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The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, by Kevin Roose
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No drinking.
No smoking.
No cursing.
No dancing.
No R-rated movies.
Kevin Roose wasn't used to rules like these. As a sophomore at Brown University, he spent his days drinking fair-trade coffee, singing in an a cappella group, and fitting right in with Brown's free-spirited, ultra-liberal student body. But when Roose leaves his Ivy League confines to spend a semester at Liberty University, a conservative Baptist school in Lynchburg, Virginia, obedience is no longer optional.
Liberty is the late Reverend Jerry Falwell's "Bible Boot Camp" for young evangelicals, his training ground for the next generation of America's Religious Right. Liberty's ten thousand undergraduates take courses like Evangelism 101, hear from guest speakers like Sean Hannity and Karl Rove, and follow a forty-six-page code of conduct that regulates every aspect of their social lives. Hoping to connect with his evangelical peers, Roose decides to enroll at Liberty as a new transfer student, leaping across the God Divide and chronicling his adventures in this daring report from the front lines of America's culture war.
His journey takes him from an evangelical hip-hop concert to choir practice at Falwell's legendary Thomas Road Baptist Church. He experiments with prayer, participates in a spring break mission trip to Daytona Beach (where he learns to preach the gospel to partying coeds), and pays a visit to Every Man's Battle, an on-campus support group for chronic masturbators. He meets pastors' kids, closet doubters, Christian rebels, and conducts what would be the last print interview of Rev. Falwell's life.
Hilarious and heartwarming, respectful and thought-provoking, THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE will inspire and entertain believers and nonbelievers alike.
- Sales Rank: #84033 in Audible
- Published on: 2010-06-03
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 700 minutes
From Publishers Weekly
In what could be described as religious gonzo journalism, Roose documents his experiences as a student for a semester at Liberty University, the largest Christian fundamentalist university in the United States. Coming from progressive Brown University, the author admits that the transition to Liberty, with its iron-clad attempts at controlling student behavior, came with much anxiety. He trains himself to control his foul language and even begins to pray and study the Bible regularly, much to the bewilderment of his liberal Quaker parents. He suffers his way through a course debunking evolution, but finds enjoyment in a Scripture class. Roose may be young—he's a 19-year-old college sophomore—but he writes like a seasoned veteran and obviously enjoys his work. He quickly makes friends at Liberty, but is na�vely stunned and not a little disgusted by their antigay rhetoric. School founder Rev. Jerry Falwell granted Roose an interview for the student newspaper shortly before the famous evangelical's death in May 2007. "Complicated" is how Roose describes Falwell, which is a good descriptor for his undercover student experience. (Mar.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Brown University student Roose didn’t think of himself as being particularly religious, yet he conceived the novel idea of enrolling at Liberty University, the school Jerry Falwell built, thereby transferring from a school “a notch or two above Sodom and Gomorrah” to the evangelical equivalent of Notre Dame or Brigham Young. His reasons were logical, though curious. To him, a semester at Liberty was like studying abroad. “Here, right in my time zone, was a culture more foreign to me than any European capital.” He tells his story entertainingly, as a matter of trying to blend in and not draw too much attention to himself. One hardened habit he had to break was cursing; he even bought a Christian self-help book to tame his tongue. Throughout his time at Liberty, he stayed level-headed, nuanced, keenly observant. He meant to find some gray in the black-and-white world of evangelicalism, and he learned a few things. His stint at Liberty hardly changed the world but did alter his way at looking at it. That’s a start. --June Sawyers
Review
"Hallelujah for Kevin Roose. This is a remarkable book. He takes us on a fascinating, funny, nuanced journey that doesn't condescend or make glib judgments. It's just what the culture wars need. If I didn't already have kids, I'd adopt Kevin."
--A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Year Of Living Biblically
"What happens when a Brown undergrad goes undercover at Liberty University? If he's a writer as insightful and open-minded as Kevin Roose, he ends up learning as much about himself as he does about the evangelical Christians he lives with. The Unlikely Disciple provides a funny, compassionate, and revealing look at Jerry Falwell's 'Bible Boot Camp,' and the surprisingly diverse band of true believers who make it their home."
--Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher
"Kevin Roose has produced a textured, intelligent, even sympathetic, account of his semester at Liberty University. He eschews caricature and the cheap shot in favor of keen observation and trenchant analysis. THE UNLIKELY DISCIPLE is a book of uncommon wisdom and insight. I recommend it with enthusiasm."
--The Rev. Dr. Randall Balmer, Episcopal Priest and Professor of American Religious History at Barnard College, Columbia University
"[Kevin] tells his story entertainingly...level-headed, nuanced, keenly observant."
--Booklist
"Kevin Roose is a delightful writer, and this is a humane book. Read it and I predict you'll have less paranoia, more exposure to 'the other,' and a larger dose of Roose's generous and hopeful faith."
--Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian, A Generous Orthodoxy, and Everything Must Change
"Keenly observed, funny, and compassionate. Kevin Roose parachutes us into a seldom-glimpsed and little understood pocket of America, then guides us through a story of religion and country more resonant than any of us could have imagined."
--Robert Kurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Crashing Through
"This is a brilliant book. Absolutely brilliant. Roose's wisdom, humanity, and love kept me going. And I laughed. A lot."
-- Rob Bell, founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church and bestselling author of Velvet Elvis and Sex God
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A Humanizing Portrait of the Christian Right
By Daniel Bastian
Paging through Kevin Roose's experiences in Evangelicalville was like a trip down memory lane. While I did not attend Liberty University, I was reared in an identical culture, where fundamentalist attitudes reigned supreme. Where preservation of dogma was paramount. Where absolutist certainty was all but demanded and gray areas of belief decried as a warning sign of pending spiritual failure. Where words like evolution, Darwin, the Big Bang and even science itself were considered evil and subversive. Where being a Christian also meant voting conservative.
Yes, this is an environment with which I'm all too familiar. Thankfully, I did not end up spending my college years at what Roose dubs in his subtitle "America's Holiest University". I know several who did, however, and I can say unreservedly that Roose's portrait in The Unlikely Disciple is not in the least a misrepresentation or caricature. If anything, it's too balanced, and that's quite an accomplishment for someone emigrating from Brown University.
How does someone raised in a secular family and enrolled in an Ivy League institution end up transplanting himself to its antithesis in nearly every major respect? The early outlines of the idea formed while interning for A. J. Jacobs on Jacobs' book The Year of Living Biblically. Roose realized that there is a subculture in America with whom he had never really interfaced: the religious right. You hear about them all the time on the news and in satirical send-ups by liberal media, but there's a difference between drawing your verdict from secondhand voices on the one hand and first-person experience on the other. He decided that going incognito to live among them, immersing himself in their inner society, would be an effective way to bridge the gap. And who knows--maybe his story could change how each side views the other and help moderate the bickering to an acceptable volume.
Much to his family's chagrin, Roose's application was accepted and he took his academic pursuits south of the Mason-Dixon line to Liberty University--the bastion of evangelicalism itself. At the time, the school belonged to Jerry Falwell, the same incendiary televangelist-cum-segregationist who campaigned against MLK, Jr. in the 1950s and 60s, who blamed 9/11 on feminists, abortionists, gays, pagans and the ACLU, and who frequently referred to AIDS as "God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals." With the Falwell era in full bloom, Roose found himself in what could properly be labeled the epicenter of Christian fundamentalism, a mini-kingdom dedicated to churning out warriors for God who could defend the values of the Christian right against an encroaching secular-liberal hegemony. This was no Brown. Putting up a credible facade around his new ultra-religious classmates would not be easy.
If culture shock was on the agenda, he certainly came to the right place. Draconian injunctions against R-rated films and all physical contact with the opposite sex (outside of hand-holding); weekly Bible studies, daily prayer sessions and omnipresent invocations of Jesus fever; courses that felt less like education than Christian apologetics, more sermonic and indoctrinational than didactic; surplus doses of Adam-and-Eve-based "science", homophobia-ridden expletives and rhetoric laden with allusions to hell. It's all here, and having been an insider for so long I can only imagine how alien Liberty must have felt to an observer outside the fold.
A lesser individual might have treated this as a faultfinding mission to be spun into an acerbic expos� on the backwardness of conservative Christianity. Roose chooses the higher road. Far from the minimally participative bystander, he invests his time in all of the extracurricular activities his schedule can accommodate. He befriends members of his Bible study and carries on late-night discussions with his hallmates. He goes on dates with chaste Christian girls. He joins the choir at Thomas Road Baptist Church and proselytizes spring-breakers on Floridian beaches. He even meets with a spiritual mentor once a week in which his masturbation habits tend to come up with irregular frequency. You know, normal college stuff, minus the Jesus-stuffed diet.
While Roose came mentally equipped for the fervorous religiosity, his semester away wasn't without its surprises. Like any school, one can find a diversity of views strolling the halls, and Liberty is no exception. Roose encounters several students during his time there who don't fit the mold Liberty has prepared for them: feminists, a small but closeted gay community, students who find creationism incoherent at best, who stubbornly refuse to toe the 'climate change is a global hoax' party line, who aren't militantly homophobic and don't believe same-sex attraction is morally suspect, and who sincerely question the values and political dispositions of the university's leadership. His exchanges with these nonconformists were enlightening and will be appreciated by those exploring a more progressive faith.
THE STRUCTURE OF FUNDAMENTALISM
Offensive, comical and rebarbative all at the same time, many may wonder how such a community can survive under the duress of modernity. As a former evangelical with a foot in both sides of the pond, I know the mentality well. More than anything else, institutions like Liberty are interested in the doctrinaire attachment to an ideology. Their dogma is a thinly veiled version of Christian dominionism. Any information deemed in conflict with said dogma is viscerally suppressed; inconvenient facts are pushed aside and only addressed once they become too difficult to ignore. Fundamentalist communities are so arranged as to propagate internal views at the expense of external ones. Within the propagandistic bubble, only views consistent with the dogma are given any weight. Its members are fastened, often without a weighing of alternatives, to a system that valorizes ignorance and trammels free thought. They are not aware that they are 'suckers' bred on intellectual deprivation, any more than fish are aware of the oxygen outside the fishbowl.
This basic schematic maps well to several pockets of Christian fundamentalism and churches dotting the American landscape, even if its application to today's Liberty loses some precision. Towards the end of the book, Roose learns through his continued communications with Liberty students that the school has grown a bit more lax in the ideology department following Falwell's departure. Given the extreme contrast between the late reverend's views and those of mainstream America, we can only hope this was inevitable.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Possibly the defining introspective work of our generation, Roose's sojourn turned memoir is an honest, transparent, balanced look into a cultural divide that seems more unbridgeable by the year. His stay at Liberty was attended by no shortage of disheartening revelations, including run-ins with narrow views on sexual ethics, gender and race, rampant (faculty-encouraged) homophobia, and distortions of inconvenient science, sentiments deeply rooted in American culture and for which Liberty is but an emblem. But contrary to what might be expected from its gimmicky-sounding premise, Roose doesn't spend the length of the book razzing de-intellectualized Bible-belters who max out on the Christian Richter scale. Roose stepped into the shoes of an evangelical to learn about their beliefs, values and traditions, and came away with so much more. He found that on the surface there is much that separates the evangelical community from the rest of American society, but scratch below that surface and you find a lot more commonality than polarizing media profiles would suggest.
This is easily one of the best books I've ever read, perhaps because it hits so close to home. Roose's closing words in the epilogue continue to resonate with me.
"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. Humans have always quarreled over religious beliefs, and I suppose they always will. But judging from my post-Liberty experience, this particular conflict isn't built around a hundred-foot brick wall. If anything, it's built around a flimsy piece of cardboard, held in place on both sides by paranoia and lack of exposure. It's there, no doubt, but it's hardly forbidding. And more important, it's hardly soundproof. 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." (p. 315)
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
One of my favorite memoirs!
By WestMetroMommy
This is a re-read for me--I had originally read it, on the recommendation of an Agnostic friend--back in 2009 when it was first published. This year, I suggested it for my book club as our March selection.
This book was born out of another book--My Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. In that book, Jacobs takes on a "slave" as part of his Biblical experience. The 21st century American translation for "slave" is apparently "unpaid college intern" and Kevin Roose, as freshman at Brown University, fit that bill. As part of his slave duties, Roose accompanied Jacobs on a research trip to Liberty Univeristy in Lynchburg, TN where, while waiting for Jacobs to conclude an interview or something, Roose first makes contact with "the other side."
I have to start with a very notable thing about this book: it is one of the few books that I enjoyed more the second time I read it--and, to be fair, I enjoyed it quite a bit the first time I read it. I don't know if it the 5 added years in maturity caused this, or the fact that I didn't have to cut through the initial shock factor to get to the meat of the book that caused this phenomenon. Whatever it is, I'm not complaining.
I will say that I could relate to a lot of this. I did not attend Liberty, but I did attend a school (the College of William and Mary) with a large evangelical presence. Coming from the Pacific Northwest, this was a sector of the population that I had had very little contact with until going to college. As a Christian (mainline Protestant), I had a number of things in common with these people--more than Roose did when he embarked on his experiement--but there was still a bit of a chasm between us. I am still in touch with some of my evangelical friends from school and I am glad that they were part of my college experience.
My head is still spinning from the fact that Roose was in college when he wrote this. When I was his age, I was still trying to decide on a major and here he is, writing a book. I guess that summer of slavery was good for him.
But, anyway, back to the book. I adored this book--one thing I have never been able to truly understand is the divisions within Christianity. I mean, I get that we have different ways of expressing out faith, but the idea of you have to do this and this and this to be saved is just beyond me. Last time I checked, we were saved by God's Grace (yeah, I'm a Lutheran). I think that Roose was actually quite brave to try to at least understand this divide by going into the Lion's Den of American Evangelicalism.
One thing that caught me this reading that I didn't pick up on the first time I read this book is the question of ethics. I mean, Roose is pulling off a great deception here and is pulling others--his classmates and hallmates--unknowingly into the deception with him. While this is something to think about--and it should be thought about while reading this book--I found it to be a part of the book and not a detriment to the book. Roose, himself, questions his ethics during his Liberty experience.
Roose is a very gifted writer. This could have been a comedic book or it could have been overly academic. It was neither--it was an entertaining, thought provoking account of someone who chose to learn about a foreign culture (one that was a 12 hour drive away).
I will say this: I think different readers will have different reactions to this book depending on their own views. I can see how some might find it cynical and others might find it insulting and others might find it preachy. However, I can't base my own feelings on how others might feel and, in the end, this has become on of my favorite memoirs.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An Excellent View Into An Evangelical Subculture
By Philip
I was originally hesitant in picking up this book. After all, the premise is based in a sort of deception research; representing oneself as something one is not. That said, it's one of the best amateur ethnographic works I've had the pleasure of reading. Kevin Roose is helping a professor on a project when he goes to Thomas Road Baptist Church, run by the late Jerry Falwell, and while there he speaks with three young people...or rather, he attempts to. He realizes just how big the "God Divide" can be, when it seems they're speaking separate languages. The idea begins to fester within him, and soon, this Ivy League student is on his way to one of America's strictest Evangelical universities.
Had I read this book while I was still a Baptist, I probably would have been downright offended at points, but that's because it's easy to be defensive when someone points out a negative thing. However, Roose's outside view of Evangelical life and subculture provide an interesting look that people within the movement most likely don't think of. A friend gets him ready by putting him through basic Bible boot camp and by loaning him her Veggietales DVDs. Anyone who has grown up in this generation in the Evangelical subculture automatically gets that reference and can understand how it was useful to him in preparing.
From singing in a choir, to the dilemma of what to do when you fall in love while living a lie, to having to reveal your secret after returning to Brown, this book never lets up a nonstop pace of the challenges of living within a subculture outside of one's own. It also gives those of us who are Christians an idea of how those outside the faith might see us. Tellingly, it takes Roose a while to find people who are arguing about the ACLU and when a gay friend from his secular school visits, he fits right in with the Evangelical students.
If this book were to be summed up in a single word, it would be "complexity". The students at Liberty are a diverse and complex bunch of people, no two exactly alike, and very few conforming to the stereotypes the author expected. The professors were a wide ranging group from a sarcastic Creationist who kept insisting he was a real scientist to the pastor who tried to "cure" gay students (not out of hate, Roose reflects, but out of a genuine if misplaced love and pity) with counseling. Even Jerry Falwell, Roose notes, upon the famous televangelist's death, was a complicated man; a prankster to those around him, a grandfather and father that doted, a demigod to some of the students, and a man who believed every volatile thing he was saying.
Roose finds himself sometimes longing for what his fellow students have spiritually, but in the end, he stays himself. In fact, this is one of the most poignant parts of the book, as his admission of the truth to his Liberty friends elicits heartbreak from many that he isn't Saved. But otherwise, they treat him no differently, because he's still "Rooster" and their friend. If you want a good look at what it's like to live within America's Evangelical Subculture, then this book is well worth the price.
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