The concept behind The Unlikely Disciple—an undercover secular
young man attends Reverend Jerry Falwell’s evangelical-Christian
Liberty University for a semester—smacks of one of A. J. Jacobs’s
smarmy little stunt books. Jacobs is the magazine writer who tried to
read the Encyclopaedia Britannica over the course of a year for a book
titled The Know-It-All, and then half-assedly lived by Talmudic law in
The Year of Living Biblically. And this semester-for-a-book-deal shtick
sounds familiar for a good reason: Kevin Roose is Jacobs’s assistant,
and he stumbled upon this Liberty University premise while helping
Jacobs research Biblically. This does not bode well for the quality of
the book.
But the student, here, has surpassed the teacher. The early part of
the book is taken up with lame, religious-themed wisecracks—”I’ll
hunker down on my studies and let he who is without Cs cast the first
stone”—but soon enough, Roose actually begins to feel friendship
and kinship with his religious schoolmates, and ironic detachment gives
way to actual observational reportage. Roose doesn’t feel the need to
construct an artificial climax for his memoir, fabricating some sort of
bullshit dramatic moment where he actually considers becoming a
Christian. Instead he feels overwhelmed and out of his league as he
learns that evangelicals are more than just caricatures.
Which is not to say that Roose is protecting his subjects from their
own stupidity and hypocrisy. He pulls no punches while describing a
homoerotic initiation into a Christian gang:
For the next thirty seconds, the rebels of Dorm 22
give me a dry-humping initiation, their version of a peace pipe.
They’re really thrusting, frankly, and it would be sort of painful if
everyone weren’t laughing so hard. When they’ve had enough, they roll
off of me, wiping the tears from their eyes.“You’re cool with us, Rooster,” says Joey. “Ya big
queer.
But the Liberty University rules and regulations—nothing
beyond hand-holding between couples, and no R-rated movies for
anyone—are dumb enough to serve as punch lines without any of
Roose’s forced wit. And Liberty’s classes, which often teach the exact
opposite of actual scientific thought, can be hilarious—until you
remember that they’re real classes full of real students who take the
curriculum completely seriously. But Roose never forgets that the
horror of evangelicals isn’t that they want to do evil in the world,
it’s that they earnestly believe they are doing good. 