Transcript
Kevin Roos (0:00)
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Kevin Roos (2:17)
It was the first time I was going on a Christian date and I was freaking the hell out. I was in my dorm at Liberty University, the world's largest evangelical Christian university, and I was in the bathroom putting gel in my hair and my friends from my dorm were all around me giving me advice for the night. And one of them told me that the three rules of Christian dating are pay, pray and say you pay for the meal as the man. You pray over the meal and then you lead the conversation. Or, because lead doesn't rhyme, you say the conversation. And I was freaking out because frankly, I'M not very good at going on dates. But I was also freaking out because this was the first time that I was going to have to lie to her. We all tell lies on dates. I've told girls that I like going out dancing, that I cook on my own, that I didn't watch the Royal Wedding. But this was different because this time I was lying about who I was and why I was there. At Liberty University, to back up, I didn't grow up in a Christian family. I'm not an evangelical Christian. I grew up as far away from that as possible. My parents were dyed in the wool liberals who worked for Ralph Nader in the 1970s. And that was the conservative wing. Like, I had other family members who actually, on game night would play Class Struggle, which is the socialist alternative to Monopoly. The box, if you're curious, features Nelson Rockefeller arm wrestling, Karl Marx, a great game. And. And then I went to Brown University, which most evangelical Christians consider Cuba, with diplomas. But in the middle of my time at Brown, I was down in Lynchburg, Virginia with my boss working on a writing project, and I met a group of students from Liberty University. And I remember them telling me about their school. They told me it was the world's largest evangelical university. It had this set of sort of crazy rules called the Liberty Way that said no drinking, no smoking, no dancing, no R rated movies, and perplexingly no hugs that lasted for longer than three seconds. This is actually a rule there. And they told me that they had classes in things like Creationist biology and Evangelism 101 that all the students were required to take. And I was fascinated and a little bit scared. I went back to Brown feeling like this was the most foreign place I could imagine. Much more foreign than Tokyo or Rio or, or places like that. And this was also, coincidentally, the time in my college career when all my friends were starting to plan their study abroad. And so I thought to myself, well, what if I went abroad to Lynchburg, Virginia and studied this culture of conservative Christianity and found out the worst things they do, how bigoted and intolerant they are, and then wrote a book about it. And so midway through my sophomore year, I. I withdrew from Brown. I shipped off to Lynchburg, Virginia, and I entered Liberty University as a student and an undercover writer. I was going to write a book about my time there. And I arrived on campus and I remember feeling the biggest culture shock of my life. These were students that had seemingly nothing in common with me. They didn't curse, they sort of like, talked like Kenneth the page, like, golly and gee whiz. They. They honestly believed the earth was 6,000 years old. And they had Facebook groups like, I hope the Rapture comes before my student loans were due. Which is pretty good, I thought. Not bad, considering the genre. And so I started to settle in. And on my first Friday night there, I went to Bible study, because what else are you going to do on a Friday night at Christian college? So I was at the house of an older student off campus. I remember going upstairs after the Bible study and watching a guy and a girl sort of kneeling together and praying very intensely. And the guy is sort of holding the girl's hand and sort of staring into her eyes. And I sort of looked around the room like, is anyone seeing this? And a girl came over to me, and she introduced herself as Kristen. She was sort of like. She looked like a young Tina Fey. She had glasses and long brown hair. And she acted like one, too. She was a little cynical. And the first thing she said to me was, they're fellowshipping. That's Liberty speak for hitting on each other awkwardly. And I liked her immediately. And so we started spending more time together after that Bible study group. And we went on. On a few dates. And since you can't do anything on dates, since there's no physicality allowed, we had to actually talk to each other and get to know each other. And over time, I learned that she was not very typical for Liberty. She was an evangelical Christian, sure, and she was pretty pure, sort of morally. But she read Harry Potter. She liked the Beatles. Her parents had made her come to Christian school. And so through all of this, I found that I had found one person who might even a little bit, be able to get me. And of course, I couldn't out myself to her. But as we went on more and more and more dates, I started telling her things about myself. I started talking about my family and my upbringing and my thoughts about some of Liberty's sort of more conservative doctrines. And it really sort of became an outlet for me as I was sort of struggling with the rest of this school. And at one point, I even was grilling her so hard that she sort of stopped and looked at me quizzically and said, are you recording this? And I knew at that point that I had gotten a little bit too close. As the semester went on, I sort of experimented in every facet of Liberty's student life. I joined the church choir. I played on the intramural softball team. I made friends in my dorm. And as all this sort of happened. I felt myself sort of becoming unmoored a little bit. I felt a little bit detached from the person that I had come in being. I felt like I was almost being brainwashed. And so I remember sitting and typing emails to my family and friends back home and puzzling for hours about whether I should use they or or we. And I knew it was bad when a friend from home sent me a Wikipedia article about Stockholm syndrome. So my family and friends were not too thrilled about this. But the one thing that I had the hardest time figuring out was what to do about Kristen. Because on one hand, I really liked her. On the other hand, I was an undercover journalist, and I couldn't exactly in good conscience continue dating her. And I realized that in some ways, dating is about what you tell people, but relationships are different. They're about what you don't leave out. And so I knew that even though I had fun dating her, I couldn't really be in a relationship with her. And so midway through the semester, I called her and I said, I'm really busy lately. I've got a lot going on. I don't know if I can make it out to our date this weekend. I sort of blew her off, frankly, and it killed me to do that. And I remember telling her, you know, it's not you, it's me. And for the first time in the history of that phrase, it was not a lie. And so the semester went on, and I would see Kristen around the school, but I didn't talk to her nearly as frequently. And the semester went on, and I had sort of wild and great experiences. Some of what I saw there was awful. It was classes about creationism and the homosexual agenda. And Jerry Falwell was the chancellor of this school. Jerry Falwell, who said that 911 was the fault of gays and lesbians and the ACLU, or as I like to call them, my friends and family. So this was not a totally comfortable experience, but it was a productive one. And I came away from the semester sort of feeling more virtuous. And I never converted, but I felt the sort of Christianity rubbing off on me. And I remember coming back to New York, and I was at the Apple Store, and I had a broken laptop that I had dropped. And I went to the guy at the Genius Bar, and he said, you know, don't tell anyone, but if you say that you didn't drop this, that it just broke, I can save you $400 in repair fees. And I remember sort of sitting there tearing my hair out like God is going to judge me if I do this. I can't in good conscience tell. And I know this is not on any Christian virtue scale. It doesn't register. I know Steve Jobs is not like widows and orphans, but I still felt more virtuous than I had before I got there, except for one thing. I still hadn't told my friends there that there was this book coming out and that they were going to be in it. And so six months passed, and I went back down to Liberty. The book hadn't come out yet. And I sort of gathered them one by one and told them that I was there, in essence, to sort of catalog their lives and our lives, and that I was turning them into the characters of a book. And they forgave me. I mean, because, you know, like, forgiveness is Christian crack or what, you know, it's like. But so they weren't mad. They were a little confused. And they felt that they had actually not done their job by not converting me. So they apologized to me. They were like, we're so sorry that we didn't show you the way to God. Clearly we screwed something up. And on that trip, I learned that Kristen had actually left Liberty. She had transferred to a home close to where she lived and wasn't going there anymore. And I guess she felt sort of mismatched there, too. So there was one more person left to call before this book came out. And I called her, and I sort of caught up a little bit, and I told her that there was this book and she was going to be in it. And she sort of paused, and then she paused some more, and then she said, oh, so that's why you didn't know anything. She said, that's why you called it Philippians instead of Philippians. Everything sort of clicked into place. And the second thing that she said was that she was glad that it actually wasn't her, that she hadn't done anything wrong. And so after that call, we sort of fell out of touch. You know, we both sort of in and out of other relationships. The book came out. And out of all the questions I got about the book, as I was going around telling this story, I would say 90% of the time, people would ask what happened to Kristen. And I had changed her name, I should mention, by that point. But people would ask, they wanted to know, had we ended up together? Had we, you know, had there been a happy ending to our story? And I couldn't exactly tell them what they wanted to hear, but I said, yeah, we're still in Touch. And then more and more time passed, and I felt the categories becoming clearer in my life. I knew that I was not a Liberty student. I was not an Evangelical Christian. My life sort of became much more like what it was before I did this experiment. But I couldn't sort of shake the one thing that she had said to me, which was that, you know, you weren't just sort of using me for material for your book, were you? She said, you know, that was not your point in all this. And I had responded, no, of course. But I thought about that more and more. And so, years after the book came out, just a little while ago, I gave her a call and we talked and caught up again and. And talked about the things in our lives that have been going on. And I said, you know, people ask about you when I go out on the road and talk and tell this story. They want to know what happened to you, what happened to us. And she said, well, that, you know, that makes sense because we were pretty amazing. And she sort of chuckled, and I just sat there and smiled because I realized that for the first time since I had left Liberty, in that statement, I had found a we that felt real to me. Thank you.