Love thy Dukie

The Church of the Good Shepherd welcomed a congregation of a few hundred to their 11 a.m. Sunday service with the baptism of two adults and several children.

I watched from one of the front pews, surrounded by a contingent of 20 or so Duke students, standing stage right behind a small Irish Catholic-looking boy yawning in my general direction, supported by his mother’s cradling shoulder.

The rest of the congregation was a down-to-earth group of young, middle-aged and old, in a mix of argyle, full suits or denim. The church describes itself as an “Evangelical Congregation Affiliated with The Presbyterian Church in America,” and I don’t know exactly what that means, but it certainly wasn’t a quintessential Southern aesthetic. I’d never before seen a pastor wearing a yellow bow tie.

Up on the stage, bewildered children squirmed around their parents’ knees while they were consecrated with baptismal water and promised to God. In a way, all the investments of parenthood, religious or secular, are prayers.

The Duke contingent was almost entirely visiting non-members, guests of Duke senior Andrew Bentley for his public proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ. The adult baptisms were a slightly more serious, less sacramental affair. Instead of his parents, Andrew was accompanied and introduced by Duke Cru Director Cole McLaughlin: “We believe this ministry is not complete until he is baptized as a member of a local church.”

Andrew’s been attending the Church of the Good Shepherd, a few miles west of Duke Forest, since last spring, in response to a spiritual awakening following the death of his friend and fraternity brother, Drew Everson, in October 2010.

“I never really questioned my beliefs. Nothing had ever happened to make me question them,” he said. “It was really the first time I was faced with my own mortality and that terrified me.”

The fear and suffering was communal for members of Pi Kappa Phi, but Andrew’s conversion was mostly a solo venture. Though he grew up nominally Christian and attended a Catholic high school, his family’s churchgoing was limited to Christmas and Easter.

For Duke seniors Katy Warren and Morgan Carney, Cru’s presence was visible even before the first day of school; Morgan connected with upperclassmen leaders of her pre-orientation trip, and Katy stayed with a Cru member during a pre-frosh visit to Duke. You get the sense that their early plug-in to the group assisted their transition and sense of belonging at a secular university—neither girl considered attending a Christian school.

“I didn’t want to be in a bubble, to feel that maybe my faith is strong but hasn’t been challenged,” Katy said. “There’s more respect on this campus than I expected.”

Katy grew up in a devout Christian household: her once adamantly anti-religious mother experienced a sudden conversion during a stadium rally led by the famous evangelist Billy Graham, and her father would often lead the family in Bible studies and daily prayer. She founded a prayer group at her high school in the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C., and says she actually experienced more antipathy there than at Duke. Here, she says her classmates’ responses to her religion are general indifference, along the lines of, “that’s cute.”

In a way, the lack of strong opinions toward Christianity can hinder its motivation for evangelism, and most students I spoke with expressed apprehension at coming off too preachy or judgmental, preferring to “lead by example.” No political impetus like Fundamental Islamic terrorism, which has incited various dialogues on Muslim faith, has put Christianity on the defensive—and the recent rallying to defeat gay marriage in California was mostly organized by leaders in the Mormon church.

So the images conjured by Christianity are more frequently products of social difference than weighty doctrine or theology. It’s the abstinence that sticks out—pre-marital sex and binge drinking are largely taboo in this group. Still, you’d find more conservatively dressed populations among followers of Islam or Mormonism, and the students I spoke with agreed that drinking (but not drunkenness) is OK for those of age. Anyway, these apparent social differences “are not the heart of it,” Morgan said. “We have our beliefs just like you have yours. We hope people see our lives as loving, helpless servants.”

Evangelism within and without

Joey Lauer’s resume should stand out among others in the Class of 2013. He ran a WordPress blog chronicling his reflections from a mission trip to Haiti, called Christ is Alive—Discovering that Jesus is Alive in Our Hearts Today. His contributions to The Gothic Guardian, a conservative publication by Duke Students, outline his political stances: He supports Arizona’s controversial SB-1070 law, praises Glenn Beck and Republicans and says that homosexual partners seeking to adopt will “destroy traditional family structures which have been the backbone of our society.” (His most recent article: “The Pope and Condoms: What Would Jesus Do?”) Joey works with Soularium, Duke Cru’s only evangelical operation targeted toward Duke students.

Basically, he’s a true religious and social conservative, at a school where most Republicans orient themselves with the fiscal ideologies only, and even committed Cru members shy away from missionary excursions that aren’t several hundred miles off campus. And yet, despite the apparent difference, Joey loves his school.

“I’m extremely happy here being at Duke and being a Christian—it’s definitely counter-culture and goes against a lot of attitudes, especially on a college campus,” he said. “[But] as a believer in Christ I’m called to love the people around me—to be involved in the world around me.”

He’s also a member of the Brownstone selective living group and co-president of Duke’s swing dancing club—a friendly, social guy, not a fire-breathing conservative pundit. In fact, Joey was almost timid in person and somewhat guarded in speech. When I pressed him to name the values he thought were unique in the college atmosphere, he mentioned sexuality and partying, but also idolatry, which he described in several forms.

“We value achievement more than God—success in school, accomplishment and approval.... We value sex, entertainment, having fun, not caring.”

I thought about these supposed symptoms of Duke culture while I sat in on the first session of a dialogue series presented by Chi Alpha Campus Ministry, a Christian organization with a brand new presence at Duke. There were only seventeen other students in the large White Lecture Hall beside me for “Bringing Sexy Back,” a cheekily titled discussion on our infamous hook-up culture.

The man leading the series, Lennon Noland, looked and spoke just like Cru’s campus director Cole McLaughlin. It’s the same self-presentation as all the other youth pastors I’ve encountered: young, newly married, mildly attractive men perpetually accompanied by a petite young wife and several small children; the kind of man who pairs button-downs and slacks with flip-flops and calls you “bud” right away.

“These are my credentials to talk about sex and God,” he said, as his wife cued up a PowerPoint showing a picture of their family. “Look at us: We’re five years in, have three kids, obviously got it all going on.”

Though he warned his audience against “missionary dating” to convert partners, he extended the relationship advice to non-Christians (looking around, probably just me), presenting a logical argument on the pitfalls of relationships initiated by sexual connection, or the belief that “eventually I’ll stumble into bed with the right person.” This train of thought was uncannily close to my romantic game plan, and I was a bit too flustered to stick around after the discussion to interview the other audience members, represented largely by giggly first-year girls.

But talking with the seasoned Duke Christians, I got the sense that most of them learn to fit in pretty well here, despite obvious and subtle differences in culture and values. It’s a learning process accompanied by hyper-consciousness of perception. Even Soularium is about “spiritual conversations,” Joey said, although he maintained that it was “not a recruitment effort.”

For Andrew, these spiritual conversations have been one of the hardest challenges to his new commitment to faith, and he admitted after his baptism to being nervous over talking about it to his girlfriend and friends from his fraternity.

“What worries me the most—I think a lot of people outside of the Cru community and Christian community kind of have the view that Christians seem to have it all together type thing, so they might not want to talk about different hardships with them. And also that sometimes talking about things like faith can come across very preachy or talking down, and I don’t want my guys to not talk to me, because I know I need to be able to talk to them.”

These are the surprising dilemmas for a well-assimilated minority group. In the fraternity context, Andrew worries about being thought of as judgmental on issues of sex and alcohol. And with his girlfriend, he spoke of problematic disagreements on spiritual matters. Even Joey, who calls his Cru friends “brothers in Christ,” names his best friends more among the diverse members of his selective living group. And he wouldn’t even think about proselytizing the mainly non-religious members of Brownstone, but is open to the task if asked.

Huge, earnest expressions of effusive love colored the tone of all my conversations, and Andrew repeated that “my guys are still my 100 percent.” The M.O.—call it “showing” rather than “doing”—is certainly endearing, and yes, even cute.

Obligated to Love

I admitted a bit of surprise at Joey’s declaration that Christians are compelled to “love the world.” The concept of worldliness has a bitter association in the Christian lexicon, and countries in Europe that are considered paragons of modern life are associated with atheism and a dearth of spirituality.

On the way to the Church of the Good Shepherd to watch Andrew’s baptism, Katy told me about her summer mission trip to Sweden, far from the classic image of charity-centered expeditions in developing countries. I told Katy that Sweden consistently ranks among the top nations in quality-of-life surveys. She pointed out that Sweden has high rates of single parenthood and suicide, social vices she attributes to a lack of religion.

“The kids are taught about the existence of religions in school, but they’re ridiculed—not presented as real options for them to make informed decisions,” she said.

The attitudes she encountered were almost never hostile, but frequently apathetic or ignorant—“They didn’t know anything about it.” Her boyfriend Casey, who was visiting in from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, agrees that the country was spiritually bereft. The couple met during the trip this past summer and have been dating ever since.

I tried to envision my reaction to Christianity if it’d been presented to me in pristine form as a young adult, but really couldn’t. I too grew up in a devoutly Christian household and was habituated to nightly bedtime prayers by the age of five, or somewhere near the age of the Irish Catholic-looking boy in the pew in front of me, yawning at me from behind his mother’s shoulder. By age sixteen I’d read the entire Bible, C.S. Lewis’s canon and several books of Christian apologetics, and promised myself that I’d be baptized the next chance I got. At seventeen, I found myself waist deep in the Pacific Ocean with a pastor and my father on either arm, gritting my teeth and wishing desperately to teleport elsewhere. It wasn’t my budding liberal politics or well-established tastes for sex and liquor that alienated me from the process: the ritual was just a rude awakening to how much I’d been faking religion for the entire decade prior.

So it’d been a long time since I’d entered a church of my own volition, instead of to appease the parents and anticipate a quality brunch destination afterward. I noticed everything: Katy unconsciously grazing her knuckles across Casey’s forearm; the freckled boy in front of me rotely yawning out the Lord’s Prayer; the yellow bow tied preacher who surprised me by echoing sentiments of Occupy Wall Street, reminding the congregation to be charitable and that the notion of a “level playing field” is a brutal myth.

The experience watching grown men kneel to accept the same sacrament of water on their heads, literal humbling for an audience of hundreds, struck me as brave and admirably different—counter-culture, like Joey had said. These are all things I definitely did not feel during the self-conscious ordeal of my oceanic baptism. I could empathize more with the squirming toddlers being promised to God, a somewhat absurd spectacle to witness. Of course, I didn’t express my ambivalence to the others. I didn’t want them to size me up as the biased liberal journalist with a personal vendetta, something I thought they suspected all along. Even with all this supposed firsthand experience I struggled to really put myself in Andrew’s shoes, to imagine what it feels like as a near-graduate, to make a symbolic gesture of life-renewing and committing so assertively to a belief.

Katy imagined for me: “Faith is scary. It is not a feeling. It is based on rational—your life—experiences, and trusting in something greater than yourself. It can waver—feel like it wavers—but actually doesn’t.”