You believe WHAT?

"I wouldn't go to any of those schools. Yale, Harvard, Princeton. No way. I heard they have naked parties there. Lots of sinful behavior. And you can't go there without accepting their point of view." - Liberty "University" student.

Inspired by a research trip to Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church, Brown University sophomore Kevin Roose, raised a liberal Quaker, decided he wanted to know what it was like to live in the world of the fundamentalist Christian. Rather than do his research from the outside, Roose took the extreme measure of going undercover and transferred to Liberty University for a semester. He lived in the dorm, attended the classes, and immersed himself in the student subculture. His research trip takes place in the Spring semester of 2007, and he was there during the shootings at Virginia Tech, and there for the death of Falwell himself. Roose even managed to finagle a one-on-one interview with Falwell for the school paper, just a handful of days before Falwell's fatal heart attack. The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University is his story of that semester.

When Chris Hall first asked me to review Unlikely Disciple for Carnal Nation, I was ecstatic. I'd heard about it and read a few short reviews before then, and was anxious to read it myself. I never suspected that by page fifty I'd be slogging to the bathroom with the dry heaves every few pages, wishing I'd never heard of this book. Roose's account has given me just a glimpse of what trigger warnings are all about.

Roose documents campus life at Liberty well, including all the little details and nuances that are important to gaining insight into the mindset of the institution and its student population. Liberty looks on its surface like any university: academic-looking buildings set in a little neighborhood of town, students hustling to and from class, dorms, cafeteria, all the things you'd expect to see at a university. But what lies beneath this mask of academia is a bizarre mix of authentic American culture and an insidious counterfeit. Students date, but are not permitted to kiss (or even hug for more than three seconds). They have email and Facebook accounts, but they are strictly monitored by the administration. There is an orientation class, but it is mostly about bashing abortion and homosexual people. There is an evolution class for biology majors, but its premise is that science is wrong. Roose quickly learns to quarantine his life at Liberty, carving out a separate space for it lest he blow his cover. While that compartment learns to walk, talk, and think like the people around him, the rest of his brain looks on in curious fascination.

Throughout the semester, Roose predictably learns that the Bible is literally true in every word, that the earth is only 6,000 years old, that America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles, that abortion is murder and Margaret Sanger promoted eugenics. But more insightful than the pretend facts taught to students at Liberty are the underlying attitudes on which those falsehoods are taught. Especially in regards to sex and sexuality, there is a sub-current of fear, used to extort obedience and conformity. Sex is a nuclear reactor, and sex outside of heterosexual monogamous marriage is a meltdown. "Think about your wedding night, guys. Do you want to know that you're going to be killing your wife by not knowing you're carrying an incurable STD?! You don't ever want to go down that way!" one dean shouts at the student body during a Valentine's Day convocation. There is, of course, the "We Can Fix Your Gayness" program at Liberty, but there is also the "We Can Stop Your Masturbation" program. Liberty has the predictable and stereotypical obsession with people's sex lives.

berty's byzantine injunctions on human sexuality are unsurprising and familiar. By convincing people that their most basic biological drives are somehow evil and should be suppressed, cult leaders and demagogues find it a simple matter to dictate the rest of their attitudes. In the end, parting them from their money is trivial. This is the first and most essential step on the road to manipulation and is the thread that runs throughout the world's most draconian religious sects.

Twenty-some years ago, I spent a semester at a place even more fanatical than Liberty. Unlike Roose however, I was not undercover at Bob Jones but rather a true believer. (I bristle at the use of the word "University" for such places, preferring to reserve that name for institutions of education, not indoctrination - though BJU is an amusing acronym.) Being so far removed in time from my experience there, I was caught completely unawares by the amount of pain and resentment that surfaced within me while reading Roose's account. The proscriptions on behavior and thought, and the militant isolation from the world in order to impose a skewed view of reality on the victims of this textbook brainwashing technique have left scars deeper than I could have imagined. It was those unseen and unforeseen scars that evoked such a violent physical reaction in me when reading Unlikely Disciple.

Roose's compartmentalization of his Liberty life is not complete however, and after all is said and done he is mildly infected with a case of whitewash syndrome. While he does not come out and defend the offensive ideology that pervades Liberty, he goes well out of his way to make excuses for the faculty and students who buy into it. His goal, after all, was to find the humanity at the heart of the institution, and in that regard he is successful. The reader can't help but like most of the students he befriends while a student there, and even the hardest of hearts must feel some sympathy for them. What he seems to gloss over, though, is that the product that Liberty churns out continues to do great damage to our secular nation, from the societal assumption of Christianity and the general distrust of intellectualism to the more overt politicking toward theocracy, the rabid struggle to dehumanize the LGBT community, and the demonization of feminism, liberalism, the ACLU, atheism, and generally anyone who is not cowed into compliance to the extreme religious right. No matter how kind and almost-normal the students at Liberty appear to be, one cannot look past the misogyny, homophobia, and general mindless conformity deliberately inculcated into them or the effect that has on our society at large. To overlook the results of Liberty's efforts is to invite a dangerous complacence that we can ill afford.

While Liberty does not use a fence to insulate its student body from reality, it does use a system of rules and punishment, "The Liberty Way," to ensure that its students are not exposed to unsanctioned thoughts or experiences that might cause them to question the authority of the Administration. The theme of oppressive sequestration runs throughout the book. As one female student put it when discussing her thoughts about women's equality within the larger framework of Christianity, "Neither of us is very vocal, because our professor made it pretty clear that if you try to debate her, you don't have a teachable spirit." This preemptive ostracization of dissenters is wielded like a sledgehammer of suppression at Liberty. Fear of punishment is a pragmatic tool of the establishment at Liberty, to the point of co-opting students to turn each other in for perceived transgressions.

The book is a valuable read to understand the frame of mind of students at an evangelical Christian school, but former members of the cult should be wary. Even the description of the openness of the campus early on in the book brought back painful memories of my time as an acolyte at BJ, a place isolated from its community by a tall chain link fence topped with strings of barbed wire. I laughed at that fence at the time, chuckling about how incompetent it was to put the barbed wire on backwards as though to keep students in rather than to keep the nefarious public out. It was only years later that I realized the orientation of that barbed wire was no accident. That was only the first time that Unlikely Disciple sent me retching to the bathroom.

Unlikely Disciple almost lives up to its potential as an exposé into the inner workings of America's most famous brainwashing institution and is worth a read. The urge to transcend caricature of Fundamentalist Christianity and meet them on their own turf is a good one. But in giving his fellow students the benefit of the doubt, Roose also sacrifices the opportunity to look deeper into what Liberty represents. What could have been a great book falls instead to mediocrity.