The Unlikely Disciple is the story of the semester I spent at Liberty University, the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s “Bible Boot Camp” for young evangelicals. Liberty, which is located in Lynchburg, Virginia, is the world’s largest evangelical Christian university – a 10,000-student training ground for the next generation of America’s Religious Right.
I grew up in the ultimate secular/liberal family (my parents are Quakers who used to work for Ralph Nader), and I went to Brown University – a school that, by Falwellian standards, is only a notch or two above Sodom and Gomorrah. But during my sophomore year at Brown, I decided to enroll at Liberty as a transfer student, hoping to learn about my Christian peers by living among them for a semester. The Unlikely Disciple chronicles the fascinating, entertaining, thought-provoking experiences I had during my semester at Liberty. Such as:
- Singing in the choir at Rev. Falwell’s legendary Thomas Road Baptist Church
- Struggling to keep up in my impossibly hard Bible courses
- Getting to know the guys in my dorm, whose personalities ranged from clean-cut pastors’ kids to foul-mouthed rebels
- Going on a spring break mission trip to Daytona Beach, where fifteen Liberty students and I tried (and failed) to convert drunken co-eds
- Experimenting with prayer
- Attending a meeting of “Every Man's Battle,” Liberty’s on-campus support group for chronic masturbators
- Going on dates with Liberty girls
- Interviewing Rev. Falwell for Liberty’s campus newspaper (which, in a twist of fate, ended up being the last print interview of his life)
- Learning some valuable lessons about the value of tolerance, the complexities of faith, and the future of America’s culture wars
