I thought we'd try something new before class today," says Nathan, the Evangelism 101 teaching assistant. "A little cheer."

My roommate Eric turns to me. "God is good. Bet you ten bucks."

Before I can ask what he means, Nathan sets down his microphone and shouts through cupped hands, "God is good!"

"All the time!" responds the class in unison. Eric pumps his fist.

"Awesome!" says Nathan. "You guys must remember this from your youth groups. Now, let's see if you remember the second part: and all the time..."

The class shouts back: "God is good!"

Nathan waves his arms with brio, conducting the class like John Philip Sousa leading a parade march.

"God is good..."

"All the time!"

"And all the time..."

"God is good!"

I've been back from spring break for two days now, and I'm starting to settle back into my classes. As you might guess from a lecture that begins with a cheer, Evangelism 101 is somewhat of a gut. Our professor, Pastor Andy Hillman, conducts the class like a large, for-credit session of Sunday school, with test questions like:

God wants to be your ____.

a) Slave

b) Best friend*

c) Priest

The ultimate goal of the universe is to show ____.

a) the love of God

b) the glory of God

c) the power of God

d) all of the above*

The upside of an easy class like Evangelism 101 is simple: I'm not failing. In fact, in most of my courses, I'm improving much more quickly than I expected to. Nobody's going to be throwing any Rhodes scholarships my way after this semester, but most of my grades are up in the B-plus range.

Despite it being my worst class grade-wise, I'm still liking my Old Testament class better than any of the others. In addition to the lessons about Deuteronomy and Judges, it's fun to flesh out the oversimplified nuggets of Old Testament lore that make it into secular pop culture. For example: I've heard a million ESPN commentators refer to a lopsided matchup as a "David and Goliath situation," but I'd never read the Bible's account of the actual battle. I didn't know that Goliath was not only huge about nine feet tall, with a 125-pound cloak of armor he was also "uncircumcised," according to 1 Samuel 17:26. This bit of information gives me a leg up on my ESPN-watching secular friends. A juvenile leg, but a leg nonetheless.

I'm finding that my favorite courses, like Old Testament and Theology, have something in common: they're surveys, classes in which the professor's goal is simply to introduce a body of new information. The information always has a literalist slant, of course, but on the whole, the classes are fairly straightforward. You'd find the same thing at a hundred other Christian colleges and Bible study groups. There's another type of class, though the agenda-driven class. In these courses, professors aren't teaching new knowledge so much as teaching students how to think about the world around them.

A week or two before spring break, I started sitting in on GNED II, a mandatory second-semester extension of my GNED course. I'm only at Liberty for one semester, so I'll never get to take GNED II for a grade, but people on my hall kept talking about it, and I wanted to get the flavor. The GNED II class I've been going to, like my GNED I class, is taught by Dr. Parks. In it, Liberty students are taught to view sociopolitical topics like homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia through an ultraconservative Christian lens. And unlike its first-semester counterpart, GNED II pulls no punches. Its workbook contains fill-in-the blank sections like:

And:

In today's GNED II class, Dr. Parks announces that we will be talking about gender roles in the evangelical world. Dr. Parks spends the first ten minutes of class laying out the two main positions evangelical Christians take on gender issues. The first position, egalitarianism, means exactly what you'd expect it to mean men and women are equal, both in the church and in the home. Women can be pastors of a church, they can teach Sunday school, and husbands and wives share equal authority in marriage. The second position, called complementarianism, means, in Dr. Parks's words, that "God created man and woman with different roles that complement each other." Complementarians believe that only men can be pastors, that only men can teach Sunday school or other Christian education classes (unless it's an all-female class). Complementarians also maintain that the husband should be the head of the household. They quote Ephesians 5:24, "As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything (NIV)."

"You can obviously tell where I am on this," Dr. Parks says. "I am definitely a complementarian, without apology. I think the egalitarian view is greatly skewed."

Dr. Parks clicks a few buttons on his laptop to start a PowerPoint slideshow. The text is accompanied by photos of white, midthirties couples clutching each other, loving gazes plastered on their faces. As the presentation plays, we fill in the blanks in our workbooks:

Dr. Parks realizes that to a nonevangelical, the complementarian view of gender roles can sound misogynistic, but he assures us that it's not. Women can still hold high-power jobs under the complementarian model, he says, and they should still get equal pay for equal work. But when push comes to shove, a woman's priority should be her family. "For a woman," Dr. Parks says, "if the career is most important, and the family gets left out, that's a problem."

At first, 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 Secular Hedonism 101: How to Smoke Pot, Cross-dress, and Lose Your Morals.

But unlike that course, GNED II actually exists, so I've had to figure out how to process it. I keep thinking back to Marcus Ross, the creation studies professor who was written up in the New York Times for his doctoral research on 65 million-year-old reptiles. Ross was able to compartmentalize his brain into two functional halves a religious half and a secular half-and for a while, I was too. I could sit in History of Life class and hear Dr. Dekker talk about the flaws in Darwinism without going crazy, because I convinced myself that I was just filling an alternate space in my brain. What's the harm in that?

GNED II is different, though. I can't convince myself that those lessons about fornicators and homosexuals are innocuous. For one, whereas I'm not an expert in evolutionary biology, I do have enough experience with gay people to know that homosexuality is not a "compulsive lifestyle involving many sexual partners." (In fact, a lot of my gay friends at Brown spend a lot of time complaining about how little sex they're having.) But aside from the patently offensive content, my biggest issue with GNED II is the way it bundles political and social issues with religious issues, and what that means for a guy who's trying to give Christianity a fair shake.

Over spring break, I finally finished Left Behind, the apocalyptic novel I started a month or so ago. And per my expectations (spoiler alert!) the secular journalist Buck Williams has a religious conversion. I'll spare you the details it involves a Romanian politician who turns out to be the Antichrist but suffice it to say that Buck deals with his skepticism, gets down on his knees, and accepts Christ as his savior.

That part didn't bother me so much. The part that worried me was the lead-up to that conversion. A few pages before Buck converts, his thought process is described in these terms: "If this was true, all that Rayford Steele had postulated and Buck knew instinctively that if any of it was true, all of it was true why had it taken Buck a lifetime to come to it?"

That middle clause "Buck knew instinctively that if any of it was true, all of it was true" is the same rationale Liberty professors use to prove that the earth is six thousand years old or that wives must submit to their husbands. If the Bible is infallible, my professors all say, and if the parts about Jesus dying for our sins are true, then a host of other things must also be true, including the sinfulness of homosexuality, the pro-life platform, and the imminence of the rapture. In Liberty's eyes, the ultraconservative interpretation of scripture carries the same inerrancy as scripture itself, and if you don't buy it all if you're a liberal or moderate Christian you're somehow less than faithful. That sort of prix fixe theology, where Christianity comes loaded with a slate of political views, is a big part of the reason I've been hesitant to accept Liberty's evangelicalism this semester. Somewhere down the road, I might be able to believe in Jesus as Lord, but I could never believe that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle or tell my future wife to submit to me as her husband.

I suppose it's weird that I'm more attached to my social and political views than my religious beliefs. Is it really more reasonable to believe that the savior of the world was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died for our sins, and was resurrected three days later than to believe that the universe frowns on gay people? On a purely logical level, probably not. But it is what it is, and it does me no good to pretend otherwise. The mind, as we know, is a funny thing.

Kevin Roose is a senior at Brown University, where he studies English literature and writes regular columns for the Brown Daily Herald. His work has been featured inEsquire, SPIN, mental_floss, and other publications. Click here to purchase The Unlikely Disciple.

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