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Despite the false starts, Roose finds the students at Liberty to be "the friendliest students I've ever met." "In fact," he writes, "that's the thing that strikes me hardest: this is not a group of angry zealots." He is surprised to realize that the "students have no ulterior motive. They simply can't contain their love for God." Clearly, Roose adheres to his resolution to conduct his experiment "with as little prejudgment as possible and "with an open mind."
Any lingering doubts about Roose's commitment to objectivity are exploded by his portrayal of a few exultant responses by some family and friends from back home to Rev. Jerry Falwell's sudden death near the end of the book. These reactions aren't pretty—but, then again, neither are all the things Roose witnesses among the Christians at Liberty University.
While the disturbing homophobia Roose encounters is, arguably, more reflective of the state of hormone-laden, sexually frustrated young men living in a male dorm than of principled Christianity, other aspects of Roose's experiences at Liberty read like cautionary tales straight from Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Roose is an English major, and like any English major worth his salt, he reads everything like a text. He pays attention to both form and content and to any disunity between the two. Much of what he has trouble reconciling about his experience is related to what he sees as discrepancies between the content of religious belief and the forms it takes at Liberty University. First, there is the masturbation ministry. Then there's the Spring Break missions trip to Daytona Beach for a week of "cold turkey evangelism." Finally, he is understandably confused by what he sees as a compartmentalized approach to education, one which, on one hand, presents itself as grounded in eternal truth claims but, on the other, seems (at least in some of the classes he takes) to eschew the higher levels of inquiry and critical thinking that should flow naturally from such a firm foundation.
Of course, Roose's academic experience at Liberty is distorted. In seeking a kind of extreme version of Christian education, he enrolls only in required freshman-level Religion and General Education classes, not in classes in other academic disciplines, or even his own major. If it's a slice of Liberty life Roose hopes to offer, it ends up more like a spoonful of batter.
Consequently, despite finding plenty of "smart people" at Liberty, Roose describes it as "a place where academic rigor is sacrificed on the altar of uninterrupted piety." He says he's learned from others that "education and piety are not mutually exclusive, and the sooner the school's higher ups take this to heart, the sooner Liberty students can go about the business of loving God with their minds." Despite his breezy style, clearly Roose has done his research, and one suspects he's been reading folks like George Marsden and Gene Edward Veith, along with Mark Noll. Even so, at five weeks into the semester, Roose finds he's had to "work twice as hard at Liberty as [he] did at Brown."
He learns also to "appreciate the rigid behavioral structure" of the school. He studies hard, exercises more, abstains from alcohol, loses weight, and in dating, feels liberated from the secular hook-up culture.
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