Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, by Kevin Roose, published by Grand Central Publishing, 2009, 324 pages, $24.99.

A recent graduate of Brown University, this young journalist devised a plan while studying there: he would take a semester off and enroll at Liberty University, the conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Va., founded by the late Jerry Falwell.

Roose chose to do so out of his own curiosity: What would it be like, he thought, to go from an Ivy League college known for its liberal campus to a place where evolution was denounced in the classroom and students were forbidden from drinking, dancing, premarital sex and watching R-rated movies?

Roose enrolled at Liberty University in the spring of 2007, signing up for a full load of courses and moving into a campus dorm, much to the chagrin of his Quaker parents.

With the intent to write a book about his experience, Roose landed a contract with a publisher even before he set foot on campus. His plan was to go incognito, keeping his true intent from everyone he met. “I would do whatever it took to blend in with Liberty students,” he writes. “I’d pray when they prayed, sing when they sang, and take exams when they took exams. If anyone ever asked, I’d say that I was a Christian (strictly true), but if the questions got more specific — say, if someone asked me how I felt about homosexuality — I’d have to be more evasive. I had to stay on the inside of the community, even if it meant holding back my true feelings.”

Once immersed in campus life, this young cynic found some surprises. “All in all,” he reports, “the Liberty students I’ve met are a lot more socially adjusted than I expected. They’re not rabid, frothing fundamentalists who spend their days sewing Hillary Clinton voodoo dolls and penning angry missives to the ACLU. Maybe I’m getting a skewed sample, but the ones I’ve met have been funny, articulate and decidedly non-crazy.”

For the most part, Roose met young men and women who were serious about their Christian faith, people who truly formed a caring community. When sharing about his sick grandfather with a prayer group on his hall, he found his dorm mates to be genuinely concerned about the emotional pain he was feeling. Roose was also greatly moved by the campus-wide assemblies where students sang together songs of worship, raising their hands, eyes closed, coming together as a unified group.

At the same time, he struggled with the school’s teaching approaches like the one in History of Life, a required course, which he describes as less of a science course and more of a class in apologetics, meant to instruct students in young-earth creationism and, according to their textbook, “to equip students to defend their faith and give answers to common questions” raised by people for whom “the Bible is just a book of fairy tales rather than the Word of God.” Roose questions whether such a didactic approach allows for a true liberal arts education.

Toward the semester’s end, Roose requests an interview with President Falwell himself, to be printed in the student paper. He is granted one, and finds a man who is congenial and down-to-earth. “You don’t get to be a religious icon without touching some lives, and it’s clear there are more sides to Dr. Falwell than the red-faced demagogue,” he concludes.

Though Falwell was seldom seen by students on campus except to address them in assemblies, he later sought Roose out tell him that he was pleased with the published interview, one that depicted a loving grandfather, a regular man who enjoyed a peach Snapple every afternoon and owned 40 red ties.