The Captive Reader

I am not sure there are enough superlatives in my vocabulary to describe my reaction to The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose.  This was one of those books I could not stop talking about while I was reading it and it led to any number of lengthy and interesting dinner table discussions of the influence of religious groups in politics, evangelical Christianity’s attitude towards women, and journalistic ethics.  These are topics my family loves to talk about at the best of times (well, maybe just my father and me but my mother gets sucked in despite her best efforts at evasion) so to read a whole book filled with such themes (and which gave such detailed insight into what is for me an alien world) was an absolute delight.

Usually a student at über-liberal Brown University, Roose’s story covers the semester he spent at ultra-conservative Liberty University, founded by evangelical fundamentalist (and Moral Majority co-founder) Jerry Falwell.  It is a brilliant combination of immersion journalism and spiritual quest, forming one absorbing memoir that seeks to educate, inform, and broaden the reader’s views rather than to condemn or criticize an already much-maligned group.  Like Roose, I strongly disagree with much of what the evangelicals have come to represent, at least politically in modern America, but that doesn’t need to mean we attack the believers.  From the very beginning of his time there, Roose is happy to point out how wrong he was in his assumptions about his new classmates:

In fact, that’s the thing that strikes me the hardest: this is not a group of angry zealots.  I knew I’d see a different side of Liberty students once I resolved to blend in among them, but I thought it would be a harsher side.  I had this secular/liberal paranoia that when evangelical students were among themselves, they spent their time huddled in dark rooms, organizing anti-abortion protests and plotting theocratic takeovers.  But that’s not true at all.  (p. 38)

All in all, the Liberty student’s I’ve met are a lot more socially adjusted than I expected.  They’re not rabid, frothing fundamentalists who spend their days sewing Hillary Clinton voodoo dolls and penning angry missives to the ACLU.  Maybe I’m getting a skewed sample, but the ones I’ve met have been funny, articulate, and decidedly non-crazy.  They play pickup basketball, partake in Celebrity gossip, and gripe about homework just like my friends in the secular world.  In fact, I suspect a lot of my hallmates at Liberty could fit in perfectly well at a secular college. (p. 63)

It may seem like an obvious point – look!  People are alike, regardless of religion, colour or creed!  Let us now gather in a circle as brothers and sing Kumbaya! – but this is continually forgotten in the so-called culture wars, which perpetuate the increasingly popular view that the opposing sides have nothing in common, no shared values, and so neither group is worthy of the respect of its opponent.

What was unexpectedly interesting were Roose’s struggles with his role as a journalist while ‘under cover’.  The relatively predictable quibbles – dealing with his new friends, how to explain coming from Brown, how to cover his limited knowledge of evangelical beliefs and culture – yield quickly to more intriguing quandaries: can he continue to date a fellow student he really likes while letting her believe he’s something he is not?  What about his spring break missionary work, when he and his fellow students go to Florida to ‘witness’ the salvation of the sinners enjoyed a rather more secular vacation?  Can he be responsible for converting someone to a faith he does not practice or believe in?

The most serious issue comes at the end of the school year when Liberty’s founder and leader Jerry Falwell dies.  Roose, having successfully pitched the idea to the school paper who then set up the meeting, wrote the last print interview ever done with Falwell and was the last one to ever interview him at any length.  His school article was reprinted in the commemorative circular for the funeral and added to the documents at the Falwell museum (one wonders/assumes it has since been removed).  Major news networks invited him onto their shows to talk about that interview.  It’s the best kind of exposure for most young journalists – just not undercover ones.

Lest you think this is all too serious, do not worry!  Roose is an intelligent and amusing writer (as befits a protégée of A.J. Jacobs) who keeps things light-hearted, frequently by making fun of himself and his preconceptions (always a way to this reader’s good graces):

At first, I couldn’t believe Liberty actually had a course that teaches students how to condemn homosexuals and combat feminism.  GNEDII is the class a liberal secularist would invent if he were trying to satirize a Liberty education.  It’s as if Brown offered a course called Godless Hedonism 101: How to Smoke Pot, Cross-dress, and Lose Your Morals.  (p. 169)

…I’m not optimistic about my wooing skills.  Most of the Liberty girls I’ve met seem to like macho, ultra-conservative guys who watch “The O’Reilly Factor” and bench-press hundreds of pounds in their spare time, not English major milquetoasts who drink mango smoothies and listen to the latest Michael Bublé album.  For now, singledom seems to be my only option. (p.196-197)

At the end of his time at Liberty, Roose remains concerned for his new friends, whose adherence to their beliefs he’s come to respect but not share, as to how they will fare once they leave their supportive surroundings and enter the mainstream.  Some of his fellow students already know what they’ll face – most memorably for me, the charismatic student leader who already knows that to succeed in state-wide or national politics he’ll have to tone down his beliefs in public – but others remain happily ignorant of just what awaits, of the many layers of complexities they might not be prepared to navigate:

Most college students, myself included, talk about entering the real world with a certain level of wariness.  But I suspect Liberty students have more reasons to worry than I do.  When I’m no longer in college, I might be surprised to discover how hard it is to make a living wage or raise a family, but Liberty students going anywhere outside Lynchburg’s city limits will soon find their whole cosmology shaken.  They’ll meet people who mock them for having attended Jerry Falwell’s college.  What’s more, they’ll see that those people bear no resemblance to the heathen masses they learned about in their GNED classes.  For Liberty students who have spent four years hearing from their professors about how unfulfilled, relativistic, flimsy, and hedonistic the real world is, meeting hordes of happy, principled, morally sound non-Christians will come as a shot between the eyes.  And to be honest, I’m not sure how they’ll take it.  (p. 271)

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