2009-03 Crossing the God Divide

2009-03 Kevin Roose Brown Alumni Magazine \American cultural polarization\Liberty University\Brown University\creationism\Biblical inerrancy\Protestant fundamentalism\Jerry Falwell http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/features/crossing_the_god_divide_2217.html Crossing the God Divide Crossing the God Divide  Like any good twenty-first-century college student, I opened a new Facebook account immediately upon arriving at Liberty. I already had an account at Brown, of course, but a friend warned me that not having a profile in Liberty's Facebook network would probably raise some suspicion among my Christian classmates. (Actually, the way she put it was, "You should just carry a sign that says: I'M A JOURNALIST.") During the first few days of school, I browsed Liberty's Facebook network for hours on end, gawking at the vast differences between my friends back at Brown and the people I was meeting at Liberty. A page called "Network Statistics" described the contrast pretty clearly; among Liberty students, it said, the most-listed "Favorite Books" were the Bible, Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers, and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity – three solid Christian classics. At Brown, on the other hand, those spots went to Harry Potter, The Great Gatsby, and Lolita – a trio of novels about witchcraft, bootlegging, and pedophilia. (Unfortunately, the statistics confirmed more stereotypes than they broke: in the "Interests" category, Liberty's most-listed item was "God," and Brown's was "Ultimate Frisbee.") At first glance, my new world seemed to have nothing at all in common with my old one. While the traditional dating scene at Brown is famously nonexistent, many Liberty students marry before they graduate. Professors begin every class with prayer, and creation-studies tests contain questions like "True or False: Noah's Ark was large enough to carry various kinds of dinosaurs." (If you're curious, the answer is True; according to my professor, since dinosaurs and humans cohabited the earth after the Flood, they would have had to find a way to squeeze onto the Ark. He suggested they might have been teenage dinosaurs so they'd have taken up less space.) In fact, Liberty makes no bones about its distaste for schools like Brown. In one section of "Give Me Liberty," an introductory booklet given to me during orientation week, I was surprised to see, as an example of Christian education gone wrong, the name of my alma mater. The section, called "Where Visions Go to Die," begins: "As we consider [Rev. Falwell's] vision ... it is important to realize that we are not the first school to seek these lofty goals. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown were all started by churches that wanted to train students to serve Christ... However, over time the priorities of these colleges shifted, and they started to focus on increasing the perceived quality of education rather than the spiritual life of the campus. Eventually, these schools achieved their academic goals, but they did so at the expense of their original Christian purposes.... Will Liberty fall into the same trap that these universities did, abandoning our Biblical worldview in the name of contemporary academics?" &ldquo;While the traditional dating scene at Brown is famously nonexistent, many Liberty students marry before they graduate. Professors begin every class with prayer, and creation-studies tests contain questions like "True or False: Noah's Ark was large enough to carry various kinds of dinosaurs."&rdquo;   