Recently I finished reading Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple after having it sit in a box of “books to be read eventually” for half a year. Kevin Roose was a student at Brown University when he decided to transfer for one semester at Liberty University out of curiosity. This book is about that semester as the tag line implies: “A sinner’s semester at America’s holiest university.”
Perhaps I should begin with explaining why I read this book in the first place. Why would I, a moderate, stout Roman Catholic, read a book by a wishy-washy, liberal Christian spending a semester at an Evangelical university founded by Jerry Fallwell, the founder of the Moral Majority and the Christian Right? That is a very good question…
To start, this book was recommended to me by an atheist/agnostic teenager living in an evangelical household (oh the irony). After reading a few excerpts from Kevin’s website and Amazon, I decided that I had to have this book. When I finally got around to reading it after graduation I couldn’t put it down. The concept of a person going to a school essentially diametrically opposed to his ideas is fascinating but more importantly, the way that Kevin approached Liberty (with an open mind and willing to try new things) helped him give Evangelicals a human feel. Now, I’m no friend of evangelicalism but nor am I really a friend of liberalism which puts me in an interesting place to read this book.
I enjoyed watching the spiritual growth that Kevin described during his study “abroad” at Liberty but I also found myself empathizing with the students at Liberty: I saw past the labels that we as a society often put on evangelicals. So, not everyone at Liberty is as crazy as Pat Robertson but that doesn’t mean they aren’t still a little crazy. There are times when Kevin distantly (temporally) reflects on his experience and times when you can tell he is writing notes the night of the events. The prose is clear and concise but I wish there were headers or better transitions between sections rather than white space.
Overall, I loved the book and I learned a lot about both the views of your run of the mill Evangelical and Kevin’s secular, liberal friends and family. I appreciate his appreciation for certain aspects of religion such as being prayed for, the charismatic feel of worship, and rules against various vices (drinking, smoking, sex). I particularly liked reading about his quasi-romance with Anne at Liberty and as it was brought up I kept wondering how it was going to work out. As an aside, I laughed that she called him a pansy for not asking her out despite feeling like he couldn’t get involved too much per his role as a journalist.
In a way, Liberty can be paralleled to Franciscan University of Steubenville as a Catholic university that from the outside looking in (and I can say that I have one foot in and one foot out) it seems to be unwelcoming and condescending. To some extent, perhaps, people there can be. There is an aversion from “other” types of people when you live in the extremes portrayed by the media and represented by members of society such as Richard Dawkins and Pat Robertson. I hate to pick on non-Catholics but since I don’t keep up on icons of Catholic extremism (and almost everyone talks about Catholic leaders as if they are extremist), I have no examples outside of a few friends who border (or flat out are) examples of religious and political extremism.
The point is this: every group has its extremists but that loud minority should not represent the whole. As intelligent individuals we ought to seek out the real people behind a movement. The loud mouth pundits don’t represent the whole and the media really does distort everything you say. I should have listened to Animaniacs when I was a kid…
