The Unlikely Disciple Part 17

All in all, this lunch is pretty standard fare for the room 201 guys. The only bizarre element is Jersey Joey, who sits quietly at the table, eating his cheeseburger, saying nothing the whole time.

After lunch, I go to Joey's room to check on him.

"Hey, man, is everything okay?"

He's sitting at his desk, staring at the wall, looking a little sh.e.l.l-shocked.

"Rooster, do you think I'm a douchebag?" he says.

I laugh.

"No, I'm serious, do you think I'm a douchebag?"

"No," I say. "But why?"

Joey explains that earlier this week, after a conversation with his friend Rodrigo, he got inspired to read Ecclesiastes, one of the Bible's wisdom books. Joey almost never reads the Bible on his own, but when he started Ecclesiastes, he couldn't stop. He finished the book in one night.

"It really opened my eyes," he says.

Ecclesiastes isn't a particularly fire-and-brimstone-heavy book, but Joey felt convicted when he read verses like "As dead flies give perfume a bad smell, so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor." After finis.h.i.+ng the last page, he began to wonder if his rebellious streak was damaging his relations.h.i.+p with G.o.d.

It didn't help that the next day, while Ecclesiastes was still fresh in his mind, one of Joey's female friends called him a douchebag.

"At first, I was like, 'whatever, screw her.' But then, I started to wonder if I should take the c.o.c.ky stuff down a notch. Maybe I should. I don't want to get a reputation, you know?"

Another reason Joey is considering changing his ways is because Travis, his roommate, still hasn't become an evangelical Christian. Joey thinks that if he can reform in front of Travis's eyes, perhaps it will help convince him that Christianity is worth his faith.

"I mean, you never know," he says. "I should be a good example for him."

As for what being a good example means, he's not so sure. Yesterday, when one of his friends invited him on a cigar-smoking trip, Joey turned him down. He's going to keep reading the Bible and praying for guidance, and he's going to try to stay away from temptation when he goes home to Hoboken.

"There's this girl at home," he says. "We made out a little over spring break, and she's been texting me, like, 'Oh, Joey, I can't wait to hook up with you this summer.' I think she's going to try to have s.e.x with me. She's smokin' hot, Rooster. Beautiful, beautiful girl. But I know I shouldn't."

Of all the people I expected to have a moral awakening this semester, Joey was at the bottom of the list. Liberty does this to you, though. It tempts you with the constant possibility of personal realignment. Joey can refas.h.i.+on himself as a Champion for Christ, and everyone will applaud him for it. And if that applause is loud enough to drown out the voice in his head telling him to stick to his guns, it might be enough to convince him that he made the right decision.

Frankly, it's a little weird to hear Joey talking about piety and moral self-control. I love the guy, and I'll support him no matter what, but I hope one Bible-reading session didn't turn him into my next-door neighbor Zipper.

"So you're really turning your life around?" I ask.

"I guess," he says, looking down at the floor.

"Are you happy about it?"

"I mean, I should be happy about it. It's the way G.o.d wants me to do things."

"You think it'll stick?"

"It might be hard to keep this up over the summer, especially because I won't be around Christians. My friends from home won't want to hang out with some pious Liberty kid."

Joey winces, suddenly realizing everything he's going to have to leave behind if he wants to stage this moral makeover. He'll have to be careful around his friends. He'll have to give up drinking. He won't be able to go out to hookah bars, his favorite activity back home. He'll have to stop cursing, and he'll have to keep holding on to his virginity for dear life.

"Rooster," he says. "This is gonna be a b.i.t.c.h to pull off, isn't it?"

As exam time approaches, my cla.s.ses are getting unbearably hard.

In Theology, we're studying ancient ecclesiology, the history of the Church from Jesus' death up until about the year 600 AD. It's not an easy subject, even for the seasoned Christian kids in my cla.s.s. We've had to memorize the details of tiny historical movements like the Marcionites (who denied the validity of the Old Testament and most of the New Testament, and primarily followed the writings of Paul), the Montanists (an early charismatic renewal movement), and the Novationists (a truly hardcore group of Christians who believed that if you denied Christ even once, you were doomed to h.e.l.l forever, with no second chances).

In Old Testament, we're learning about the structure of the Bible's poetry. Dr. Thompson is teaching us that all of the Psalms and Proverbs fit into one of a half-dozen rhetorical modes. For example, Psalm 49:1 ("Hear this, all you peoples; listen, all who live in this world") is an example of synonymous parallelism, meaning that the first clause ("Hear this, all you peoples") is simply reworded in the second clause ("listen, all who live in this world"). This is not to be confused with synthetic parallelism, which means that the second clause amplifies or complements the first (as in Psalm 55:6: "I said, 'Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest' ").

See what I mean?

In addition to cramming ma.s.sive amounts of material into my skull, I've been thinking a lot about my cla.s.ses in general and about the characteristics of a Liberty education. I've been pondering the conversation I had with Max Carter the other week, the one in which he inveighed against Liberty's educational one-sidedness.

I think I see what he means when he criticizes a Liberty education as undemanding. I'm struggling just to tread water in my Liberty cla.s.ses, but for a Christian college student with a huge amount of intellectual curiosity, going to Liberty could be a frustrating experience--not because the cla.s.ses are too easy or the professors are incompetent (which, by and large, they're not), but because Liberty seems to have a conflicted view of the academic process itself.

Several weeks ago, after a lecture about the age of the earth, Dr. Dekker, my History of Life professor, projected a pa.s.sage on the board. The pa.s.sage, which comes from the pen of Dr. Kurt Wise, one of the world's foremost young-earth creationists, goes as follows: "I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of G.o.d seems to indicate. Here I must stand."

"Ultimately," Dr. Dekker said of the pa.s.sage, "what Dr. Wise wrote there is the same thing I'm saying: when it comes to the age of the earth, it becomes a question of what the Bible says."

Say what you will about young-earth creationism (I think I've said enough already), but there's something depressing about a credentialed, university-level scientist who freely admits that he wouldn't budge in his beliefs even if all all the evidence in the the evidence in the universe universe contradicted one of his scientific theories. Never mind that Dr. Dekker is talking about creationism--can you imagine a physicist saying that about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Or an English professor saying that about his theory of late Victorian poetry? It might be honest of Dr. Dekker to admit that his views are impervious to evidence, but it should probably disqualify him from any sort of university-level teaching. contradicted one of his scientific theories. Never mind that Dr. Dekker is talking about creationism--can you imagine a physicist saying that about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Or an English professor saying that about his theory of late Victorian poetry? It might be honest of Dr. Dekker to admit that his views are impervious to evidence, but it should probably disqualify him from any sort of university-level teaching.

Another worrisome statement came during a guest lecture in my Evangelism 101 cla.s.s by one of Liberty's campus pastors. At the end of the lecture, the pastor addressed the two hundred-plus students in my cla.s.s this way: "I just want to say this, Liberty students. My biggest worry about you, about all of you, is that you'll become educated beyond your obedience."

This, too, struck me as depressing. What he was saying, in effect, is that there's a cap on a Liberty education, a point at which knowledge becomes dangerous rather than useful. And once you're aware that some Liberty administrators feel this way--or at least one Liberty administrator feels this way--the signs appear everywhere you look. You realize that the reason Liberty's GNED professors cherry-pick quotes from Kant and Nietzsche and insert them in workbooks rather than a.s.signing entire texts is that reading non-Christian philosophers in the originals might cause some Liberty students to stumble in their faith. You start looking back at Liberty's inst.i.tutional history and realizing why, for example, the school library wasn't built until a regional accreditation board mandated it. And you start to wonder if the Facebook joke, "You know you went to Liberty if . . . you learned more about t.i.thing than your major," might actually have a kernel of truth to it.

It's not that there aren't smart people here. In fact, with very few exceptions, I've been impressed by how bright and intellectually engaged my Liberty friends are. The problem is in the system. Liberty is a place where professors aren't allowed to take chances with their course material. It's a place where academic rigor is sacrificed on the altar of uninterrupted piety, where the skills of exploration, deconstruction, and doubt--all of which should be present at an inst.i.tution that bills itself as a liberal arts college--are systematically silenced in favor of presenting a clear, unambiguous political and spiritual agenda.

I wish I could claim these criticisms as my own, but I'm just echoing things I've heard my friends and hallmates say all semester. A few weeks ago, I took a walk with Stubbs, the RA from Dorm 22, who sits next to me in Theology cla.s.s. Stubbs is an exceedingly smart guy with an encyclopedic grasp of Christian doctrine, and outside of cla.s.s, he spends a lot of time complaining to me about our professor.

"It's not that I don't agree with Mr. Watson," Stubbs said. "It's just that I wish he allowed alternative points of view in cla.s.s."

"Why?" I asked.

"Well, because without skepticism, without challenging our own views, what we're learning is lifeless. I mean, there are some major issues Christians should all agree on: the infallibility of scripture, the atonement of Christ for all men, things like that. But I wish our professors would branch out a little."

I've always known that I'll be leaving Liberty after this semester, which is why I think I've been so forgiving of Liberty's academic flaws. But Stubbs doesn't get to leave. Max Carter doesn't, either. For both of them--and for the rest of my friends here--Liberty's inst.i.tutional shortcomings are no minor business. This is their college education, and for their sakes, I can't help wis.h.i.+ng that Liberty would purge itself of the att.i.tude that education is an enemy of faith.

Admittedly, there are a few positive signs on the horizon. After thirty-plus years of an untenured faculty that could be fired for straying from the party line, Liberty gave out its first tenure position in 2004. Rules on academic freedom among professors are being loosened, and I've heard some things in my cla.s.ses this semester that, while not heretical, were definitely unorthodox. (One faculty member, whom I'll refrain from naming even under a pseudonym, told me that Dr. Falwell's approach to Christian doctrine struck him as "overly reductive").

There may be other signs, but until anti-intellectual att.i.tudes like the ones I've heard in History of Life and Evangelism 101 are dealt with, I'm afraid Liberty will continue to wallow in academic mediocrity. Me, I'm praying for a turnaround. As people like Stubbs and Max Carter have taught me, education and piety are not mutually exclusive, and the sooner this school's higher-ups take this to heart, the sooner Liberty students can go about the business of loving G.o.d with their minds.

Late Friday night, Jersey Joey comes knocking at my door.

"Rooster, come to my room. We're watching old Van Halen videos on YouTube. The ones with the hot chicks in bikinis."

"I can't," I say. "Sorry."

"Why not?"

"Too much work."

"Fine, be that way."

I don't actually have any homework tonight. In fact, I've been browsing Facebook for forty-five minutes, and I've got no plans to do anything more productive. But I didn't want to tell Joey the real reason I couldn't watch lascivious music videos with him, because, well, it's sort of embarra.s.sing. Namely, I'm trying to stop masturbating.

In this week's disciples.h.i.+p meeting with Pastor Seth, I told him about my trip to Every Man's Battle. He asked what I had learned by going, how it felt to talk so openly about my l.u.s.tful habits, and what the experience had motivated me to do.

"What do you mean, motivated me to do?" I asked.

"Well, I've been thinking," Seth said. "And I think we should work on cutting out your masturbation."

I was mortified. Cutting out my masturbation? I went to Every Man's Battle strictly out of curiosity. I wasn't expecting to join the fray myself. Also, what's this about we we? Curtailing my self-love is going to be a corporate effort?

"Here's the plan," Seth said. "First, I want you to try all those tips you heard in the group. Keeping your door open, making sure you play Christian music when you're alone in your room, things like that. Second, when you feel like you're about to fall, I want you to text message me."

Oh, really?

"Really. Any time of night, if you feel a tingle down there, text me. I'll stop everything and help you through it."

I tried to laugh it off, but Seth was serious. He really wanted to help me stop masturbating. And since I really had no other option--what was I going to say? "No thanks, I think I'll keep touching myself"?-- I nodded in agreement. The apex of awkwardness between us had long pa.s.sed. What did I have to lose?

"Now, don't be shy," Seth said. "If I haven't gotten a text from you in a week, I'll a.s.sume you're hiding something from me."

Calling Pastor Seth and telling him I m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed is by far the most uncomfortable hypothetical I can imagine, so for the past four days, I've been mounting an all-out campaign against l.u.s.t. I deleted my TMZ.com bookmark, I deep-sixed my bookmark, I deep-sixed my Esquire Esquire magazine with Halle Berry on the cover. Whenever Jersey Joey has tried to show me something racy-- a Van Halen video, a picture of Britney Spears flas.h.i.+ng her nether regions to the paparazzi--I've politely declined. All in all, I'm dominating my libido. magazine with Halle Berry on the cover. Whenever Jersey Joey has tried to show me something racy-- a Van Halen video, a picture of Britney Spears flas.h.i.+ng her nether regions to the paparazzi--I've politely declined. All in all, I'm dominating my libido.

But tonight, without warning, it all hits the fan. My roommates are gone for the night, and I'm sitting at my desk typing an e-mail when I start having these intense, two-second-long visual flashes. Girls in bikinis. The Victoria's Secret catalog. The alto two seats over in choir. Girls in bikinis. The Victoria's Secret catalog. The alto two seats over in choir. I try to make the thoughts go away. I get up from my computer. I leaf through I try to make the thoughts go away. I get up from my computer. I leaf through Walden Walden. I make lists in my head. Baseball teams, soft drinks, European capitals. But nothing works.

I think briefly about relieving myself and not telling Seth. Then I think of what he said: he'll know I'm lying if he doesn't hear from me this week. Man, the guy drives a hard bargain.

My fingers shake as I text him.

Red alert.

I wait nervously, phone in hand, for a response. Ten seconds later, I hear the new text ding.

Gotcha.

The phone rings.

"Kevin, it's Seth. I got your text."

"Hey. Yeah . . . I'm having some, uh, trouble over here."

"Sorry to hear that. Are you alone in your room?"

"Yeah."

"Where are your roommates?"

"Away for the night."

"Uh-oh. Well, that's okay. Everything's okay."

Seth's calm sounds rehea.r.s.ed, like a crisis-line operator talking a guy down from a bridge.

"Have you gone to the gym today?" he asks.

"No."

"Well, you should head over there. Work it off. And listen to some music or something."

"Okay, sounds good."

"Oh, and Kevin: remember to keep the door open tonight."

"Will do."

"And maybe invite a friend to sleep in your room."

"Okay."

"Good. And call me if anything, uh, comes up comes up."

I hoped that battling my s.e.xual appet.i.te would lead me to new levels of spiritual growth, or at least to a greater level of empathy with my Liberty friends. But truth be told, I still don't get it. Masturbation seems like a victimless crime if there ever was one. And from the Christian perspective, allowing a Liberty student the freedom to do it would seem to lessen the chance that they'd be experimenting with actual s.e.x.

Most of all, I feel sorry for Pastor Seth, who--in addition to winning the double entendre prize of the century--has worried himself sick about whether or not I'm touching myself. I can think of very few people, at Liberty or anywhere else, who would call me on a Friday night to help with any of my personal problems. That level of support is something I've rarely felt before, and I don't take it for granted.

It comes back, I guess, to the difference between the form and content of Liberty's religious system. I love the way Pastor Seth's faith motivates him to help me in my struggles. I admire his compa.s.sion and selflessness. I just wish he were calling to see whether I was returning my mom's phone calls, or whether I had left good tips at restaurants, or whether I had been nice to everyone I met today. Working on masturbation when I have so many other flaws seems like putting fuzzy dice in a car whose transmission is falling apart. I suppose it's better than nothing, but it doesn't feel like a particularly good use of anyone's time.

One King Shall Be King to Them All

Every afternoon around three o'clock, Dr. Jerry Falwell drinks a bottle of Diet Peach Snapple very, very quickly. I know this because he told me so, and because right now, I'm watching him in action. First, he removes the plastic seal over the cap with a utility knife. He cuts horizontally, then vertically, then horizontally again, straining and struggling for the proper angle. It takes a little while, but he succeeds eventually, and once the cap is off, it's five seconds, tops, before the empty bottle is set back down on the table. I've never seen anything like it. He pours that stuff down his throat like a genie appeared in his office and said, "I'll grant you three wishes, but only if you can kill your drink before I finish tying my shoe."

Today is my interview with the chancellor for the Liberty Champion Liberty Champion, and this speed-drinking spectacle is a probably a good distraction. After all, marveling at the way Dr. Falwell guzzles his iced tea is a lot easier on my nerves than contemplating the reality of who he is. When you're sitting five feet away from a man who has held the ear of five U.S. presidents, a man whose Moral Majority changed the course of modern American politics, whose life work has won the adoration of millions of people and the fear and loathing of millions more, it's good to have a little mental distance. So . . . the Snapple.

I was actually feeling mildly relaxed about this interview until I checked my e-mail this morning and saw the flood of panicked notes from my friends and family in the secular world, who apparently consider a tete-a-tete with Jerry Falwell about as safe as a lox brunch with Hannibal Lecter. The e-mails said things like "PLEASE be careful with him" and "Be aware that he is crazy like a fox." Then there was the one from Mrs. Mott, the Champion Champion's faculty advisor, who seems to have realized that what she did in my case--a.s.signed a major feature to a student she doesn't know from Adam--isn't exactly standard protocol. She wrote: "Normally, such interviews are granted to senior staff members to whom much trust has been given. As a new reporter, you will want to conduct the interview in a professional manner."

Armed with all that emotional support, I put on a s.h.i.+rt and tie and walked over to the chancellor's office, which is housed in an opulent white estate in the middle of campus (Liberty students call it "the Mansion"). When I arrived, Dr. Falwell's secretary escorted me past the reception area, where a portrait of Ronald Reagan hangs high on the wall, to the waiting room, where I spent ten sweaty-palmed minutes staring at a bookshelf that contained t.i.tles like Falwell: The Autobiography Falwell: The Autobiography, Jerry Falwell: Aflame for G.o.d Jerry Falwell: Aflame for G.o.d, and Strength for the Journey: An Autobiography Strength for the Journey: An Autobiography by Jerry Falwell. (A secular friend of mine quipped that this shelf could be called "Barnes & Ign.o.ble.") by Jerry Falwell. (A secular friend of mine quipped that this shelf could be called "Barnes & Ign.o.ble.") When the secretary came for me, I wiped my hands on my pant legs and followed her down the hall through a thick wooden door, around a quick bend, and into a cavernous room where Dr. Falwell, clad in his signature black suit and red tie with a s.h.i.+mmering "Jesus First" lapel pin, stood to shake my hand.

"Come on in, Kevin!" he bellowed.

The first thing to know about Dr. Jerry Falwell is that his office is d.a.m.n nice. The walls are lined with rich, dark wood, the high-back leather chair looks like it was plucked from Donald Trump's personal collection, and there's a private powder room next to the door. The shelves are smattered with portraits of Dr. Falwell's personal heroes, men like Mickey Mantle and Winston Churchill, and carved wooden eagles and antique globes fill the s.p.a.ce behind his desk. Everything is neat, tidy, polished to a s.h.i.+ne. Dr. Falwell's moral platform may be up for debate, but his taste in office decor is fairly unimpeachable.

The second thing to know is that at the moment, Dr. Falwell is tired. After he drank his Snapple, he slouched down in his chair, splayed his legs out in front of him, and hasn't budged since. As I introduce myself and tell him about the premise of my interview, he closes his eyes and breathes slowly and heavily, as if meditating.