samsnewsletter.doc is a collection of thoughts about feelings and feelings about thoughts. The newsletter is free, but I’d be honored if you shared it with a friend or two. Enjoy!
For quite some time I’ve struggled to write clearly about my time at Liberty University. I was an undergrad student from 2015-2018, and received my bachelor’s degree from the university. During my time at Liberty, the school went through significant changes. Significant attention has been given to Jerry Falwell Jr.’s personality, politics, and evangelical faith, which all seem to have combined in the perfect storm to make him the ideal loose-gun public figure to heartily endorse Donald Trump and defend him at every bluster. Since the 2016 election, Falwell Jr. has been the subject of journalistic investigations (starting with this and leading to this) into his and his wife’s alleged tryst with a Miami pool boy along with other sexually promiscuous allegations. Other writers have called into question a shady level of nepotism between family businesses and his non-profit university. Just this year, two podcasts (I recommend listening to this one) have made Liberty the subject of their shows. They examined the culture and history of the school and Falwell family to help others better understand what the hell goes on at the Lynchburg, Virginia school. The point is, there’s a lot of noise out there about Liberty University. Many of these books, articles, and podcasts have done incredible work to describe the complex dynamics that made Liberty the white evangelical empire it is today, and many of them also do a great job of showing how Liberty is but one extreme example of the oppression that can be found in white evangelicalism.
I’ll admit, however, that all this noise has made me cautious to share my stories. Liberty has caused an unimaginable amount of pain to both me and so many of my closest friends. And yet, I have avoided sharing my story because I have wondered whether it was actually one worth telling. When I emerged from a place so filled with fear and oppression, it was easy to compare my story with others and determine that I shouldn’t take up space in the noise because others stories are worse than mine. I have only recently been able to refer to my experiences at Liberty as traumatic because I was so long afraid to cheapen others’ struggles that were, in my eyes, significantly more traumatic than my own. But I have come to realize that this latter apprehension is an internalized gatekeeping mechanism that plays too easily into the hands of the oppressors. If we have learned anything through the continuous uprisings against oppressive systems in the recent past from women, the LGBTQ+ community, and the BIPOC community, it is that sharing our stories can serve to both help communities heal while simultaneously calling into account the oppressors.
My intention in writing my story is not to break news or entice readers with juicy tidbits about Falwell Jr. or other administrators. Rather, my intention is to tell a more monotonous story of someone who lived a life at Liberty day in and day out for three years. While so much of the storytelling done about Liberty has been so helpful and good to hear, I often find it misses a certain attention to the complexity of everyday life at Liberty. There were certainly some significant moments in my time at Liberty that shocked me, moved me to action, or made me stop dead in my tracks, but that was not the majority of my time at Liberty. And to be sure, there were other moments that were truly positive and good. However, the majority of my time felt more like bleeding out from paper cuts. This bleeding out led me to an intense crisis of my own faith, which I am both immensely grateful for as well as incredibly sad to have gone through in the way I did.
Before I end this brief introduction, let me emphasize that this story is mine and no one else’s. Retelling stories of one’s past will inevitably involve details that another person might take issue or disagree with. I’m excited to share these stories with my friends who I lived life with in Lynchburg and to hear their critiques and adjustments of my details and telling of the story. But in the end, my goal is to communicate a bit of what it felt like to be me at Liberty between the years of 2015-2018. Some might relate and others might not. That being said, I definitely invite those who were at Liberty when I was to respond with thoughts, ideas, or questions. I am not a closed book on my story and I want to do my best to remember this accurately. If you’re someone who has never been associated with Liberty and have questions or thoughts, please send them my way. I’ll be writing a few of these posts to cover different aspects of this story, and I’d appreciate hearing how these stories hit you from an outsider's perspective. So without further ado, here are some thoughts on Life at Liberty:
Before I get to my time in Virginia, it’s important to lay some groundwork for my story. In many ways, it seems I was destined to attend a place like Liberty. However, I would have strongly disagreed with this notion at the time I was making college decisions. Liberty was not even in the realm of consideration when I was a high school senior looking at colleges. Instead, I was determined to attend any school that wasn’t explicitly Christian. I grew up homeschooled, was very involved in my church, and volunteered a significant portion of my latter high school years to a hyper-conservative Christian organization, and I was ready to experience the world outside of this conservative evangelical bubble. Or at least I thought I was ready.
In the fall of 2014, I moved down to Cincinnati as a freshmen at the University of Cincinnati. Anyone’s first year in college comes with struggles of relating to new people and acclimating to a totally different lifestyle apart from the familiarity of life at home, but I felt an extra barrier to overcome. While I cognitively recognized the importance of being surrounded by a more diverse group of people, there is a level of formation I had already undergone that would make it incredibly hard to quickly develop friendships with those outside of my evangelical upbringing. Part of this was a sense of self-righteousness. I remember multiple conversations about sex and alcohol with classmates where I would outwardly claim that I didn’t judge others who drank or had premarital sex despite my own abstention from both, but inwardly I would tell myself that there was probably no chance I could develop real relationships with these people because of their lifestyles. I know… yikes.
This reveals something quite powerful about the way sectarian religious institutions work. Despite being so involved in so many conservative organizations, I didn’t grow up in a family that actively told me to separate myself from non-Christian people. However, through the influence of homeschool teachers, youth group leaders, and authors of the many Christian Living books I read, I became implicitly biased against those who were not deeply committed Christians. I spent years steeped in learning doctrines and religious ideologies and then was given opportunities to put those doctrines and ideologies into practice through controlled activities such as missions trips and volunteer opportunities with Christian non-profits, which ultimately did the work of forming my beliefs and outlooks on the world in such a way where Christians were the good guys and non-Christians were those who were lost and needed to be saved. While I certainly knew people whose interpretations and actions were much more aggressive and antagonistic toward non-Christian people (and Christians who they deemed not disciplined enough), I still carried a self-righteous attitude about my relationship to others who had not yet been enlightened like I had.
There is a realm of scholarship which theorizes something called subjectivation. This theory begins with the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose work has deeply informed recent scholarship on sexuality, power, and politics. The theory of subjectivation is essentially the idea that institutions who desire to hold power, such as political regimes or religious groups, employ certain “technologies” to influence individuals to act a certain way. As it relates to Christianity, Foucault talks about the way confession works as a “technology of the self” where Christians are continually reflecting on the merit and value of their actions so as to make sure they are not living in sin. This makes confession a form of self-governing. Confession is only one example of the technologies of subjectivation, but it serves as an example of how institutions can use these technologies to form a certain kind of ideal individual. If you’ve been a part of a large youth group, you’ve probably noticed that a certain group of students are upheld as the ideal teenagers. Maybe they’re even part of a “youth leadership team.” This kind of practice praises certain individuals for being ideal subjects within a certain group and incentivizes others to follow in their footsteps.
In my upbringing, I often found great social success in the religious groups I took part in because I followed the doctrines and practiced my faith in an “authentic” way. I was on my youth group’s student leadership team (I was even an official “intern” with the church for a year), I was in leadership in the group I volunteered with, and I often had a leadership role in the church as a musician as well. The point is, I was a product of Christian subjectivation. I was intensely self-reflective in order to avoid sin, and I did my best to surround myself with others who shared this self-reflectivity so that we could all experience the best life possible.
While being an ideal evangelical Christian in high school afforded me a lot of great opportunities, it became an almost insurmountable road block for me when I went to the University of Cincinnati. Because self-reflection had become such an important part of my life, I found myself getting so frustrated with classmates when we would go to lunch together and talk about simple things like sports, who we were attracted to, and what our weekend plans were. I judged these experiences as shallow and therefore not good for making close friendships. I longed for community that reflected on the same questions I did. To some degree I found some of those people in the campus Navigators ministry, but by then I think I had internally given up. By October, I reached out to a leader at the Christian organization I had worked for the year prior to see if there was any space for me to come back for the spring semester, and he said there was. I decided to leave Cincinnati and go back to a community that I knew would be “wrestling” with discussions and conversations I was used to while I figured out what was next for school. During my time at Cincinnati, I had started dating Paige, who I’m now married to. Paige had just recently left her job at the same organization I was headed back to so that she could go back to school. From the encouragement of her parents and mentors, she looked at Liberty University and decided she would finish out her undergrad there. After hearing that Paige as well as a few of my good friends from high school were headed to Liberty in 2015, I decided that maybe I would be interested in a Christian School after all. I hated to admit it, but I knew I had a better chance at finding other students who were interested in having “self-reflective” conversations and seeking out opportunities to put our beliefs into practice. After a visit to Liberty in January of 2015, I decided to apply as a transfer student and enroll in the fall of 2015.
I want to make two quick notes at the end of this newsletter. First, I know this concept of Christian subjectivation might sound incredibly cynical. I want to clarify that I’m not saying subjectivation is the only motivation behind governments or religious groups encouraging the practices that they do. I’m also not trying to paint all technologies of subjectivation as inherently bad. Rather, I’m trying to articulate exactly what the barrier was for me in relating with other non-Christian people in early college because this played a huge role in my decision to transfer to Liberty. The merit of these technologies and any deeper reflection on this theory is far outside the bounds of this short essay. (If you’d like resources to research deeper, feel free to let me know and I can point you toward some!) That being said, I’ll certainly return to this point of subjectivation in later parts of this story. I’ve come to realize it played quite a significant role in my own crisis of faith that I experienced while at Liberty.
The second point I wanted to make is that I was no conservative Christian soldier at this point in my life. While I associated with many of these conservative groups, I felt it was my duty in those groups to offer alternative ideas about politics and theology. It’s a bit ironic that I would return to the conservative Christian organization after a semester at the University of Cincinnati because I experienced quite a bit of alienation in that organization for being too “liberal.” My point here is not to make myself sound better, but rather to emphasize that this form of self-reflectivity is not something only found in hyper-conservatives, but is also found in a more liberal or progressive forms of Christianity. My politics and theology were not a result of me bucking against self-reflectivity and confession, but were instead a result of my embrace of these tools. I felt that my liberal politics and progressive theology was more in line with the teachings of Jesus than the politics and theology of the conservatives around me. In some ways, this produced an even deeper sense of self-righteousness because I was the enlightened liberal surrounded by a group of conservatives. This posture continually led me back into conservative circles in my high school years, and it’s the same posture that ultimately led me to imagine myself at Liberty. What I didn’t anticipate was how much larger of a scale Liberty was in its ability to alienate someone for aspects of their beliefs or identity. After a few months of enjoying the familiarity of Christian community, I would come face to face with the challenges of difference at Liberty. More on that next time.
The Weekly Syllabus
Annette - This movie is wild and weird, but I was so drawn in the entire time. It’s a musical dealing with themes of toxic masculinity, the lure of fame, and the dangers of a life of performance.
How to Get Your Driver’s License - One of the better pieces of short fiction I’ve read in a long time. The pacing makes monotony feel intimate in such an incredible way. We love Kiefer.
Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - With everything going on in Afghanistan over the weekend, I’ve had many conversations with fellow Americans about where the US has gone wrong. While I am no expert in foreign affairs, I do believe this book is a great place to start in helping us locate a new starting point in talking about the human rights the US government has so often seemed concerned about.
Stories From the Great American Labor Shortage - This podcast includes some great reporting on how COVID has given so many service workers pause as they consider their futures in relation to work.
The Human Voice - Sorry for two movies in the same week, but this one is short! If you just want to watch an aesthetically perfect thing for 30 minutes, start here. It’s beautiful and Tilda Swinton is the perfect cast for this one. It’s on HBO Max!
As always, please send ideas, musings, or questions my way.
See you again soon!
-Sam