The Unlikely Disciple

I have only reviewed movies in theaters so far on this blog, so I finally wanted to expand and review a book I finished a little while ago. It will go down as one of my favorite books of all time.

The books premise excited me right from the start. A secular student was spending an entire semester at Liberty University, a fundamental Baptist school founded by the late Jerry Fallwell. As a secular person myself, all religion fascinates me, but fundamental Christianity seems to intrigue me more than others. I think it has something to do with the large role that evangelicals now play in our government, a larger role than I think most secular (or non-fundamentalists) are comfortable with. So as I read the book jacket in Borders (where I could easily spend ½ of my salary), I knew this was a must read. I wasn’t disappointed.

In his book, Kevin Roose decides to forego spending a semester abroad, and instead enrolls at Liberty University, where for the next semester he will pretend to be a born again evangelical Christian. His insight into this world highlight both the good and the bad without demonizing or glorifying the culture and the students. There are plenty of students that seem like genuinely kind and loving people, that despite vast differences, I could see hanging out with. Then there are the students that seem to embody the stereotypes that secular people have of evangelicals. They bashed homosexuals and there were even a few racist comments. At the end of the book I found that I actually respected most of these students. I respected them for their seemingly unwavering faith, their real desire to help people and the ways they still managed to rebel against the very strict rules and regulations at liberty. That doesn’t mean that I agreed with them, I still think church should be vastly separate from state, and that condemning others for not believing exactly as you do is incredibly wrong. I just feel I got to peek into their world for a little while, and the knowledge and understanding that I gained from that is priceless.

Kevin Roose did an excellent job of making you feel like you were on his journey with him, and wrote a book that I think should be mandatory reading for Christians and secular humanists alike. It would do us all a lot of good to better understand each other.