CARNAL NATION

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University
By Kevin Roose
Grand Central Publishing
$24.99, 336 pp.

“I wouldn't go to any of those schools. Yale, Harvard, Princeton. No way. I heard they have naked parties there. Lots of sinful behavior. And you can't go there without accepting their point of view.” - Liberty “University” student. (50)

Inspired by a research trip to Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church, Brown University sophomore Kevin Roose, raised a liberal Quaker, decided he wanted to know what it was like to live in the world of the fundamentalist Christian. Rather than do his research from the outside, Roose took the extreme measure of going undercover and transferred to Liberty University for a semester. He lived in the dorm, attended the classes, and immersed himself in the student subculture. His research trip takes place in the Spring semester of 2007, and he was there during the shootings at Virginia Tech, and there for the death of Falwell himself. Roose even managed to finagle a one-on-one interview with Falwell for the school paper, just a handful of days before Falwell's fatal heart attack. The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University is his story of that semester.

When Chris Hall first asked me to review Unlikely Disciple for Carnal Nation, I was ecstatic. I'd heard about it and read a few short reviews before then, and was anxious to read it myself. I never suspected that by page fifty I'd be slogging to the bathroom with the dry heaves every few pages, wishing I'd never heard of this book. Roose's account has given me just a glimpse of what trigger warnings are all about.

Roose documents campus life at Liberty well, including all the little details and nuances that are important to gaining insight into the mindset of the institution and its student population. Liberty looks on its surface like any university: academic-looking buildings set in a little neighborhood of town, students hustling to and from class, dorms, cafeteria, all the things you'd expect to see at a university. But what lies beneath this mask of academia is a bizarre mix of authentic American culture and an insidious counterfeit. Students date, but are not permitted to kiss (or even hug for more than three seconds). They have email and Facebook accounts, but they are strictly monitored by the administration. There is an orientation class, but it is mostly about bashing abortion and homosexual people. There is an evolution class for biology majors, but its premise is that science is wrong. Roose quickly learns to quarantine his life at Liberty, carving out a separate space for it lest he blow his cover. While that compartment learns to walk, talk, and think like the people around him, the rest of his brain looks on in curious fascination.

Throughout the semester, Roose predictably learns that the Bible is literally true in every word, that the earth is only 6,000 years old, that America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles, that abortion is murder and Margaret Sanger promoted eugenics. But more insightful than the pretend facts taught to students at Liberty are the underlying attitudes on which those falsehoods are taught. Especially in regards to sex and sexuality, there is a sub-current of fear, used to extort obedience and conformity. Sex is a nuclear reactor, and sex outside of heterosexual monogamous marriage is a meltdown. “Think about your wedding night, guys. Do you want to know that you're going to be killing your wife by not knowing you're carrying an incurable STD?! You don't ever want to go down that way!” one dean shouts at the student body during a Valentine's Day convocation. There is, of course, the “We Can Fix Your Gayness” program at Liberty, but there is also the “We Can Stop Your Masturbation” program. Liberty has the predictable and stereotypical obsession with people's sex lives.