More from The Unlikely Disciple

While Kevin Roose was at Liberty, several news-making things happened. The Rational Responders debate with a beloved faculty member named Caner (which many students thought he actually lost.) Roose snagged one of the last interviews ever with Jerry Falwell who died in May of that year, 2007. And, the Virginia Tech shootings happened.

I like how you feel like Roose felt when you read this book. You think sometimes, hey these people aren't SO bad. But then something happens: a homophobic remark, an angry sermon against global warming or some of their reactions to the VA Tech shooting and you are right back to thinking, nope, there is still (regrettably and seemingly, inevitably) some grade A assholery going on here and the fuckers are totally oblivious to it.

It starts when one of the campus pastors concocts a prayer that makes me wince: "Lord, we know that you use catastrophes like this to bring people to you. What happened at Virginia Tech today was awful, but I pray that you'll use this situation to make people see their need of a savior. I pray that you would send believers to Virginia Tech, to spread the gospel to people who are grieving right now."

"Let's keep things in perspective," says a skinny guy in the corner of the room. "This was only 33 people. Millions of murders happen in the US every year through legal abortions."
"Yes," says the pastor. "Can't forget that."

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 Libery students sitting around a prayer room talking about the ideological crops that can be reaped from a national tragedy. 

And then Roose quotes Hawthorne from The Blithesdale Romance (which is his only book that I kind of am interested in reading were I not still turned off by the death by tedium march through The Scarlet Letter in my teen English class years) with regard to the devolution of Utopian communities: 

The higher and purer the original object and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.