The last time we heard from Ergun Caner, the president of Liberty University's seminary, he was riding around his Lynchburg, Va., campus on Election Day in a truck (accompanied by a GOP elephant made out of chicken wire) urging students to vote for Republican candidates.
Americans United asserted that Caner's overt electioneering was just another example of the fundamentalist school's determination to push candidates favored by Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr., despite a federal law that forbids tax-exempt religious institutions from intervening in partisan politics.
Now Caner is back in the news - and once again it's not in a good way.
Caner has made a name for himself by highlighting his unusual life story: He says he was born into a stridently Muslim family in Turkey, where he learned to hate America and Christians. As Caner tells it, he flirted with jihad before undergoing a life-changing conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. He then persuaded most of his family to convert as well, and they now spread the gospel.
It's a compelling story, and Caner tells it well. I heard him address last year's "Values Voter Summit" sponsored by the Family Research Council. Even though I didn't agree with Caner's Religious Right perspective, I had to admit that he was a funny and engaging speaker.
But now it turns out there may be some problems with Caner's life story - like, it may not be true.
The Lynchburg News & Advance reported two days ago that Liberty officials have launched an investigation. The school was forced to act after criticism about Caner, which had circulated on the web mostly through blogs, bubbled up to the print media.
"In light of the fact that several newspapers have raised questions, we felt it necessary to initiate a formal inquiry," Falwell said in a statement posted on LU's Web site.
Both Christian and Muslim bloggers have criticized Caner. Caner poses as an expert on Islam and in 2002 wrote a book with his brother titled Unveiling Islam: An Insider's Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs, but it's unclear if he ever even belonged to that religion.
Despite his claims about having lived in Turkey, it now appears that Caner was born in Sweden and moved to Ohio when he was 4 years old. His father was a Muslim, but his mother was Lutheran. The couple divorced, and Caner's mother retained custody. He became an evangelical Christian as a teen; it's unlike he was ever recruited by jihadists.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/5/13/12243/3191
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