I just finished reading The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, an interesting look at Liberty University, the country’s largest evangelical college, located in Lynchburg, Virginia. Liberty’s the school founded by Jerry Falwell, he who famously denounced the purple Tellytubby Tinky-Winky as a raging homo and blamed the September 11 terror attacks on feminists, abortionists and, naturally, gays. Kevin Roose, a charming writer who’ll graduate this December from Brown University, decided to take a semester off from Brown and study “abroad,” enrolling at Liberty, committed to understanding how the rather large evangelical community in our country lives and works.
While there, Roose experienced a lot of what you would expect from a religious university filled with conservative students – the “fag” jokes were out of control (a point that Roose emphasized repeatedly, mentioning homophobia in nearly every chapter), a half inch of too much cleavage made a girl an immoral slut, and “I’ll pray for (insert cause or person here)” was tossed around like “good morning.” Roose also experienced some of the more startling elements of Liberty: he attended sessions of Every Man’s Battle, a self-help group for chronic masturbators; he listened to Falwell poo-poo global warming, debunking it as a myth; he took “History of Life” classes, where he learned that evolution is a media conspiracy and the Bible has the correct answer on every issue in the world; and he attended a trip where he and his peers witnessed to horny, drunk Spring Breakers, trying to show them that they too can be saved. He even survived The Liberty Way, the rulebook at the university, which bans R-rated movies, hugs that last longer than three seconds, kissing and cursing.
And despite all of these ultra-conservative aspects to Liberty, Roose reflected, in the end, that it really wasn’t all that bad. The Liberty Way provided him with structure, ensuring that he completed his studies without getting distracted by alcohol, parties or other things standard in secular higher education. He truly enjoyed daily prayer and, perhaps more so, the way it felt to know that someone was keeping him in their prayers. He even saw benefits in the lack of physical contact with girls – because he knew that hand-holding was as far as he could get with a girl on any given date, he found himself genuinely interested in her personality and life instead of figuring out a way into her pants.
Most importantly, Roose discovered that all of the stereotypes about evangelical students were not true. Sure, many were homophobic or traditionalist, and many sincerely felt bad for non-evangelicals since they had no chance at God’s eternal heaven unless they were “saved,” but Roose also encountered students who struggled with their faith, who dismissed creationism, who swore and watched 300. His exploration of Liberty’s student body is deep and layered and, ultimately, Roose comes to the conclusion that “evangelical” is not synonymous with “egotistical, Bible-thumping zealot who knows all of the answers.”
Despite the importance of this stereotype-shattering, Roose’s book is most interesting to me because of the way it suggests the religious indoctrination that schools like Liberty facilitate. By condemning hundreds of things left of center as morally wrong – and going even further by insisting that transgressing any of the Bible’s rules will send you to Hell – evangelicals are scared away from experiencing anything beyond the familiar. Students are told over and over and over again that the Lord is the way and the only way, and by hammering home this point to young, impressionable minds, people in positions of authority can abuse their power and steer the thoughts of younger generations. Young people are gradually convinced that what they are being taught is correct – gospel, if you will. The indoctrination that occurs at schools like this is dangerous. It freezes a large sect of our population in traditionalism, times when women were required to submit to their husbands, when homosexuality was a disease and when devotedly following every last Bible verse was chosen over living a life of happiness.
I’m not saying that all of the students at evangelical schools – and certainly not even a majority of the students at Liberty…The Unlikely Disciple proved that – have been transformed into thought clones, incapable of making their own decisions. I truly don’t believe that every religious student in our country solves a dilemma in their life by simply looking it up in the Bible and taking that specific course of action. But I do believe that there is an inherent risk to the psychological independence of teenagers when they attend a school that preaches to them lessons based on a single work of literature and punishes them severely for disobeying the Word. Roose demonstrated the first stages of his own indoctrination in his work – by the end of his semester, he was desensitized to homophobia, was halfway convinced that prayer solved a world of troubles and was almost willing to disregard Jerry Falwell’s history of intolerance as the mis-steps of a misunderstood man of God.
The Unlikely Disciple is a triumph in both anthropology and guerilla journalism. Roose had a brilliant idea to take his super liberal, open-minded background from Brown to the other extreme, and it paid dividends. He managed to produce a work that is funny, revealing and at times both hopeful and troubling, all while remaining non-judgmental and unbiased. If you have any interest in intra-America anthropological studies, religious explorations or journalism prowess, read this book.
