The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University

Like most college students, Kevin was eager for a semester abroad-a nice long break from all the beerpong, frat parties, gender-neutral bathrooms, cold pizza and mind-numbing sameness of life at Brown University, one of the most liberal colleges in the country and home to both a sizable chapter of the Young Communists League and the annual orgiastic party called SexPowerGod. Four months in Barcelona perhaps? Paris? Athens? No, everyone goes to those places. So Kevin searched for the most foreign place he could imagine and ended up right in America's backyard. Liberty University is the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Christian version of West Point, a training ground for his coalition of hardcore conservative Christians. Falwell described his mission for Liberty as “training Champions for Christ.” Liberty's 10,000 undergraduates learn everything-from Anthropology to Zoology-through a strict lens of Biblical literalism. They have majors in Evangelism and Worship Music, every professor is a born-again Christian (and was vetted for faith by Falwell himself), and their student code of conduct, called the Liberty Way, lays out a host of rules and regulations (i.e. no witchcraft allowed, period). Every spring break, they take a bus to Daytona Beach to convert the heathens. But Kevin did not go to poke fun at the students or the way of life there, far from it. He went there to try to get a better understanding of the people who are so similar and yet so different from him, to see if perhaps they have found a way to live that is more rewarding than his own. What begins as a journey to reveal what is actually going on at the nation's largest Christian fundamentalist school ends up revealing more about Kevin than he could have possibly imagined.