Undercover with the Evangelicals

Imagine this book: a student from an Ivy League institution goes undercover and spends a semester at a Jewish university to study the Jewish students there.

Imagine another book: a student from an Ivy League institution goes undercover at an Islamist university to study the Muslim students there.

Don't sound plausible do they? In my mind it even seems, well, kind of racist. Well, that's exactly what happened but at an evangelical Christian university (Liberty).

Taking a semester off to travel and focus on writing isn't that unusual for a student at Brown University. But instead of studying comparative literature in Europe, Kevin Roose decided to go to Lynchburg, Va., and enroll at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

I'm must admit my feelings on this subject are torn. In one sense, I feel like evangelicals are one of the few religious groups that it's socially "okay" to mock (this being an example of a chance to peek in on the "weird religious people"). But, I also have to applaud some of the results of his work. According to the article, Roose left Liberty with a much better understanding of evangelical Christians:

"My goal was to see the real, unfiltered picture of life at Liberty University," he says. Even though his method required deception, Roose says the intent was honest. It "really did allow me to get a more accurate — and actually a fairer picture — of what life at Liberty was like."

Two things I think are key to remember in response to this:

(1) Liberty University may get the most press of an evangelical university, but Liberty University does not represent Evangelicals anymore than Andrea Dworkin represents all feminists. Or, to state it in a more extreme case, anymore than Ayatollah Khomeini represents all Muslims.

(2) The student's thesis, despite how he went about answering it, was spot on.

Roose, the product of the "ultimate, secular, liberal upbringing," got the idea to go undercover after meeting a group of Liberty students while a freshman at Brown. "I had never really come into contact with conservative Christian culture," he says. "It became clear very quickly that we had almost no way to communicate with each other."

I can speak to this from times I've had friends who are evangelical Christians out with those who are not. Sometimes there really is a language boundary. And in the past it's led to a lot of misunderstanding. Let's hope this book doesn't bring more of the same.