The Unlikely Disciple Part 7

"Guys, if you hear about any, you know, h.o.m.os.e.xuality h.o.m.os.e.xuality in the dorm, let me know. I don't want anyone to get a crush on me, you know?" in the dorm, let me know. I don't want anyone to get a crush on me, you know?"

I chuckle. Henry does not. He slams his pen down on his desk and looks first at me, then at Eric.

"Don't even talk like that," he barks. "I hate f.a.ggots. If something like that happened to me, I would do something about it. I would snap somebody's neck."

"I mean, it must happen," says Eric, not missing a beat. "They're everywhere. Like, my college friends who went to Christian schools, they talk about how guys have . . . tendencies. Like, this one friend saw a guy wearing a Speedo out on the beach . . ."

"I don't want to hear any more," says Henry. "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."

Eric winces. "Wouldn't it be terrible to be a gay guy's roommate and not know it? Ugh. I'd have to go into therapy after that."

He looks at me for a sympathetic response, but I can't do it. I sit there, trying not to gape, feeling my breath shorten and my toes curl inside my shoes. Unsure how to respond, I stand up and leave the room, mumbling something about being late to a meeting. I walk briskly out of the dorm and into the parking lot, where I sit on a curb, breathing hard, trying to keep it together.

What's sad is that this isn't even the first time this week I've been stunned by overt h.o.m.ophobia in Dorm 22. On Monday, during a conversation with Zipper, my ecstatically happy next-door neighbor, he told me that he respected Dr. Falwell for standing up for the biblical view that "while legally, we cannot throw h.o.m.os.e.xuals in jail, we shouldn't tolerate them." On instinct, I asked if in an ideal society, h.o.m.os.e.xuals would be thrown in jail.

"Hmm . . . Well, I do believe in the Old Testament," he said. "And in the Old Testament, they were supposed to be killed. And, I mean, we obviously don't have the same type of system that the Israelites had. But if you look at how G.o.d initiated judgment on these people, well, in the ideal society, which is Christ's society, they would be eliminated from the earth."

That time, I managed to shake it off. Zipper doesn't have a malicious bone in his body, and it's possible that he's just too socially insulated to realize the real-world effects of his views. But twice in one week is too much for me. I walk around campus all night trying to decompress.

More than anything, I'm mad at myself. I've been so eager to make my time at Liberty tolerable that I've been sweeping all kinds of dirt under the rug. h.o.m.ophobia? Nah, they're just a little behind the times. Using religion to justify violence? Nope, not since the Crusades. But tonight, sitting there at my desk as my roommates reenacted The Laramie Project The Laramie Project, I realized how naive I was. My aunt Tina was right: this stuff does exist, and it does hurt people, and although there are lots of people at Liberty who condemn violence against gays--including Dr. Falwell himself--the number of students who want to give them the Goliath treatment isn't zero. In fact, the number who live in my room isn't zero.

All semester, I've struggled to balance the dominant personality traits of the Liberty students I've met. On one hand, there are scads of compa.s.sionate, gentle-spirited people to be found here--the kind you wouldn't think twice about hiring as a babysitter or a camp counselor. On the other hand, these same people can turn around and floor me with their sociopolitical views.

Here's what worries me the most: I came to Liberty to humanize people. Because humanizing people is good, right? But what about people with reprehensible views? Do they deserve to be humanized? By giving Jerry Falwell's moral universe a fair look, am I putting myself in his shoes? Or am I really just validating his worldview? What's the difference between what I'm doing and certain Iranian presidents who want to "do more research" into the Holocaust? Where's the limit to open-mindedness?

I ask myself these questions and more for hours, and when I calm down, I reach this conclusion: humanizing is not the same as sympathizing. You can peel a stereotype off a person and not see a beautiful human being underneath. In fact, humanity can be very ugly.

In my case, I don't know if I can act toward Eric and Henry as if I agree with what went down tonight. And now, for the first time all semester, I'm worried about what happens if they find out who I am. I've been a.s.suming that it would just be a matter of awkwardness, but maybe I should be afraid for my safety.

Two days later, I'm still in a funk about my roommates' gay-bas.h.i.+ng. I can't pay attention in my cla.s.ses. Whatever spiritual momentum I built up over the past few weeks has gone down the drain. I haven't been able to look Henry or Eric in the eye. I feel like I did during orientation week--anxious, out of place, aloof.

To cheer myself up, I call Anna, the girl from Bible study. Anna and I have gone out four or five times since our first date, and we've become a semiofficial item. We haven't had the conversation that, in Christian circles, is called the DTR, for "Defining the Relations.h.i.+p," but it's pretty clear where we stand. We've stuck mainly to the half-dozen coffee shops in the greater Lynchburg area, and we haven't so much as held hands, but we do spend a fair amount of time flirting. Last time we were out, when I spilled coffee all over the table, she laughed and called me a r.e.t.a.r.d, then corrected herself. "I mean, a cute r.e.t.a.r.d."

This week, I've started to get myself into trouble with Anna. Here's the problem: I really like her. I can't help it. She's bright and witty, a rare pract.i.tioner of the kind of humor that's used not to hide personal insecurities but to bring joy to the people around her. She has this other side, too--the deeply spiritual, insatiably curious side--and when she gets into that mood, her eyes fill with a childlike wonder that makes me wish I saw the world the way she does. She's the kind of girl who zones out during your conversation at Starbucks and interrupts you five minutes later, during one of your funniest and best-rehea.r.s.ed stories, to say, with a huge smile on her face, "You know, I really like the shape of the lights here."

Anna's not a rebel, but she's not ultra-pious either, and when I'm around her, it feels natural to let my guard down. So tonight, when we're sitting in the Drowsy Poet Cafe drinking milk shakes and she asks me what I plan to do after college, I tell her reflexively that I want to be a writer.

"What kind of writer?" she asks. "Like a journalist?"

"Yeah."

I wasn't supposed to tell Anna anything about writing, of course. I was supposed to say that I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, or that I was studying religion with an eye toward grad school. That's what I've been telling everyone else. But I was so comfortable, it just slipped out.

"You know," she says, "when we first went out, I thought you were writing a story about me."

My eyes widen, and a string of unbiblical language rockets through my brain. Jesus. Am I really this transparent?

"Why . . . did you think that?" I ask.

"You asked all these weird questions! How were my parents' rules growing up? How did it feel to go from a small Christian high school to a huge Christian university? I was like, is he recording this?"

Eventually, I manage to laugh it off and veer into another topic, but Anna's words haunt me all night. I drop her off at her dorm, park my car in the lot in front of Dorm 22, and head back inside. On the way across the parking lot, my heart sinks, my head drops, my steps get slow and heavy, and I feel my eyes start to tear up.

When I came to Liberty, I thought my biggest moral quandaries were going to revolve around people who rubbed me the wrong way. I never expected to find Liberty students I liked too too much. But I'm starting to care about some of the people I've met here, and it's taking a toll on my conscience. Hiding a huge part of my life from my roommate Henry is no skin off my back, but with my favorite Liberty students--Anna, Paul, Jersey Joey--I'm finding it hard to keep secrets. much. But I'm starting to care about some of the people I've met here, and it's taking a toll on my conscience. Hiding a huge part of my life from my roommate Henry is no skin off my back, but with my favorite Liberty students--Anna, Paul, Jersey Joey--I'm finding it hard to keep secrets.

Graham Greene, the great Catholic novelist, talked about a "sliver of ice" that sits in every writer's heart, allowing him to stay emotionally detached from the subjects of his work. And maybe it means I shouldn't have taken up this project in the first place, but I don't know if I can find that ice. Every time I go out with Anna, I ask myself: Do I really want to get closer to her? Isn't that just going to make things worse when I leave? Last night, when I sat down to write a few paragraphs about Jersey Joey, I heard him in my head, saying to me at the end of all this, "Rooster, you were lying to us?"

The idea that undergirds my whole semester at Liberty has always been the possibility that I could belong to two worlds at once. But tonight, I don't feel like I belong to either. I can't be completely open with the people I meet here, no matter how well we get along. And the next time I call home, I certainly can't tell my parents that I'm falling for an evangelical girl. Each world is getting a partial story.

Later tonight, Anna calls me, presumably to set up another coffee date. But I can't bring myself to pick up. I let it ring until it goes to voicemail, and then I climb into my bed, pull the sheets up to my neck, and stare at two leftover dots of sticky tack on my ceiling for an hour and a half until, finally, I fall asleep.

Troubled on Every Side, Yet Not Distressed

It's the beginning of March, and Liberty University is at war.

The enemy is a Philadelphia-based group of atheists called the Rational Response Squad. A few months ago, the RRS issued a rallying cry to young secular humanists around the world: videotape yourself denying the existence of G.o.d, and post the video on YouTube. They called this the Blasphemy Challenge. The first 1,001 people who answered the challenge, they said, would receive a free DVD of an atheist doc.u.mentary, and the rest would get the satisfaction of having spoken out against the tyranny of theism. It proved a tempting offer. Over eight hundred atheists, many of them college age or younger, have uploaded their ant.i.testimonies so far. The Rational Response Squad's ma.s.s blasphemy efforts have captured the attention of the mainstream press, the nation's religious leaders, and most recently, the student body here at Liberty.

This isn't the first time organized atheism has punctured the Liberty bubble. Last fall, the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The G.o.d Delusion The G.o.d Delusion and agitator in chief of the New Atheism movement, lambasted Liberty's science program on C-SPAN for teaching young-earth creationism, calling it "an educational disgrace" and urging Liberty students to "leave and go to a proper university." and agitator in chief of the New Atheism movement, lambasted Liberty's science program on C-SPAN for teaching young-earth creationism, calling it "an educational disgrace" and urging Liberty students to "leave and go to a proper university."

That was bad enough, but now, the Blasphemy Challenge is taking the anti-G.o.d struggle to the gra.s.sroots. All over Liberty's campus, ideological panic is breaking out. Facebook groups are popping up: "Christians Against the Blasphemy Challenge," "Challenge Blasphemy," "The Holy Spirit is using my soul, therefore I cannot take the Challenge." Students are asking each other, What do we do? How do we respond? What do we do? How do we respond?

Enter Dr. Ergun Caner. Dr. Caner, one of Liberty's star preacher-professors, is a thirty-nine-year-old Turkish man with the barrel-chested frame, shaved head, and long pointed goatee of a professional wrestler. He preaches at the Wednesday night Campus Church services, and his edgy, humor-laden sermons have made him a beloved campus figure. Earlier this semester, some of Dr. Caner's students began e-mailing him articles about the Blasphemy Challenge. When he investigated, he became concerned--not because atheists were coming out of the woodwork, but because Liberty students were responding to those atheists in the worst possible way: by posting emotional counterarguments on YouTube and shouting down nonbelievers on Internet message boards.

At last Wednesday night's Campus Church, Dr. Caner explained his frustration with Christian reactionaries.

"We're not doing any good by just saying that that we believe," he said. "We need to explain we believe," he said. "We need to explain why why we believe! Why we can prove G.o.d existed, that Jesus Christ was a real man and the son of G.o.d, why he died and was resurrected. We can prove all of this, but we're not doing it." we believe! Why we can prove G.o.d existed, that Jesus Christ was a real man and the son of G.o.d, why he died and was resurrected. We can prove all of this, but we're not doing it."

Dr. Caner took matters into his own hands, challenging the Rational Response Squad's top apologists to a debate about the existence of G.o.d. Proving Christianity's truth claims is the best way to subdue the spread of atheism, he said, not yelling and arguing.

"A guy a long time ago named Kierkegaard said that we just can't know about things of faith, we have to take a leap. But Christianity is not a leap. According to the Bible, our faith is hooked to the rational coherence and the veracity of the one named Jesus, who was who he said he was, did what he said he did, lived a virgin-born, sinless life with miraculous works, had a literal, vicarious death, a literal burial, and a literal, bodily, visceral resurrection.

"You, who are believers in Jesus Christ, do you want to know what the secular world believes about you? They think what you believe is great! But you can't prove it! When the secular mind doesn't believe you, it's because they've made a gap between faith and knowledge, faith and reason, faith and logic. And it is a gap that we're about to bridge."

Word came back quickly from the Rational Response Squad--they accepted Dr. Caner's challenge. Next week, Dr. Caner will debate three members of the squad on their weekly radio show. Immediately after the announcement, I got a barrage of ma.s.s e-mails like this one: "We're gathering together outside of the bookstore to pray for Dr. Caner's success in the atheist debate. Please join us!"

Tonight, a group of my hallmates are discussing the debate over dinner.

"This is so exciting, man," says Marco. "Think about it. What other school would challenge a bunch of atheists?"

"I don't know," says Luke, a tall, good-looking biology major who lives down the hall. "Do you think we need to be out there proving Christianity?"

"Why not?" Marco asks. "You heard what Caner said. It's about loving G.o.d with your mind."

"Yeah, but people don't come to faith in Christ because of logic. They come because they have an open heart. To me, debating atheists kind of feels fruitless. Like, if their hearts are that hardened, it might take more than rational proof to convince them."

I don't really know what to think about the atheism debate. On one level, I guess it will be exciting to watch an explosive Christian apologist go mano a mano with a group of mockers and scorners. But I'm skeptical about Dr. Caner's ability to win this one, mostly because, well, isn't this sort of an old battle? In Theology cla.s.s, we've been reading about theologians going all the way back to Thomas Aquinas who have agreed with Kierkegaard in saying that while logic can get you most of the way to faith in G.o.d, it can't cross the bridge completely. Charles Spurgeon, the legendary nineteenth-century Prince of Preachers and a man whose work Dr. Caner quotes regularly, warned Christians against "perpetually demanding arguments and logical demonstrations" for their faith. Even C. S. Lewis separated faith into two steps, Faith A and Faith B--Faith A being a general intellectual a.s.sent to the existence of a higher being and Faith B being an orthodox belief in the specific G.o.d of the Bible. Faith A, Lewis said, can be proven logically, but Faith B requires a leap.

All this is to say: I'm not sure Dr. Caner has much help from history. But who knows? Maybe trying to prove the Christian faith isn't an intellectual suicide mission.

A few hours after dinner, I sit down with Marco in his room. He's eating a bowl of Easy Mac while browsing rationalresponders.com, looking through some of the squad's articles, with t.i.tles like "The Irrationality of Theism" and "G.o.d: The Failed Hypothesis."

"I think this is the weakest part of my Christianity," he says, looking up at me with a spoonful of orange sludge in hand. "I honestly wouldn't know how to respond to an atheist with anything rational. But I really like the fact that Caner is debating them."

His eyes wander back down to the screen.

"I'm just glad it's not me in there," he says. "That's all I can say."

Later that night, I head to room 201 to hang out with Jersey Joey and his gang of rebels. Three of them--Travis, Alex, and Joey--are huddled around Joey's laptop, browsing the Facebook photos of the girls they know.

"Ooh, Sandra has a booty," says Alex. "Look at it! You could use that thing as a table!"

"Yeah, but she's got no b.o.o.bs," says Travis.

"True," says Joey. "She's on the itty-bitty t.i.tty committee."

They click through a dozen-odd photos, subjecting each of the girls to a brutally honest critique: "Emily has a fish face. She looks like a grouper."

"Leslie is so pretty it's not even funny. That's wifey material right there."

"Ooh, she looks like Sofia Coppola, but sort of r.e.t.a.r.ded."

"This girl's got a pretty nice rack."

I've been spending a lot of time in room 201 this week, and I'm finding that it's a great place to be. For one, when I'm hanging out with Joey and his friends, I can jettison my ultra-pious Christian persona. I don't have to pepper my conversations with phrases like "Lord willing" or "Praise be to G.o.d." I can let loose with a "d.a.m.n" or a "h.e.l.l" once in a while, and no one blinks. In fact, a bit of cursing is probably good for my rebel image.

But the bigger reason for spending time in room 201 is that by hanging out with Dorm 22's outliers, I'm seeing sides of Liberty I never would have seen otherwise.

For example, I've learned that Jersey Joey is a Democrat. Over the past few weeks, Joey and I have had some long, involved discussions--mostly late at night, mostly while playing video games--and in these talks, he's told me that his mom and dad, a nurse and a union electrician respectively, raised him as a political moderate. They're churchgoing Christians, and Joey went to a small Christian academy for high school, but he never bought into the extreme right-wing politics. Joey's time at Liberty has made him slightly more conservative--he's now convinced that abortion is wrong--but he refers to The 700 Club The 700 Club's Pat Robertson as a "first-cla.s.s nut job," and although he's still a virgin, he doesn't think premarital s.e.x is necessarily sinful. He's also lukewarm on Dr. Falwell--"I mean, I can appreciate what the guy has done," he says, "but I don't agree with most of the things he says."

Joey's ideological rebellion surprised me, but not nearly as much as what I learned about his roommate Travis, a lumberjack-looking guy with freckles and red hair who hails from nearby Mana.s.sas. Namely, Travis isn't even an evangelical Christian.

I first learned this on Tuesday, when Joey offhandedly mentioned that his prayer group had spent ten minutes praying for Travis.

"Why?" I asked. "Is something wrong with him?"

Joey looked at me in astonishment. "You don't know about Travis?"

"No," I said. "What happened?"

"He's not saved."

"What?"

"Yeah, dude. Travis is unsaved. I can't believe you didn't know."

Joey proceeded to tell me that there are several tiny pockets of non-Christians at Liberty (and by "non-Christians," of course, he means "non-evangelicals"). One is composed of varsity athletes who came to Liberty on sports scholars.h.i.+ps, either not realizing or not caring that Liberty was an evangelical school. Another is a group of international students, predominantly Buddhists from Asia, whose parents wanted them in a school with conservative social rules and were willing to ignore the religious discrepancy. Then there are people who came to Liberty because it was a decent, affordable school close to home. Travis originally came to Liberty for reasons one and three--he wanted to play football, and he lives an hour or so from campus. He got cut from the team during his freshman year, but he decided to stay at Liberty, even though his beliefs didn't match up with the school's doctrinal statement.

Later that night, when Travis walked into his room, I asked him about his lack of faith.

"I didn't know you weren't a Christian," I said.

Travis smiled. "Most people don't figure it out for a while. If you're a Liberty student, people just sort of a.s.sume you are."

He explained that although he believes in G.o.d, he hasn't felt the need to accept Christ as his savior, in part because his rebel friends, who are all Christians, don't act any differently because of their faith. "If I become a Christian, I'm going to change," he says. "I'm going to stop cursing, stop drinking on the weekends, stop looking at girls the way I do. And I'm not ready for that yet. Maybe somewhere down the road, but not now."

When I ask Travis if he ever gets hara.s.sed for being a non-evangelical, he said, "When I first got here, it would come up, and people would be like, 'Oh my gos.h.!.+' It was a big deal. But now that I've been here, and people know me, I think they just feel bad. They always try to get me to accept Jesus, and when I don't, they feel like they've failed."

Surprisingly, even though Travis doesn't consider himself a believer, he likes being a Liberty student. In fact, that's the amazing thing about the entire room 201 gang: they love Liberty. None of them were forced to come by their parents, and none are itching to leave. They all chose Liberty over less-strict schools, in part because of the structure it gives them.

"Other than the curfew and the rules about girls, Liberty is perfect for me," said Joey. "It's nice and stable, and you don't have to worry about anything."

Even Marco, who almost left Liberty after his first semester, was enticed to stay. "Once you leave," he said, "you get a little bit of freedom, and then you realize that you want to come back. You want that focus."

Another interesting thing about Joey and his friends is that they seem to have a sort of rebel radar--that is, they're good at sniffing out other Liberty students who don't quite fit the mainstream. I think this is why they've let me hang out with them. When I'm in Room 201, I act like the old-model Kevin, and even though I haven't told them everything about my past, I think they sense that something is different about me, that I'm somehow struggling with Liberty's orthodoxy.

Tonight, before we go to bed, Joey turns to me.

"Rooster, leave the room for a minute."

"Why?"

"Just leave the room. We need to talk about something."

What's going on? Did I do something wrong? Am I being exiled?

I walk outside and close the door, pressing my ear against the keyhole to hear what's going on inside. From behind the door comes quiet, mischievous giggling. Then, Joey yells, "Okay, come in!"

Slowly, warily, I open the door.

"Rooooooose!" They're all screaming my name, and they rush over to me. Joey grabs my arm, drags me over to his bed, and wrestles me down. I try to resist, but it's no use. When my shoulders are pinned to the ground, I open my eyes and see three guys staring at me, smiling nefariously. They're all screaming my name, and they rush over to me. Joey grabs my arm, drags me over to his bed, and wrestles me down. I try to resist, but it's no use. When my shoulders are pinned to the ground, I open my eyes and see three guys staring at me, smiling nefariously.

"Rooster, welcome to room 201," says Joey. "We're making you an official member."

"Yeah," says Alex. "But first, you gotta get dry humped."

And so, for the next thirty seconds, the rebels of Dorm 22 give me a dry-humping initiation, their version of a peace pipe. They're really thrusting, frankly, and it would be sort of painful if everyone weren't laughing so hard. When they've had enough, they roll off of me, wiping the tears from their eyes.

"You're cool with us, Rooster," says Joey. "Ya big queer."

A few minutes after curfew on Thursday night, Paul Maddox storms into my room.

"Man, this p.i.s.ses me off. He can't go two days without saying something."

"Who?" I ask.