats — and the country — in a campaign for action in a way that Mr. Sanders’s message of economic equality did not.”
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In Bernie Sanders’ bids for president, race always came secondary to his messaging on the economy. Of course, Sanders always adopted left-wing positions on race, but that was Bernie’s appeal and his brand. It just didn’t age well with the direction the country moved towards. To even suggest a big priority of Democrats should be trying to reach white working-class voters and appeal to their economic self-interest is tone-deaf (and some would say borderline racist) in this day and age.
We can applaud Sanders’s visit to Liberty University as a means of reaching out to people who might disagree with you, but it’s also important to note the Bernie Sanders campaign relied greatly on the state to do the right thing and level the playing field. Sanders wanted a “political revolution” that looked past the culture war issues of same-sex marriage and abortion and instead focus on fighting poverty and economic inequality:
“Let me respectfully suggest that there are other issues out there that are of enormous consequence to our country and the world and that maybe, just maybe, we don’t disagree on them — and maybe, just maybe, we can work together in trying to resolve them,” Sydney Ember at the New York Times said.
However, de-emphasizing the culture wars and emphasizing uniting around the economy just did not age well. America is not the U.K. or any other country where class is the prevailing social issue and political flashpoint. You will not get far as a left-leaning, national Democrat without having a strong stance on race, which Sanders was not perceived to be compared to Joe Biden.
Sydney Ember at the New York Times says defenders of Sanders note his activism during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and that his policy proposals would help the lives of working Americans of all races. But even Nina Turner, the co-chair of his campaign, acknowledged Bernie did not take on racial justice as forcefully as the moment demanded.
And in defense of Bernie, he reached across the aisle without compromising his policy positions or his stances, a reputation he’s built over the course of his career as honest. Other politicians just don’t do that — their policy positions and stances shift with what the moment demands. This is often seen as disingenuous, but what most politicians have to do to keep up with shifting public opinion.
Some liberal students at Liberty greatly appreciated the speech, but some students did not think many minds were changed.
Still, what Bernie Sanders did was special in terms of shifting the conversation. I doubt he expected he would be as electorally successful as he was in 2016 or 2020, but he shifted the conversation to make previously radical policy positions like “Medicare For All” mainstream.
Charles Pierce at Esquire says Sanders gave Liberty a lesson in Christianity, a reminder that “there’s more to being Christian than being pro-life.” This is true and I agree, as a Christian and a liberal.
However, I do think, looking back seven years later, hammering home Bernie Sanders themes about class and economic inequality will never be as salient as “culture war” issues around race, abortion, gender and sexuality.
I’m not saying poverty is not “as salient of an issue” as same-sex marriage, but I once subscribed to a line of thought that Democrats should stress economic issues over the culture wars. I now realize that line of thinking is wrong and probably won’t win elections at the end of the day.
Then again, I am not a political strategist. I am just a concerned voter, teacher, and Christian. I don’t talk about abortion with people in the church, and as a pro-choice Christian, there’s a large part of me that doesn’t want to.
For a long time, I’ve seen people and their views as separate entities. People are much more than their political views.
How someone treats their neighbor is, to me, more important than what they think of abortion or Medicare For All.
Three years ago, this would not be (as much) of a controversial statement, but today, the world and our climate around politics and speech have shifted so much I’m probably better off not keeping that thought to myself, or just sharing it with some close friends.
What changed in 2020 is Bernie Sanders was no longer the most fringe or most progressive voice, especially once race became the most salient issue in America. And as someone who liked and supported Bernie, who saw him go from the popular progressive in America to an afterthought, I acknowledge now there were probably a lot of people who didn’t like Bernie’s policy positions, but just didn’t speak up about it for fear of reprisal.
When Medicare For All was popular, a Democratic candidate saying they didn’t support it was considered blasphemy, almost as if the candidate didn’t want uninsured people to have health insurance!
However, there was a lot more nuance to that. And with how self-righteous politics has become for so many of us, how core our politics are with our identities, I think it’s always important to be open to the fact that you can be wrong or short-sighted somewhere.
Bernie Sanders keeping the same policy positions for his entire political career is respectable, but it also stopped him from adapting, as a candidate, to the forcefulness of racial justice as the most important political issue in America.
Let it be known that any 80+-year-old white guy would struggle to be a standard-bearer for change on racial justice, but this is an arena Biden has succeeded in far more than Bernie.
In my opinion, members of “The Squad,” the young women of color pushing progressive views in Congress (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib), have adapted much better to this present political moment than Bernie has.
The big lesson is the world has changed a lot since Bernie’s Liberty speech, and an overture into a university with an evangelical, conservative reputation like Liberty carries a lot more risk in this day and age. Perhaps the climate will change and grow less chilling in a year, and perhaps it won’t.
But to many in my generation, Bernie Sanders pioneered the art of thinking outside the box and going against mainstream political thought. While Bernie himself has faded into obscurity compared to the headline-dominating political force he once was, he did inspire many to push boundaries and be the change they wanted to see in the world, including AOC, Tlaib, and Omar, and including so many young liberal progressives in my generation.
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Previously Published on Medium
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