An entertaining read about a Brown student's year at America's holiest college
When Brown University sophomore Kevin Roose hears his friends talking about spending semesters overseas and immersing themselves in foreign cultures, he begins to cultivate an idea of his own. Roose finds out that he doesn’t need to leave the country to find a culture completely foreign to the one he knows. In fact, he discovers, as he says, he doesn’t even need to leave his own zip code. Roose decides to spend a semester of his college experience immersed in a culture he knows almost nothing about: modern American Christianity. For his cultural immersion, he chooses what is arguably America’s most famous Christian university: Liberty.
Roose was raised in a Quaker household that he calls “practically religion-free,” and admits a certain ambivalence about his parents’ religion. As such, Liberty is a far cry from what he was used to. The school was lightly called “Bible Boot Camp” by its founder, Jerry Falwell, and was designed as a place where young Christians could obtain the benefits of higher education without all of the temptations present at most universities. Roose decides to leave his liberal home at Brown in exchange for a semester at the heart of the American Christian experience.
Suffice to say, Roose’s idea of cultural immersion does not go so well with everyone he knows. He receives more than one warning about the possible influence the semester might have on his own philosophy. He also receives a very tangible reality check in the form of the school’s 46-page code of conduct: “The Liberty Way.” This document outlines the appropriate and inappropriate behaviors for Liberty students, as well as the consequences for those behaviors. Roose, considering the weighty list, decides that taming his tongue may be the toughest part of his experience. In fact, early on he invests in a Christian self-help book for just this problem. For Roose to really understand the Liberty experience, he feels he needs to be a part of it. He decides that the only way to really get this experience is to convince his new peers at Liberty that he is one of them. Roose certainly has some anxiety about misleading the people he hopes to get to know, but he also wisely understands that doing so is the only way in which he can really know them. That being the case, he decides to jump in from the start. he joins the choir at Falwell’s home church, attends small groups in his dorms and even takes up prayer.
The most remarkable thing about this whole experiment is that Roose never reduces it to satire or mocking. Instead, he spends a semester doing his best to keep an open mind and to really understand the people he comes to know. In the face of racism, strictly limited behavior and what he considers very strong homophobia, Roose makes a genuine attempt to get to know the people underneath the beliefs. It’s this honesty that really makes the book shine. It is thoroughly interesting to watch as Roose learns that the students at Liberty are not nearly as simple as he would have thought. He discovers that his friends at Liberty aren’t really so different from his friends at Brown, and that they really do care about him. During this time, he struggles with his own beliefs and biases about God and religion—and discovers that he’s not alone. “The secret about a place like Liberty,” Roose says is this, “everyone doubts.”
Roose also takes some of his time at Liberty to try and understand Falwell. While he takes issues with many of Falwell’s views, he takes a front seat at his church every week (in his choir robe) to try and understand him a little better. What’s more, Roose secures one of the very last interviews with Falwell before his death—an interview that reveals a little bit about Falwell as a man, not just a public figure.
All of this adds up to a truly engaging read. It was very hard to put down Roose’s narrative. Reading as he chronicles his internal and external struggles with fitting in at Liberty is like being invited into a very private conversation. It doesn’t hurt that the writing skill on display easily outstrips his age and experience level. It is a picture of American Christianity painted by an outsider in the rarest of ways, with honesty, care and openness. For a while after its publication, The Unlikely Disciple was banned from Liberty’s bookstore. That decision has since been reversed by an advisory committee, though they did so with a small disclaimer above the display. All in all, I think this is a wonderful decision. While Kevin Roose may not have agreed with everything about Liberty (or its founder), his book goes a long way toward humanizing them and reminding people that Christians are as varied and individual as everyone else.
