Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Roose!
So it was the first time I was going on a
Christian date and I was freaking the hell out. I was in my dorm at Liberty
University, the world's largest evangelical Christian University, and I
was in the bathroom putting gel in my hair and my friends from my dorm were
all around me giving me advice for the night and one of them told me that the
three rules of Christian dating are pay, pray, and say. You pay for the meal as the
man, you pray over the meal, and then you lead the conversation or because lead
doesn't rhyme you say the conversation. And I was freaking out because
frankly I'm not very good at going on dates but I was also freaking out
because this was the first time that I was going to have to lie to her. We all
tell lies on dates. I've told girls that I like going out dancing, that I cook on
my own, that I that I didn't watch the Royal Wedding, but this was different
because this time I was lying about who I was and why I was there at Liberty
University. To back up I didn't grow up in a Christian family, I'm not an
evangelical Christian. I grew up as far away from that as possible. My parents
were dyed-in-the-wool liberals who worked for Ralph Nader in the 1970s and
that was the conservative wing, like I had other family members who actually on
game night would play class struggle which is the socialist alternative to
Monopoly. The book if you're curious features Nelson
Rockefeller armwrestling Karl Marx. It's a great game. And then I went to
Brown University which most evangelical Christians consider Cuba with diplomas,
but in the middle of my my time at Brown I was down in Lynchburg, Virginia with
with my boss working on a writing project and I met a group of students
from Liberty University and I remember them telling me about their school. They
told me it was the world's largest evangelical university, it had this set
of sort of crazy rules called the Liberty Way and it said no drinking, no
smoking, no dancing, no R-rated movies, and perplexingly
no hugs that lasted for longer than three seconds. This is actually a rule
there. And they told me that they had classes in things like creationist
biology and evangelism 101 that also all the students were required to take. And I
was I was fascinated and a little bit scared. I went back to brown feeling like
this was the most foreign place I could imagine, much more foreign than like
Tokyo or Rio or places like that, and this was also coincidentally the time in
my college career when all my friends were starting to plan their study
abroads. And so I thought to myself "Well, what if
I went abroad to Lynchburg Virginia and studied this culture of conservative
Christianity and found out the worst things they do,
how bigoted and intolerant they are and then wrote a book about it?" And so midway
through my sophomore year I withdrew from Brown, I shipped off to
Lynchburg Virginia, and I entered Liberty University as a student and an
undercover writer. I was gonna write a book about my time there. And I arrived
on campus and I remember feeling the biggest culture shock of my life. These
were students that had seemingly nothing in common with me: they they didn't curse,
they sort of like talked like Kenneth the page, like you know golly and gee
whiz, they honestly believe the earth was 6,000 years old,
and and they had you know Facebook groups like "I hope the rapture comes
before my student loans were due," which is pretty good I thought oh not
bad considering the the genre. And so I started to settle in and on my first
Friday night there I went to Bible study because you know what else are you gonna
do on a Friday night at a Christian College so I was at the house of an
older student off-campus and I remember going upstairs after the Bible study and
watching a guy and a girl sort of kneeling together and praying very
intensely and the guy is sort of holding the girl's hand and sort of staring into
her eyes and and I sort of looked around the room like "Is anyone seeing this?" and
a girl came over to me and she introduced herself as Kristen. She was
sort of like she looked like a young Tina Fey she had glasses and long brown
hair and and she acted like one too, she was a little cynical and the first thing
she said to me was "They're fellowshipping, that's Liberty speak for hitting on each
other awkwardly." And I liked her immediately,
and so we started spending more time together after that Bible study group
and we went on on a few dates and since you can't do anything on dates,
since there's no physicality allowed, we had to actually talk to each other and
get to know each other and over time I learned that she was not very
typical for Liberty's she was an evangelical Christian sure and she was
pretty pure sort of morally, but she read Harry Potter you know, she was she liked
the Beatles, her parents had made her come to Christian school and so through
all this I found that I had found one person who might even a little bit be
able to get me. And of course I couldn't out myself to her but as we went on more
and more and more dates I started telling her things about myself, I
started talking about my family and my upbringing and and my thoughts about
some of Liberty's sort of more conservative doctrines, and it really
sort of became an outlet for me as I was sort of struggling with the rest of this
school and at one point I even was grilling her so hard that she sort of
stopped and looked at me quizzically and said
"Are you recording this?" and I knew at that point that I had gotten a little
bit too close. As a semester went on I sort of experimented in every facet of
Liberty's student life. I joined the church choir, I play it on the intramural
softball team, I made friends in my dorm. And as all this sort of happened I
felt myself sort of becoming unmoored a little bit, I felt a little bit detached
from the person and I come in being. I was sort of I felt like I was almost
being brainwashed and so I remember you know sitting and and typing emails to my
family and friends back home and puzzling for hours about whether I
should use "they" or "we" and I knew it was bad when when a friend from home sent me
a Wikipedia article about Stockholm Syndrome.
So my family and friends were not too thrilled about this. But the one thing
that I had the hardest time sort of figuring out was what to do about
Kristen because on one hand I really liked her, on the other hand I was an
undercover journalist and I couldn't exactly in good conscience continue
dating her, and I realized that in some ways you know dating is about what you
tell people but relationships are different, they're about sort of what you
what you don't leave out. And so I knew that even though I had fun dating her I
couldn't really be in a relationship with her and so midway through this
semester I called her and I said "You know I just I'm really busy lately, you
know I've got a lot going on, I don't know if I can make it out to our date
this weekend." I sort of blew her off frankly and it killed me to do that
and I remember telling her you know you like "It's not you, it's me," and for the
first time in the history of that phrase it was not a lie.
And so the semester went on and I would see Kristen around the school but I
didn't talk to her as nearly as frequently and the semester went on
and I had sort of wild and great experiences. Some of what I saw there was
awful, it was classes about creationism and the homosexual agenda and Jerry
Falwell was the Chancellor of this school, Jerry Falwell who said that 9/11
was you know the fault of gays and lesbians and the ACLU or as I like
to call them you know my my friends and family, so this was not a totally
comfortable experience but it was a productive one and I came away from the
semester sort of feeling more virtuous and I never converted but I felt the
sort of Christianity rubbing off on me and I remember coming back to New York
and I was I was at the Apple store and I had a broken laptop that I had dropped
and I went to the guy at the genius bar and he said you know "Don't tell
anyone but if you say that you didn't drop this that it just broke,
I can save you $400 in repair fees," and I remember sort of sitting there tearing
my hair out like God is gonna judge me if I do this you know I like I can't in
good conscience tell ya and I know like you know this is not on any Christian
virtue scale like it doesn't register, I know Steve Jobs is not like widows and
orphans, but I still felt more virtuous than I had before I got there, except for
one thing: I still hadn't told my friends there that there was this book coming
out and that they were gonna be in it. And so six months passed and I went back
down to Liberty, the book hadn't come out yet, and I sort of gathered them one by
one and and told them that I was there in essence to sort of catalog their
lives and our lives and that I was turning them into the characters of a
book. And they forgave me I mean, because you know like
forgiveness is Christian crack. So they weren't mad, they were a
little confused and they felt that they had actually not done their job by not
converting me so they apologized to me. They were like "We're so sorry that we
didn't show you the way to God, clearly we screwed something up." And on
that trip I learned that Kristen had actually left Liberty. She had
transferred to a home close to where she lived and and wasn't going there anymore
and I guess she felt sort of mismatched there too, so there was one more person
left to call before this book came out and I called her and I sort of caught up
a little bit and I told her that there was this book and she was gonna be in it
and she sort of paused and then she paused some more and then she said "Oh, so
that's why you didn't know anything. That's why you called it
Phillipians instead of Philippians." Everything sort of clicked
into place, and the second thing that that she said was that she was glad that
it actually wasn't her, that she hadn't done anything wrong. And so after that
call we sort of fell out of touch, you know we both sort of in and out of other
relationships. The book came out and out of all the questions I got about the
book as I was going around telling this story I would say 90% of the time people
would ask what happened to Kristen and I had changed her name I should mention
that by that point but I but people would ask they wanted to know had we
ended up together, had we you know had there been a happy ending to our story.
And you know I couldn't exactly tell them what they wanted to hear but I said
"Yeah we're still in touch," and and then more and more time passed and I felt the
the categories becoming clearer in my life. I knew that I was not a Liberty
student, I was not an evangelical Christian, my life sort of became much
more like what it was before I did this this experiment.
But I couldn't sort of shake the one thing that she had said to me which was
that you know, you weren't just sort of using me for material for your book or
you she said you know you we that was that was not your point in all this and
I I had responded no of course, but I thought about that more and more and so
years after the book came out just a little while ago I gave her a call and
we talked and caught up again and talked about the things in our lives
that have been going on and I said "You know people asked about you
when I go out on the road and talk and tell this story they want to know what
happened to you, what happened to us," and she said well that "You know that makes
sense because we were pretty amazing," and she's sort of chuckled and I just
sat there and smiled because I realized that for the first time since I had left
Liberty in that statement I had found a we that felt real to me. Thank you.
Kevon Roose