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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.
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Average Customer Rating:   Refreshingly open-minded It was refreshing to read this beautifully written account of a student experiencing a year in a polar opposite campus in which he was open-minded. These days so many people rush to demonize the different, and make fun of the stereotype, but Kevin Roose took care to listen to and understand his fellow students at Liberty University setting us all a good example. informative, entertaining, and well written This non-fiction book is worth reading. It offers skilled writing, plenty of history, facts and concepts. Amusing at times, I even found myself laughing out loud. This young author is not pushing an agenda. His journalistic approach offers a well balanced view. The Other Side of the Story The author's reasoning is understandable but I do not condone his lies and deception in writing this book because the end never justifies the means.
I, too, attended Liberty University both as a skeptic and a naysayer ... but later I returned as a person committed to Jesus Christ. As a result, I can attest to the vast differences in my own experiences because they were completely dependent upon my worldview at each individual time. For example, the people I hung with were different, the sermons I listened to were different, my feelings toward the rules were different and the amount of good and evil I saw or experienced was very different.
I believe Kevin has capabilities as a writer but my prayer is that he will allow his heart to be captured by Jesus Christ and then write the other side of the story. By the grace of God, he succeeds. Kevin Roose was your typical Brown University sophomore. He studied, he partied, he protested, and he sang in an a cappella group. His social circle included atheists, Buddhists, Wiccans and non-practicing Jews, but no born-again Christians. And then, one weekend, Roose met a couple of students who went to Liberty:
"I wasn't sure whether `go to Liberty' was some sort of coded religious language, like `walk the path' or `seek the kingdom,' so I asked. I had to chuckle when they told me that `Liberty' meant Liberty University, a Christian liberal arts college founded and presided over by Rev. Falwell."
Quick reminder: Rev. Jerry Falwell is the guy who organized the Moral Majority in the 1970s, outed Tinky Winky in the 1990s and blamed the September 11 terrorist attacks on gays and feminists on September 13, 2001. Despite controversial comments like these (or perhaps because of them), Falwell's college, Liberty University, has grown from 154 students to nearly 25,000 over the past four decades.
After meeting with the Liberty students and talking about Rev. Falwell, Roose resolved to see what all the fuss was about. Over objections from his ultra-liberal extended family, he enrolled at Liberty, spent a full semester there and wrote about it in his new book, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University.
Liberty University sticks Roose in a dorm room with an older, homophobic student named Eric (i.e., "I'm telling you, if a queer touched me, I would do what Samson did to the Philistines. Or what David did to Goliath. I would beat him with a baseball bat."). Trouble comes when Eric decides that Roose is gay (i.e., "Put some clothes on, faggot.").
Luckily for Roose, Eric is the exception; most of the guys at Liberty ("there are lots of Lukes, Matthews and Pauls") are nonjudgmental and more like the rest of us than you'd think (i.e., "Dude, Joey, tell me you didn't have the biggest boner when you saw Topanga on [Boy Meets World].").
And then there are the girls. "While Liberty isn't a sexual place in the same way most college campuses are," Roose explains, "it's certainly sexualized. Liberty girls might be virgins, and they might not wear two-piece bathing suits to the pool, but they do wear thigh-hugging jeans, clingy blouses and dresses that leave some, but not all, to the imagination."
Early on, Roose meets a fellow thought-criminal named Anna, who, like the author, has reservations about the school. "Liberty is a pretty ironic name for this place," she comments. This romantic subplot is taken out of George Orwell's 1984 playbook; just as Winston Smith meets Julia at a Two Minutes of Hate rally, Roose meets Anna at a Friday-night Bible-study group. And like Winston and Julia, Roose and Anna bond over their normalness and their humanity.
But Roose and Anna have to keep their emotions in check; at Liberty University, intercourse, oral sex, rubbing, kissing and prolonged hugging are strictly forbidden. If Roose and Anna were to stare at each other for too long, they might be accused of having "optical intercourse."
While Roose and Anna aren't "making eye babies"--another term for staring--the author joins a Masturbators Anonymous group, learns to evangelize like Kirk Cameron and attends a Christian hip-hop performance (i.e., "Tryin' to find purpose in life without Christ/Is like findin' Wesley Snipes in the dark with no flashlight.").
Roose's open-mindedness and writing style resemble those of his literary mentor, A.J. Jacobs. If you've read either of Jacobs' books (The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically), you know this isn't a bad thing; it just means that Roose breezily combines high culture with low, integrates scholarly information into real-world situations and learns a couple of lessons along the way.
Roose succeeds by keeping the stakes grounded. He's a college student, so he writes about college. He doesn't try to unlock the mysteries of evangelical Christianity, just evangelical Christianity at the collegiate level. And by the grace of God, he succeeds.
Oh, and one last thing: The book has an incredible ending. A True Eye-Opener! I've been wanting to read this book for awhile, ever since I saw the author on, I think, The Today Show. As an evangelical, right-winged Christian, I was curious as to how his exposure to Liberty would come about. First, I wondered if he would leave Liberty with a changed heart towards Christ. Second, I wondered about how an outsider would see evangelical Christians. Third, I wondered what I could learn from this book.
Well, all of my expectations were met. I felt like this book can be a real eye-opener to Christians and the mistakes we often make. The way we act can come across too judgemental. It's also important for Christians to realize just how much non-believers see. Our actions are closely being monitored by others. And in order to make impressions on others with our beliefs, we need to be careful in what we say and do.
The author did a great job going undercover and pointing out some of Christians biggest mistakes. And although I hoped for him to change his viewpoint at the end, I do appreciate his honesty. Thanks for a great book, Kevin!
I plan to give copies of this out at Christmas and to share this book with believers and non-believers alike! |  |
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