The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose (Grand Central, 2009, 319 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
I grew up in typical 1950s congregations of two mainline denominations in the North, attending a fundamentalist university in the South before graduating from a Northern state university. I attended Dispensational and Reformed seminaries before graduating from secular graduate schools (one private, one public). I worked for evangelical and mainline campus ministries as well as for an urban public university before entering private practice in psychotherapy. I’ve lived within very different Christian and secular subcultures. They all looked askance at each other. They all held monologues they mistook for dialogues. So, their notions of each other were often hopelessly naïve and needlessly negative. To disagree after learning another’s views is one thing; to demean others or their views out of misunderstanding is something else. So, I read, with interest and respect, of this crash course a college kid from a liberal background took on when he put himself in the unfamiliar milieu of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
Reared by politically and religiously liberal Quaker parents in Oberlin, Ohio, Roose enrolled at Brown University where, he says, his social circle included atheists, agnostics, lapsed Catholics, Buddhists, Wiccans, “and more non-observant Jews than you can shake a shofar at, but exactly zero born-again Christians.” This got him to thinking. So, in his sophomore year, he transferred to Liberty for the 2007 spring semester, assigning himself the task of fitting in to find out what conservative Christians are all about. To prepare, he read books by Balmer, Budziszewski, Campolo, Kinnaman, LaHaye, Lewis, Noll, Strobel, et al., and, of course, Falwell.
Christianity Today is right: Roose is “a talented writer [with] synthesizing wit [and] keen insight”. His account has a fresh, diary-like feel – a fascinatingly fast-paced read on culture shock, acculturation and a lived empathy that pushes back against the enmity that’s so common between secularists and evangelicals, Left and Right.
Roose – affectionately dubbed “Rooster” in his dorm – plunged right into campus life: enrolling in Evangelism 101 and young-earth creationism, hanging with his dorm mates after curfew, singing in the front row of Falwell’s church choir, and traveling to Florida with fellow students for spring break evangelizing.
He observes that LU students are “a lot more socially adjusted than I expected. They’re not rabid, frothing fundamentalists … and the ones I’ve met have been funny, articulate, and decidedly non-crazy.” But, “I’m still adjusting my mind to all the earnest God talk … . They simply can’t contain their love for God. … It’s hard to watch Liberty students … and not wonder whether they’ve tapped into something that makes their lives happier, more meaningful, more consistently optimistic than mine. I still don’t get what that something is, or how it changes them, or how it can coexist with [Falwell’s] socio-political beliefs”.
A sample of the socio-political was the antigay vitriol in his dorm, e.g., “I hate faggots”, “I would do what David did to Goliath. I would beat him with a baseball bat”. One kid who “doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body” said the Bible called for the death of gays and that, in “Christ’s society, they would be eliminated from the earth.” Roose, who’s heterosexual, says he had to “walk around campus all night trying to decompress” from all the gay bashing. “Whatever spiritual momentum I built up over the past few weeks has gone down the drain.”
He describes a shouting match over interracial dating and marriage (10 percent of LU students are black). That evening, the dorm’s RA reminded the young men that racially insensitive comments are punishable with 18 reprimands and a $250 fine. Roose recalls that Falwell himself opposed Brown v. Board of Education: “When God has drawn the line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line”. In 1965, Falwell criticized Martin Luther King, Jr. for his public advocacy: “preachers are not called to be politicians but soul-winners”. Roose notes the inconsistency of Moral Majority’s founder and probably hopes that later leaders follow, in terms of homophobia, Falwell’s finally repenting of his racism.
Though he wasn’t the only non-evangelical – LU enrolls non-evangelicals for varsity sports scholarships as well as Buddhists from Asia – Roose says his “hiding” took “a toll on my conscience”. But when, after having left LU to go back to Brown, he returned and let his former classmates know his fuller story, they didn’t hold his past secretiveness against him. They embraced him warmly. However, they registered their sadness that he wasn’t “saved”.
In Acknowledgements, Roose addresses the students, faculty and administrators at LU: “I never thought that the world’s largest evangelical university would feel like home, or even a home away from home. But by experiencing your warmth, your vigorous generosity of spirit, and your deep complexity, I was ultimately convinced – not that you were right, necessarily, but that I had been wrong.”
On the last page, Roose writes of getting “a distressed call” from one of his best LU buddies, telling him: “I know I shouldn’t” but a non-Christian girlfriend is “hinting strongly” about having sex. He says he can’t wait for marriage that may not come for ten more years. Roose doesn’t tell him what to do. But here’s his final sentence: “After hanging up, I went straight to my knees. If that’s not worth praying for, I don’t know what is.”
The author’s recognition of himself in “others” that he got to know at LU resembles experience of evangelicals who’ve gotten to know real people who happen to be gay. This was mirrored by LU students’ recognition of themselves in Rooster. Sadly, so many conservatives – and so many liberals – are still not willing to go even a bit of the distance Roose did to get to know themselves in and through “others”.
As a teenager, Roose learned the wisdom of John Wooden, legendary UCLA coach and devout Christian, who died this summer, just a few months shy of his 100th birthday: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” May we all learn this lesson of life as well as did The Coach and Rooster.