27 Quotes by Kevin Roose

Here’s what worries me the most: I came to Liberty to humanize people. Because humanizing people is good, right? But what about people with reprehensible views? Do they deserve to be humanized? By giving Jerry Falwell’s moral universe a fair look, am I putting myself in his shoes? Or am I really just validating his worldview? What’s the difference between what I’m doing and certain Iranian presidents who want to “do more research” into the Holocaust? Where’s the limit to open-mindedness?

To put it in Quaker terms, my inner light flickered a lot, like the overhead fluorescent at a Motel 6, and sometimes, it burnt out altogether. The closest I came to consistent faith was during my senior year religion class, when we learned about the Central and South American liberation theology movements and I became briefly convinced that God was a left-wing superhero who led the global struggle against imperialism and corporate greed. Sort of a celestial Michael Moore.

I couldn’t believe Liberty actually had a course that teaches students how to condemn homosexuals and combat feminism. GNED II is the class a liberal secularist would invent if he were trying to satirize a Liberty education. It’s as if Brown offered a course called Godless Hedonism 101: How to Smoke Pot, Cross-dress, and Lose Your Morals.

At Liberty, I’ve met hundreds of people whose lives have been made better and more virtuous by their faith. But I’ve also seen a process whereby some reasonable, humble believers are taught to put their religious goals above everything else. This is how you get gentle Christian kids condemning strangers to hell in Daytona Beach, and it’s how you end up with a group of Liberty students sitting around a prayer room talking about the ideological crops that can be reaped from a national tragedy.

It’s hard to watch Liberty students singing along to worship songs during convocation, raising their hands and smiling beatifically, and not wonder whether they’ve tapped into something that makes their lives happier, more meaningful, more consistently optimistic than mine.

In the irony-in-hindsight department, Dr. Falwell also chided Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965 for getting involved in public advocacy, saying “preachers are not called to be politicians but soul-winners.

Every day, I’ve heard someone worrying about gay people, praying for gay people, talking about the scientific evidence against the alleged “gay gene.” I’ve heard ten times as many conversations about homosexuality at Liberty than I ever heard any place where gay people existed in the open.

Problem is, a lot of Christians who believe the world is headed for imminent destruction don’t use their eschatology to motivate altruism. Some, in fact, use their belief in the coming apocalypse to justify negligence and destruction. Critics of pretrib theology point out that rapture obsession can make Christians overlook glaring social needs in the present, like genocide, disease, and abject poverty.

I grabbed at transparency like an addict grabs at a crack pipe.