 "Where the worthwhile worship. Unsaved unwelcome!" | |
Screenshot | |
| Owner | Americhrist Ltd. |
|---|---|
| Created by | Chris Harper/Paul A. Bradley |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 1998 |
| Current status | Active |
The Landover Baptist Church is the website of a parody fundamentalist Baptist church. The church lampoons fundamentalist, Independent Baptist churches and Biblical literalism, and originated as a satire of Liberty University.
The site was created by Chris Harper, who obtained his master's degree in English literature from George Mason University in 1993 after being expelled from Liberty University (founded by Jerry Falwell) in 1989 for producing a radio show satirising the school's procedures [1] which Liberty's administration found offensive. [2] Harper responded to the expulsion by creating the Landover Baptist Church website, described by Pop Matters as both a parody and an exposé of the religious subculture at Liberty. [1]
In an example of Poe's law, some members of the Christian community have supported some of the outlandish stories on the website, [1] and a book [3] about Hello Kitty mistakenly cites a joke article on the Landover site as an example of the "dead seriousness" of the Christian right's opposition to Japanese culture. [4]
The church is located in the fictional town of Freehold, Iowa. [5] It is described as operating under a dictatorial structure whereby its "Pastor" holds all authority over the church, its members, and its extensive holdings. The church supposedly uses an elaborate fine system to maintain its authority over its members, parodying Jerry Falwell's system at Liberty University, [6] and in addition can force its members to comply with any and all of its wishes (a common phrase on the website used in such cases is that the member "mandatorily volunteered" to comply). In cases of expulsion the member is also removed from the church property. The website describes Landover as having a "permanent injunction" against all "unsaved" persons, prohibiting them from being within ten miles of the Landover property as well as forbidding them to enter Landover's website. [7]
Within the Landover universe, the church is described as owning well over 1,000 acres (400 ha) in Freehold, with twenty-eight paid pastors, 412 full-time staff members, eleven fully equipped chapels, seven sanctuaries, a 100,000 seat amphitheater, twelve television studios, two radio stations, an academy, a university, two gated communities, twenty-seven developments, three office parks, as well as a shopping mall, amusement park, golf course, retirement community, foundation, fire and police department, circus camp, resort center, retreat center, and a number of fitness centers, swimming pools, hot springs, and cemeteries. An annual feature on the website is a story about the church's Halloween hell house. [8]
The site records that the initial pastor of Landover was Ben Ebeneezer Smith, and that upon his death his brother (Deacon Fred Smith) assumed the office. In and around June 2010 a "coup" was related to website visitors (in accordance with a spurious interpretation of Romans 13) whereby Pastor Harry Harkwell took over leadership. The site went on to describe Deacon Fred being "restored" to his pastorship after a "reconciliation" during Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally.
The Landover site also features material from Betty Bowers, a fictional central character on the satirical website BettyBowers.com. Bowers is portrayed by voice actress and comedian Deven Green, appearing both in photographs and numerous satirical videos. According to Bradley's fictional satirical biography of Bowers, she proclaims herself "America's Best Christian". [9] Listed as a member of the Landover Baptist Church, [10] Bowers operates several Christian ministries with names like "Bringing Integrity To Christian Homemakers" (B.I.T.C.H.) [11] and "Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals" (B.A.S.H.). [12]
Jerry Laymon Falwell Sr. was an American Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He founded Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967, founded Liberty University in 1971, and co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979.
The Christian right, or the religious right, are Christian political factions characterized by their strong support of socially conservative and traditionalist policies. Christian conservatives seek to influence politics and public policy with their interpretation of the teachings of Christianity.
Christian fundamentalism, also known as fundamental Christianity or fundamentalist Christianity, is a religious movement emphasizing biblical literalism. In its modern form, it began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among British and American Protestants as a reaction to theological liberalism and cultural modernism. Fundamentalists argued that 19th-century modernist theologians had misunderstood or rejected certain doctrines, especially biblical inerrancy, which they considered the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
Moral Majority was an American political organization associated with the Christian right and Republican Party. It was founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. and associates, and dissolved in the late 1980s. It played a key role in the mobilization of conservative Christians as a political force and particularly in Republican presidential victories throughout the 1980s.
Thomas Road Baptist Church (TRBC) is a Baptist megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia, located on the campus of Liberty University, which it founded and is closely affiliated with. In 2016, a church spokesperson stated they had an average weekly attendance of 9,000. The pastor is Jonathan Falwell, the son of previous Senior Pastor Jerry Falwell and brother of former Liberty University President, Jerry Falwell Jr. In addition to a second campus, Dan River Church, Thomas Road also hosts a Spanish congregation on its main campus. It is affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship International and the Southern Baptist Convention.
The Baptist Bible Fellowship International (BBFI) is a conservative Baptist Christian denomination. It is headquartered in Springfield, Missouri.
Liberty Baptist Fellowship is a fellowship of independent Baptist churches that grew up around Jerry Falwell, Thomas Road Baptist Church of Lynchburg, Virginia, and Liberty University. Most pastors of the Fellowship are alumni of Liberty University. In 1994, the Liberty Baptist Fellowship had 100 churches, including the 21,000 member Thomas Road church, which was also affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship International. In 1996, the Thomas Road church joined the newly formed Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia, thereby aligning itself with 3 Baptist bodies.
Liberty University (LU) is a private evangelical Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia. It is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia. Founded in 1971 by Jerry Falwell Sr. and Elmer L. Towns, Liberty is among the world's largest Christian universities and the largest private non-profit universities in the United States by total student enrollment. Most of its enrollment is in online courses; in 2020, the university enrolled about 15,000 in its residential program and 80,000 online.
Harry Emerson Fosdick was an American pastor. Fosdick became a central figure in the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy within American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s and was one of the most prominent liberal ministers of the early 20th century. Although a Baptist, he was called to serve as pastor, in New York City, at First Presbyterian Church in Manhattan's West Village, and then at the historic, inter-denominational Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.
Jack Frasure Hyles was a leading figure in the Independent Baptist movement, having pastored the First Baptist Church of Hammond in Hammond, Indiana, from August 1959 until his death. He was well known for being an innovator of the church bus ministry that brought thousands of people each week from surrounding towns to Hammond for services. Hyles built First Baptist up from fewer than a thousand members to a membership of 100,000. In 1993 and again in 1994, it was reported that 20,000 people attended First Baptist every Sunday, making it the most attended Baptist church in the United States. In 2001, at the time of Hyles's death, 20,000 people were attending church services and Sunday school each week.
Tennessee Temple University was a private Christian university in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Temple Baptist Seminary was the university's graduate school of Christian theology, also operating in Chattanooga. The university merged with Piedmont International University in 2015.
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) is a Baptist theological institute in Louisville, Kentucky. It is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The seminary was founded in 1859 in Greenville, South Carolina, where it was at first housed on the campus of Furman University. The seminary has been an innovator in theological education, establishing one of the first Ph.D. programs in religion in the year 1892. After being closed during the Civil War, it moved in 1877 to a newly built campus in downtown Louisville and moved to its current location in 1926 in the Crescent Hill neighborhood. In 1953, Southern became one of the few seminaries to offer a full, accredited degree course in church music. For more than fifty years Southern has been one of the world's largest theological seminaries, with an FTE enrollment of over 3,300 students in 2015.
Bascom Ray Lakin was a Baptist preacher and evangelist.
Elmer Leon Towns is an American Christian academic, pastor and writer who co-founded Liberty University, the largest private non-profit university in the world, alongside Jerry Falwell in 1971. Towns is also a prominent Christian leader and speaker on the principles of church growth, church leadership, Christian education, Sunday school, and prayer and fasting. He has written over 170 books, eight of which are listed on the Christian Booksellers Association Best Selling List. In 1995, his book The Names of the Holy Spirit received the Gold Medallion Award from the Evangelical Christian Booksellers Association for Book of the Year in Biblical Study. Most recently Towns has served as Dean of the B. R. Lakin School of Religion, Dean of Liberty University Baptist Theological Seminary, and Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Liberty University. In fall 2013, Towns announced he would be taking a sabbatical from his teaching and administrative duties to focus on speaking and writing.
Jonathan Pate Falwell is the senior pastor at the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and campus pastor at Liberty University.
Edward G. Dobson was a Northern Irish-American pastor, at one time an executive for the Moral Majority. He became the pastor of a megachurch in Grand Rapids, Michigan and a nationally known author and speaker, especially after being diagnosed with ALS in 2000.
Ergun Michael Caner is a Swedish-American academic, author, and Baptist minister, who became well known for his book, co-authored with his brother, on Islam and his claims that he was a devout Muslim trained as a terrorist. He emigrated to the United States at age four and claimed to have converted to Protestantism in the early 1980s.
Protestantism is the largest grouping of Christians in the United States, with its combined denominations collectively comprising about 43% of the country's population in 2019. Other estimates suggest that 48.5% of the U.S. population is Protestant. Simultaneously, this corresponds to around 20% of the world's total Protestant population. The U.S. contains the largest Protestant population of any country in the world. Baptists comprise about one-third of American Protestants. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest single Protestant denomination in the U.S., comprising one-tenth of American Protestants. Twelve of the original Thirteen Colonies were Protestant, with only Maryland having a sizable Catholic population due to Lord Baltimore's religious tolerance.
Deven Green is a Canadian comedian and model who produces comedy parody videos, including as the satirical character Mrs. Betty Bowers, "America's Best Christian".
Steven Lee Anderson is an American preacher and founder of the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement. He is pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. He advocates for the death penalty for homosexuals, and prayed for the deaths of former U.S. president Barack Obama and Caitlyn Jenner. He produced a documentary titled Marching to Zion in which he "championed a wide range of antisemitic stereotypes", according to Matthew H. Brittingham of Emory University.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)My name is Mrs. Betty Bowers and — as you already know — I'm America's Best Christian.