The Unlikely Disciple

In his memoir, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University (2009), American author and journalist Kevin Roose, an Ivy League student raised in a secular, liberal environment, chose to go "undercover" at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the Christian private college run by the controversial far-right evangelical, Jerry Falwell.

Roose got the idea for the book after serving as an intern on A.J. Jacobs's  The Year of Living Biblically. His interest grew after meeting some Liberty students while attending school at Brown University. It struck Roose that as a lifelong liberal who prided himself on meeting and interacting with people of as many different cultures as possible, one sub-culture he had very little experience with was evangelical Christians. Therefore, he applied to Liberty and was accepted. To better understand the culture, he tried to pass himself off as an evangelical, hence the description of the book as an "undercover" investigation.

The culture clash was immediate but not exactly surprising. Ideologically, Falwell, the university's president, couldn't have been more different from Roose. A stalwart segregationist during the Civil Rights Era, Falwell blamed 9/11 on "abortionists" and "pagans," among other sub-groups, and described AIDS as “God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.”



Roose sought to enroll in as many core classes as he could at Liberty. These included Old Testament, New Testament, Evangelism 101, and History of Life, a creationist biology class. Among the test questions, Roose was asked to answer was the following true-false query: "Noah's Ark was big enough to accommodate various species of dinosaurs." The "correct" answer was "True."

However, the coursework wasn’t the only culture shock for Roose; R-rated movies were banned. Physical contact with the opposite sex, outside of handholding, was banned – to say nothing of the restrictions on same-sex physical contact. Hearing homophobic epithets on campus was not uncommon. Roose was compelled to participate in daily prayer sessions as well as weekly sessions with a spiritual mentor who seemed to show an uncomfortable interest in Roose's masturbation habits.

Roose tried his best not to resist the strange culture he found himself in, seeking to participate in as many extracurricular activities and social events as possible, including handholding dates with girls and even a missionary trip to evangelize Florida Spring Break partiers. Through these interactions, Roose met a number of students who didn’t fit the fundamentalist Christian mold, including feminists, creationism-deniers, and even some closeted gay students who felt comfortable telling Roose their sexual orientation.



However, Roose’s interactions with the hard-liners provided the most interesting insights. The real question at the heart of the book is this: Is the divide between secular, liberal America and conservative, evangelical America truly unbridgeable? To this, Roose responds, “At the end of the day, the two sides of this culture war still have glaring differences, and those differences are likely to continue to define the relationship between the evangelical community and America at large for decades to come. […] Religious conflict might be a basic human instinct, but I have faith, now more than ever before, that we can subvert that instinct for long enough to listen to each other."

In the end, Roose's experiences at Liberty did not convert him. However, they did give him the chance to offer a clear-eyed view of a sub-culture often viewed only with suspicion and scorn by those who disagree with its beliefs.