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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A thousand years from now, if people manage to survive, historians will shake their heads in disbelief that humanity allowed religious fanatics to dominate this planet for so long. Religion -- which is merely a catchall term for systems of irrational thinking that involve imaginary deities and other magical characters -- is increasingly dangerous not only to democracy but to the survival of our species. Unfortunately, these folks are not only allowed to spread their harmful ideologies but actually encouraged to do so by our government, which probably will be eventually destroyed by those very groups now being nurtured in our society. It's very ironic and sad, but human history is full of such nonsense.
who knows if the earth will even be here in a thousand years
Religions may change a thousand years from now but there will still be religious fanatics.
Don't you think it is a crime for an institution to use the trust of these nice young people in order to fill their heads with conservative propaganda and outright lies? How will their personalities changes after they get of of this 'university', living in a world where science and logic are basic building blocks of thought?
Won't they either evolve their thoughts or be forced to build a belief fortress inside their heads in order to deny reality? Why would anyone feel the need to justify this terrible process.
As for the kind of religion being taught at this place, its no wonder that everyone who inhales it becomes happy. It answers all questions with absolute answers! Wow, no doubt at all...must be pure bliss. I am not sure how this is different than spending your life high on drugs, except the drug people don't seem to feel a need to make everyone else a druggie.
Life is hard and yet wonderful. No one DESERVES a life of bliss, it's unnatural. To seek such bliss and deny living in the real world...it
"How will their personalities changes after they get of of this 'university', living in a world where science and logic are basic building blocks of thought? "
See: The bush justice dep't.
Yes, at bottom religion is just silly. If adults would act like adults and refuse to tolerate this nonsense anymore, it would disappear overnight.
Too many of these kids will go home to the community they were raised in and never need confront the idea that maybe life is wider and more complex than their preacher tells them. Sad, really.
Religion is faith, faith in the unseen which is the most difficult of all. With faith there is hope and without hope comes depression , depression is a place most people would rather not be. Not that Christians are immune to depression but they at least have hope when times are hard. And hope for greater things than are found on earth.
Science is not anti christian, because All things were given to man to manage by God. Everyone should be good stewards of the earth in the time we are here. Christians are not anti education or anti government either, should we turn our backs on the U.S. and the constitution? No we should fight for what is respectful to God and the people blessed enough to be living in a country that was founded on Biblical principals.
The promise, or hope, for eternal life, does not justify the lie. Just because you want to believe something, and it feels good, doesn't make it true.
I live quite happily without believing in a supernatural deity. I have hope without faith. I live morally without faith. Except for the lack of a social (not religious) support system that church communities offer, as a non-believer, I miss NOTHING.
Christianity makes it too easy to dismiss science in place of magical thinking.
On the 700 Club TV show right after 9/11:
JERRY FALWELL: And I agree totally with you that the Lord has protected us so wonderfully these 225 years. And since 1812, this is the first time that we've been attacked on our soil and by far the worst results. And I fear, as Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said yesterday, that this is only the beginning. And with biological warfare available to these monsters - the Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Arafats - what we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be miniscule if, in fact - if, in fact - God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.
PAT ROBERTSON: Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population.
JERRY FALWELL: The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this.
PAT ROBERTSON: Well, yes.
JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I'll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.
JERRY FALWELL: I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way - all of them who have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."
PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.
JERRY FALWELL: Pat, did you notice yesterday the ACLU, and all the Christ-haters, People For the American Way, NOW, etc. were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress as they went out on the steps and called out on to God in prayer and sang "God Bless America" and said "let the ACLU be hanged"? In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time - calling upon God.
PAT ROBERTSON: Amen.
The wiki link doesn't quite work. See this instead: http://en.
Grrrr.....
Pancho Villa raided a town inside the US border. That's why the US sent Gen. Pershing after him.
http://en.
So, the United States was attacked on home soil at least once between 1812 and 2001. Aren't these guys supposed to own a history book or two?
Gasp - reading? To gain knowledge??? Oh, what an elitist idea!
Besides sating an intellectual curiosity about something you didn't understand
I'm pretty sure it was clear that that was the whole point. Personal research -> book.
And now we know that Falwell likes peach Snapple.
Conservative Christians are not the only Christians. They just think they are.
You are tolerant precisely because you are a liberal. In the end they would not be tolerant of your
beliefs if you came out with them. They would simply see you as someone to be converted, not to be tolerated.
I have a problem thinking some student studying Noah's ark and teen age dinosaurs is '''intellectually curious'
Hah! Snort !! (There's just something about that term 'teenage dinosaur'.
The mindset is that all others are lost and wrong and must be pitied, condemned or converted. That's putting aside completely that a good portion of fundamentalist and evangelical theology and "history" does not stand up to the light of reason.
Whoever accredited Liberty as anything but a sectarian seminary did the world no favors.
Place that employs a 'professor' who says that Noah's ark was big enough to accommodate dinosaurs should not be called "University" nor should the person be called a "Professor".
Exactly.
True!
Your parents are Quakers who worked for Nader. Think about it dude. Teenage dinosaurs on the ark? You cant help your genetic predisposition to tolerate these idiots but you cannot in good conscience allow them to hold any position of responsibility in our society.
Sounds like a bunch of bible-thumping freaks to me. A support group for masturbation? And you're going to tell me that's not freaked? Get real.
'Undercover Sinner' not 'Undercover Evangelical' ... The cover is what you put on, what you really are goes with undercover
E.g. 'Undercover cop' not 'undercover criminal'
That was the most disturbing part of the article for me, too.
So you discovered Liberty students are human. But humanity encompasses all shades of neurosis and psychosis.
"I had just as much to learn about tolerance as the most hard-line fundamenta
Tolerance is one of the levels of homophobia. Refer to the Homophobia Scale by Dr. Dorothy Riddle.
"Also troubling was Liberty's extreme social and political conservatism, which made for ... textbook chapters like 'Myths Behind the Homosexual Agenda.'"
Troubling is when a university uses a new textbook that has a lot of errors in it. Insane is when it uses textbooks like that. More than troubling is when someone accepts this insanity as if it's somehow a valid alternative to reality.
"Or when I paid a visit to 'Every Man's Battle,' Liberty's on-campus support group for chronic masturbators. "
This idiocy is far from harmless. Read Dr. Kellogg's (of cereal fame) book. It's free on-line and has choice bits about the surgical mutilation he performed on male and female children. Masturbation is a good thing for people who aren't sexually active. It reduces the risk of cancer and maintains fertility.
A university is supposed to be a place for higher education, not an exercise in collective misinformation.
I should note that it's male masturbation that reduces cancer risk and maintains fertility. Male and female masturbation also have the very positive effect of reducing stress. And, I find it ironic that the same people who argue against being sexually active try to suppress masturbation as well. Is this because all of the pent-up sexual desire is supposed to be channeled into religiosity?
America's legacy of the invention of numerous bland foods like Graham crackers, the use of numerous forms of genital mutilation, and the employment of various types of torture (like being tied down) is not to be whitewashed. It's a legacy of barbaric insanity that I find alarming, not only when looking back to fathers who wanted to kill their daughters for masturbation, but when seeing people gloss over this infection today. There is no excuse for college students to embrace irrational anachronism in lieu of science/fact. This is 2009, not 1009.
Thank you for the information regarding masturbation and its cancer affecting benefits. I am relieved to know I have been "beating" cancer for some time.
Seriously, I find your posts compelling, although not nearly as funny as Professor Teen Dinosaur, whom the author recalls in his story. I do, however, believe in God, I hope that's not too disappointing. It's not my business what you (or anyone else) believe in, although I enjoy hearing or reading different perspectives and beliefs, regardless of whether or not I agree.
I've never known a father that wanted to kill his daughter for masturbating, and while it's nearly certain at least one father has actually done so in human history, I suggest he didn't "want" to do it, he was compelled by religious mandate (this tennant pops up in Islam as well as Christianity). I don't think it would be an effective defense in court though. I recently read that all birds masturbate, does that mean people who eat chicken are sinners by proxy?
Oops, I meant tenet, not tennant. I can only hope Liberty University approves of proofreadi
Tolerance breaks down when we tolerate intolerance. The marketplace of ideas breaks down when we give equal credence to mythology and science.
Frankly, I feel sorry for these people... most of them have never had a taste of reality, and would probably be terrified if they ever did... but we cannot just pretend that ill-informed graduates of a diploma mill "university," a 4-year vacation bible school, are somehow on a par intellectually with those of us who took 4 years of biology and chemistry and mathematics, read great literature of the world, created new technologi
Bottom line I appreciate your kind sentiments, but let's please quit pretending this school is anything but a purveyor of self-reinforcing nonsense.
I'm quite sure few if any of us are your intellectual equal!!
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