Surprises from Liberty University: What I Learned as an Undercover Evangelical
When I stepped on to the campus of Liberty University for my first day as a new transfer student, I thought I knew what I was getting myself into.
I knew that Liberty was a Christian college in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded in 1971 by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell to train "Champions for Christ." I knew it had required courses in Creationist Biology and Evangelism 101, a student body whose political views ranged from conservative to arch-conservative, and a 46-page code of conduct - called "The Liberty Way" - that outlawed drinking, smoking, cursing, dancing, R-rated movies, and hugs that last for longer than three seconds.
I knew all those things, which is why I decided to transfer to Liberty from Brown University, one of the nation's most liberal colleges, and write a book (The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University) about my experience. Before Liberty, I'd never been exposed to conservative Christian culture - my parents are secular Quakers who once worked for Ralph Nader - but during my sophomore year at Brown, I decided to break out of my left-wing enclave and learn about my Christian peers by experiencing their world firsthand. For an entire semester, I took Bible classes, lived in Liberty's single-sex dorms, and sang in Rev. Falwell's church choir, trying to expand my horizons while studying "abroad" in a subculture more foreign to me than Barcelona or Tokyo. A slew of adjectives could describe my Liberty semester - "enlightening," "difficult," and "weird," to name a few - but perhaps the most apt one is "surprising."
Some of the surprises I saw at Liberty were off-putting and worrisome. I remember opening my first Creationist Biology exam to find the question: "True or False: Noah's Ark was large enough to accommodate various species of dinosaurs." (According to my professor, the answer was "True" - since dinosaurs and humans cohabited the earth after the Flood, they would have had to find a way to squeeze onto the Ark. He suggested that they could have been teenage dinosaurs, so as to take up less space.) Also troubling was Liberty's extreme social and political conservatism, which made for classroom lessons like "The Consequences of Immoral Sex" and textbook chapters like "Myths Behind the Homosexual Agenda."
A few surprises were strange but harmless. I'm thinking of my spring break mission trip to Daytona Beach, Florida, where a group of Liberty students and I tried (and mostly failed) to convert drunken coeds to Christianity. Or when I paid a visit to "Every Man's Battle," Liberty's on-campus support group for chronic masturbators. (Insert your own "hands-on research" joke here.)
But many - maybe even most - of the surprises I encountered at Liberty were much more pleasant. For starters, I learned that my stereotypes about evangelical college students - that they were all knuckle-dragging ideologues who spent their free time writing angry letters to the ACLU - were almost entirely wrong. Far from crazy, the friends I made at Liberty were some of the warmest, funniest, most intellectually curious college students I've ever met. After a few weeks of frantic acclimation to life in the dorms (aided by a Christian self-help book, 30 Days to Taming Your Tongue, that helped me kick my cursing habit), I began to fit in on my hall, and I found that Liberty students had a lot of the same day-to-day anxieties as my friends back at Brown. They gossiped about girls, complained about their homework, and worried about their post-graduation plans. Many even doubted their faith.
I was also surprised to learn that Liberty's strict religious discipline can actually be a good thing. I've always assumed that college students and freewheeling social climates went hand-in-hand, but most of the students I met were thankful for Liberty's rules. (Although I did find a few subversive Facebook groups, like one called "I Hug For Three Seconds, Sometimes Four.")
A sociologist named Margarita Mooney has shown that college students who attend regular religious services report being happier, more diligent, and more satisfied with their college experience than students who practice no religion. I still don't consider myself an evangelical Christian, but I can understand now what millions of Christian college students see in faith-based education, and why Liberty's enrollment has grown at a rate that few colleges, secular or religious, have ever matched.
Since the book came out, I've taken some heat from people who have argued that, by going to Liberty with an open mind, I was turning a blind eye to intolerance - or worse, that I'd been brainwashed by my time under Rev. Falwell's tutelage. But no community is all bad, and to dismiss Liberty as a place of wall-to-wall insanity is to reduce it, and the evangelical movement that birthed it, to a lazy caricature.
I still disagree with a lot of the values Liberty stands for, but seeing the human faces on the other side of the American culture wars made me question my own assumptions and realize that, in some ways, I had just as much to learn about tolerance as the most hard-line fundamentalist.
We can all be surprised by our ideological opponents. We just have to give them a chance.
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Good for you. Rather than simply sit back and dismiss the far religious right, you have gone to live among them. I can respect that. I am sure most of these students are followers of their faith because their parents were & their parents parents were and so on... much the same as all other religions. Faith is one thing, but when it interferes with actual education, that is where I draw the line. Professors teaching that there were "teenage dinosaurs on the arc"... how can any person accept this as truth let alone try to pass it off as a fact? Answering a scientific question by saying "God did it" is absurd. Spirituality has it's rightful place in many discussions, a science class isn't one of them.
It's not just dinosaurs on the arc I have a problem with; it's the arc, period.
"Since the book came out, I've taken some heat from people who have argued that, by going to Liberty with an open mind, I was turning a blind eye to intolerance ... "
My concern is that a statement like this to the author smacks in the face of intolerance. Why can't agnostics ... atheists... whatever your slant ... be more tolerant of those who have a belief system different than yours? So what if they're vocal? So what if they're passionate? Aren't you passionate about something in life? Should I consider you intolerant because of your passion?
Why can't we all just get along without slamming each other because of our beliefs. Geez.
I think that many people are tolerant of religious beliefs as long as they don't affect others in a negative way. But when religion comes into the public sphere and starts hindering legislation on climate change and same-sex marriage (for example), that is when some people start to push back against religious belief. Religious people can say what they want about gay people, that's free speech. But when they start quoting the bible in order to take rights away from gay people, that makes a lot of people very angry.
So you are mostly concerned with WHY I am against gay marriage? What if I don't like it because it is unhealty or I don't like the color pink or I don't like the way gay people might walk or talk or for any other number of reasons? I don't believe you are being honest. Am I not allowed to just have an opinion that says that marriage is and always has been committed union between a man and a woman? If you want to have a committed union between 2 men or 2 women, that's fine, too. Just come up with another term for it. When I tell someone that I have been married for 38 years, I don't want the followup question to be," to a man or a woman ?".
TEENAGE DIONASAURS ON NOAH'S ARC???
That's just awesome. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.
Yeah, that was pretty darned funny.
Dear Kevin Roose:
In 1962, I registered as an agnostic at a Jesuit University, for one semester I lived in dorms, as you did at Liberty University. Although I put myself in a more ideologically confrontational position, I learned some of the same truths you learned there. It is a truth that's been reinforced everywhere I've ever been, i.e. people are people; AS INDIVIDUALS, there is far more that unities us than drives us apart. What you wrote reinforces an essential fact of our common humanity - one that we obscure at our peril.
There is also political truth, that human beings are vulnerable to the machinations of demagogues who use absurdities to divide us from one another for their profit and power. Anyone who can be convinced that Satan planted all the fossils or that a pair of adolescent T-Rex sat serenely next to baby brontosaurs on a cartoonish Arc, can be spoon-fed far more destructive delusions. Belief in preposterous pseudo- science, apart from making us the laughing-stock of the first world and less competitive in a global economy, is more benign than lies that primitive Christianity has the right to crush the separation of church & state, which threatens America's survival as an open society.
Did they teach you that line from the Bible: "By their fruit you shall know them?" Look at what Fundamentalists have done to the Republican Party, then remember, that's what they wanted to do to all of America.
Boy that nail is perfect, you nailed the problem. The United States was build on separation of church and state. That was done because religion is just too emotional. Who is going to disobey their minister when he tells them how to vote. I think we should tax these churches as they are really PAC's. That would pay for everything and reduce the deficit to zero.
It's much easier to go through life as happy as a lark when all the difficult questions have been answered for you. Religeous people can't handle the truth when it's too painful, so they 'trust in God'. Dinosaurs on the ark? This is why the republicans were so sucessful in recruiting these people. They are like sheep. They provide a reliable voter base if you just tell them you are a Christian. And this is why the Democrats have trouble with concensus on issues. They think about issues critically and put their ideas out there. They ask questions. It can make for a rockier road to the truth, but at least the aim is truth, not just what is most comfortable to believe.
"And this is why the Democrats have trouble with concensus on issues."
There is also a conflict, in some cases, between their espoused populism and their corporate backing.
Democrats are diverse. Republicans are lockstep. To what degree are the Democrats guilty of corporate backing as compared to the Republicans? If Democrats didn't accept some corporate backing, they would not be in the game at all.
I attended one of these schools. Was expelled. I haven't read this book but am planning to do so in the near future.
These places are like every other place. You will find the nice and the not so nice, the bigot and the tolerant. You'll find those you take their religion to the extreme and those who don't. You'll find students who toe the line and those who sneak around the rules and try hard not to get caught. I know that's hard for some people to believe because the picture of them walking lock step together with no minds of their own is ingrained but its true. I've learned that liberals don't hate the military. don't want to coddle criminals and terrorists and all that so perhaps there are some liberals who can learn a thing or two about the 'other side'. Its not quite all that black and white.
At so no one think I'm 'defending' them I'm glad I was able to get away. Rules were too strict and made little sense.
I don't think they are saying all others are wrong......just misinformed.
At least that college isn't full of booze parties...and sex and drug parties like some of
the colleges...
Depends on what you want out of life. they are taught a set of values that they try to adhere to.
Nobody is twisting their arms. They are there because they want to be and because it has
a moral code and what is so wrong with that.
Does everybody have to be liberal just to please liberals....
I think not.....
Seems really odd though, that when a disaster happens in America, how many people start
praying and calling out to God to save them...
Go figure...
When a disaster happens in America, I try to figure out what caused it so that we can prevent it from happening again; there is no god involved in that.
All people aren't calling to dinosaurs-on-the-ark-god when they call out to god.
And there are more than two possible outcomes to most situations in life. It isn't a choice between Liberty College and its 3-second hug rule college OR "sex and drug parties." University.
This fundamental Christian belief in dichotomy is at the heart of the sheepish ignorance that allows them to be manipulated. You're either for us or your against us, God or Satan.
I wonder why they go to college at all. Seems a waste of time and money to go to college to be taught NOT to think critically.
the difference is that liberals don't try to force you to be like them as conservatives do.
You're dreaming! Make an anti-gay- abortion- woman-etc.. thought in a college classroom and get ready fro the shrieks.
Left and right have hot button issues.
Wonser how many of you would allow a physician who took Creationist Biology to operate on you?
That is if that person really was a trained physician who actually made it through medical school.
Would one allow a Christian Scientist Doctor to practice medicine (or non-medicine?)?
One of the last acts of Bush was to enact an order that allowed any medical professional to not undertake any act that violated their faith (regardless of medical "good practice" or patient need). Fortunately that Presidential Directive was killed by Obama.
I have to tip my hat. The author's attitutude of tolerance is Christ-like. Personally, I would have never made it through a week.
Creationism just kills me. I saw an interview with one of the "scientists" on staff from the Creation Museum in KY the other day, and was seriously disturbed that this woman earned a PhD from Ohio State in molecular biology and was systematically denying the tenets of the education she had earned by stating over and over that the earth is only + or - 6000 years old.
Looking at their website, they encourage questions for submission.
One issue I didn't see addressed was about the origin of man, specifically relating to the fossil record. They have all kinds of things about fossils, the fallibility of carbon dating (?) and how things can be petrified rapidly, presumably to demonstrate how dinosaurs walked the earth with man.
I asked the scientists at the museum to answer my question about early man. My question centered around the fact that there are several other species of man that have walked the earth, according to the fossil record. I asked them to explain to me why God would have bothered with creating a fossil record at all, notwithstanding the debate over the age of said record. Moreover, I wanted to know why he would have bothered creating a fossil record of early man, as well as separate species of man (Neanderthal was a different species). I haven't received an answer yet.
Not to spoil your time but there are also errors and outright distortions in some of these so called records of man. Evolution my be an accepted fact but I like the old saying that if there was a musuem for missing links it would be full. Don't be so cock sure of your self.
If there was all but one link left to be found, creationists will point to the gap and say there's not enough evidence.
They would reject evolution even if there were no gaps.
There's a difference in being a skeptic and being in denial. Skeptics welcome new evidence. Creationists try to explain it away... by creating doubts...yet they have no doubts concerning their beliefs having no evidence whatsoever.
I don't think this school is "harmless". If their science says the earth is a few thousand years old, how can they educate future doctors and health professionals (and other science-based professions) where an understanding of science-based evolution is required?
I didn't say I was so sure of myself nor do we have all of the answers. Far from it. What I asked was this-Why would our creator bother to "create" a fossil record at all, given that he could have made the world without it. What would be the purpose of creating such a record? Just to satisfy our curiosity and give us something to debate about it? I guess what I am driving at is why would God create a world with so much bio-diversity and competition, and a fossil record, etc... instead of a perfect, 6000 year old world that looked like Disney World? What is the purpose of having species compete with each other and the environment? For his sadistic amusement?
I believe there is something of a divine spark that allowed man to be distinguished from al other species, and the wonder of creation is truly magnificent. To me, much of the universe is too well engineered to be purely random. However, I do believe also that the earth and the known universe is very very old and we are arrogant to think that an omnipresence would "create" us as the lone inhabitants, and "create" us with so many flaws, unless there were things we are supposed to learn and figure out. To shut out our intellectual curiosity and accept what we learn is an insult to the Creator that gave us the brain to pursue knowledge.
Kevin,
I applaud you on your good work here. People are far more complex than the stereotypes any of us can be guilty of imposing on them.
Our common humanity is much more important---and critical to our existence---than the differences of race, culture, ideology and yes, religion.
I once shared a flight with an extremely smart and charming young woman who was a student at a different Christian, fundamentalist college. She was a biology major and admitted that it was often hard to balance her religious beliefs with those of modern science. When I asked her about carbon dating, and the strong evidence that dinosaurs had lived millions of years before the first humans, she said, "Yes, I realize that. And what I've learned is that carbon dating is one of Satan's tricks. Satan sets up things like that to test our faith and to try and weaken it."
What can you say when your beliefs come down to "Satan is pulling a trick on us."?
I also knew a smart (in many aspects of her life) and charming woman who believed the dinosaur bones themselves were a trick of Satan's. (Sigh)
that is the point I lose all respect for the person I am talking to
And ditto the people who taught her, and the institutions that sustain that sort of ignorance.
Slave owners were generally nice, sociable people. Police will tell you that many criminals are the nicest people you'll ever meet. Many of the nicest people in the world are oppressive and bigoted. Hitler was a nice man (socially-speaking). It doesn't mean that such people are "good" or "moral" or that we should find "common ground" and accept their needlessly oppressive political views.
Some liberals are nice people as well, Karl Marx was said to be a nice man but I dont think we need to find common ground with Marxism or Socialism and accept the liberals dream of wealth distribution, to each to his need, from each to his ability.
punk, you are absolutely right!
Well, you've convinced me that it's all right to feel morally superior to those I disagree with.
I am increasingly worried about schools like Liberty. I get the impression that they want to grow debaters for the Republican cause, when in fact, if it weren't for Democrats, California would have approved same sex marriage.
I think they need to open their arms and hearts to the Democratic party, otherwise, they will go the way of the Republicans.
But you're not worried about schools like Mills College in Oakland? No, because that fits your doctrine. What's good for the goose isn't good for the gander.
Two faced.
OMG. If you're a Liberty student or graduate, you are not a good representative for a school that is suppposed to attract intelligent people.
Calling me two faced is very grade school, which maybe...........
Fascinating, I once has an epistemology professor who wrote an evangelical christian bestseller under a pseudonym.
However, it's no surprise that students who aren't truly intellectually challenged, challenged by an education that causes them to seriously examine the ideas and axioms upon which their worldview is built, are happier than those who are. Few people relish the actual experience of being educated. Real supervision at this experience level calls for limiting the consequences of excessive opinion and behavior that comes with new found intellectual freedom, not indoctrination.
Education is very hard work. That is why many would rather accept the idea that Satan created carbon dating to test one's faith.
****However, it's no surprise that students who aren't truly intellectually challenged, challenged by an education that causes them to seriously examine the ideas and axioms upon which their worldview is built, are happier than those who are.****
Ignorance is bliss. There's more truth to that than we would like to admit. My mother always told me I think too much. And she had a point. I am not happier because I am a well educated, critical thinker. If anything, "knowing" makes life more painful. I'm sure Jesus could relate to that. But I wouldn't give it up for bliss. You won't find critical thinking causing the pains of wars and environmental callousness and social prejudices. It is ignorance (and the fear born of it), not knowledge that ties a young man to a prairie fence, pistol whips him and leaves him to die alone.
Kevin - Thanks for being honest in your assessment and not caving to the pressure I'm sure you received to give the college a negative review. The left will always look for any opportunity to bash Christians and lump us all together....most are NOT crazy homo-phobes, short on tolerance or abortion rights killers. We are just like everyone else, but with some strongly held convictions on right vs. wrong. Don't we all hold strong convictions to some degree? And, most of us love and care about others and want them to experience the freedoms we enjoy in Christ. Those who throw stones might want to check themselves for the intolerance they so vocally label others.
"We are just like everyone else, but with some strongly held convictions on right vs. wrong."
It's these types of comments that lose the rest of us. You don't get it. You basically said that we don't know right from wrong if we're not Christians. You casually throw stones and cry foul when we toss them back.
I hate to break it to you, but many non-Christians have strong moral convictions. I know they told you not to believe that in Bible class, but it's true.
I would be interested in knowing where your moral convictions came from? What is considered moral to you and on what basis?
I have no problem with Christians who truly live their faith. What Jesus taught was an excellent way to live - but too many so-called Christians are hate filled bigots who use their own narrow interpretations of the Bible as reason to mistreat others. Before the Civil War, the Bible was used as approval for slavery. It's used as approval to treat women as lesser beings than men, and to treat the GLBT community as less than human.
The 'the world is no older than 6,000 years' idiocy comes from a Catholic bishop who added the ages of the patriarchs listed in the Bible and said that was the age of the earth. Denying science is foolish - and to deliberately limit what we feel the deity can achieve (such as a millions of years evolution of Man) is the true blasphemy.
"The left will always look for any opportunity to bash Christians and lump us all together"?
Hmm.
"Those who throw stones might want to check themselves..."
"We seek dominion" - Pat Robertson
That's pretty much all you need to know about the guy.
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