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!
Some people can make you feel so alone. I don’t exactly know what the trick is, but it seems to be mostly in the way an individual presents themselves. They might wear nice clothes and walk with an air of arrogance that says, “You’ll never have what I have.” They might speak of their social engagements as if they’re a part of a special club of which you would never qualify for. They’re always sure to walk around with their posse in order to never be outnumbered in any sort of confrontation. It’s all sort of schoolyard politics, but these politics govern the culture at Liberty. And no person at Liberty was better at making you feel alone than David Nasser.
I’ve briefly described Nasser in previous stories of my time at Liberty. He was the head of campus ministry while I was a student, which was an extremely powerful and visible position. In many ways, his role can be understood as a student relations position. He was in charge of the tri-weekly chapel services as well as the MC and he oversaw the office of campus pastors and student leadership. During his time at the university, he made a series of massive organizational changes to these offices, which are too detailed and boring for this particular story. What matters more to me is the way he seemed to oscillate so easily between the role of pastor and public relations manager for Falwell to the student body. I find it incredibly frustrating and unfortunate that Nasser hasn’t received more attention from journalists (outside of this fantastic profile), but it’s also quite understandable. To the outsider, Nasser doesn’t mean much. He was just the cool guy campus pastor. But to the student body, he was responsible for shaping the way students perceived what exactly the school was. He worked to shape this in many ways, from how he presented himself to who he invited to speak at convocation to how he addressed the school’s biggest news stories in front of the student body.
From this perspective, it shouldn’t be that surprising to find out that the only school administrator I ever met with in person was David Nasser. Our 45 minute meeting was one of the most impactful experiences I had at Liberty, and not because there was any type of significant conflict in the meeting. Rather, the impact of the meeting was mostly in how Nasser was able to make me feel like I was on an island, separate from himself, Falwell, and the entirety of the student body. But to explain the meeting well, I need to first tell you how I ended up in his office in the first place.
As I entered my senior year at Liberty, I was determined to do my best to make a tangible difference in the university before I left. Just before the beginning of the fall semester, the Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, Virginia just 45 minutes away from Liberty. The rally was put on by a group of far-right white supremacists and ended in violence between their group and counter protestors. Ultimately, one person was killed after a car drove through a crowd of protestors. Within hours of the event, politicians began making statements against the white supremacists and the violence that took place at the rally. School presidents from all corners of Virginia made statements that they stood against the rally and would offer support to the UVA and Charlottesville communities. I remember watching the news closely, waiting for Falwell to make some type of statement decrying the white supremacists and offering support to Charlottesville. But Falwell’s statement lagged by weeks. Meanwhile, President Trump made a statement that there were “very fine people on both sides.” This statement, of course, received significant attention and critique. Only after Trump’s statement did Falwell speak about Charlottesville publicly, where he simply defended Trump and said he agreed with his statement. While mostly predictable, I was furious with Falwell’s statement, and it felt more important than ever to organize on campus to speak out against Falwell’s continual defense of Trump at the cost of the entire student body’s reputation.
As students began returning to campus, Toph, our friend Alex, and I went over to Paige’s house to discuss organizing goals we had for the year. I’ve said it before, but organizing on campus was difficult because some of these meetings would only include three people trying to make a real difference. But this year we felt we had the knowledge and will power to gather more people for our cause, and the events in Charlottesville had renewed our sense of purpose in speaking out against Falwell. We talked about what it would take for us to organize some sort of protest on campus, how we might get our friend Caleb Fitzpatrick elected as student body president, and how we could continue to feed important stories to journalists we had created relationships with over the past year. While we felt these efforts had great potential to create change, I found myself constantly wishing we had some sort of mentor or assistance from someone with access to more resources than a few college students.
And so I thought we might have struck gold when Jonathan Martin tweeted about his desire to come to Liberty and meet with students. Jonathan was a fiery preacher and author who had a unique mixture of charismatic style and progressive theology. He had become well known in the Christian twittersphere for his elegant yet scathing critiques of evangelicalism’s toxic partnership to white supremacy and the far right. After Falwell publicly aligned with Trump’s statement on Charlottesville, Jonathan released a Twitter thread stating that he felt called to come to Liberty to meet with students to pray and discern with them what actions might be taken to call Falwell and his defense of Trump into account. When Toph and I saw the thread, we both jumped on reaching out to Jonathan. If he was going to come to campus, we wanted to be the ones to show him around and connect him with students. We were both a bit unsure of whether it was ultimately a good idea for Jonathan to come at all, but it seemed that if Jonathan could help us draw together some people from across campus it could lead to something productive.
Toph got in contact with Jonathan and we planned on picking him up from the airport once he arrived. He would come for one night only. During that time, we planned on holding a meeting off campus with him and a few students who seemed interested in organizing, and then we would hold a public prayer time on campus that he would announce on twitter. This time would allow others to come and get involved as well as pray over what we might do to protest Falwell’s actions. While I wasn’t sure how productive or helpful Jonathan’s visit might be, I was really looking forward to having someone from outside the university come in to help think through how we might organize better.
When Jonathan landed, Toph and I went to pick him up in Toph’s old, tan Ford Taurus. Johnnyswim, a singer/songwriter duo, was playing a concert on campus that night, and Jonathan had us take him there. He was friends with the duo and was going to spend a bit of time with them before we took him to a friend’s house to meet some of the students we would be strategizing with. After dropping Jonathan off, Toph and I went to the concert and then walked around on campus for a bit while we waited for Jonathan to let us know he was ready to head to our friend’s house. Almost an hour passed by after the concert before hearing anything from Jonathan, but then he sent the below text to Toph.
When we arrived at the hotel to hand off the bag, Jonathan was clearly shaken up. He told us that three police officers from campus, all armed, had walked into the backstage area where he was with Johnnyswim and served him a restriction notice on the entire Liberty University campus. After showing him the notice, they escorted him in a police car off campus to the hotel. When he asked why he was being served the notice, the police officers told him he was an uninvited outside guest who had made public statements about holding unauthorized protests on campus.
We were all furious. Even the members of Johnnyswim, who arrived shortly after us to the hotel, were furious. They posted on their Instagram the next day that they would never play at Liberty again after the incident. Because of the incidents, we canceled our meeting for that night, and Jonathan tweeted out a thread letting students know he wouldn’t be at the prayer meeting. Although Jonathan couldn’t join us, we still held the prayer meeting the next morning on campus. As we were praying, three LUPD police officers, including the chief of police, circled our prayer group. I’m sure their justification for this surveillance was that they wanted to make sure we weren’t posing a safety threat, but it was clearly an act of intimidation.
While a few of us students did get to meet with Jonathan at the hotel the next day, it was only for a brief time, and the meeting never metastasized into anything larger. Jonathan left and would come back for a bigger conference held later in the school year (more on that another time), but any hope of creating some type of sustained organizing campaign from his visit was lost. Jonathan’s visit did, however, become a topic of conversation for many students on campus. Some sided with the administration’s decision to remove him from campus, stating that it was the university’s right to restrict him since it was private property. However, many found it as a massive overstep in the administration’s power.
This felt like a final straw for me. I felt like my desire to have Jonathan come to campus in the first place was because no one from the administration would listen to me. It gave me a bit of hope that an older, more experienced spiritual leader would come and validate my experience and help the student body seek real reform and change in a meaningful way. Removing Jonathan from campus was a physical manifestation of what it felt like to be a student every day on campus: you could use the little power you had to try and make a difference, but the university would always have more power to silence any attempt you could make to undermine them. If they didn’t like what you were saying or how you were saying it, they would simply remove your words from the space they dominated. I felt like the only option I had left was to try and have a meeting with someone in the administration. While I really wanted to talk with Falwell himself, I knew that wasn’t realistic. Instead, I reached out to the highest ranking administrator who had given his phone number to every student on campus: David Nasser.
As I mentioned in an earlier story, Nasser gave out his phone number at new student orientation to all the new students. This seemed like a move to show that he was never too busy for an individual student. He would regularly share stories on stage of the ways he helped out students who in need of prayer, money, or community. So when I felt like I needed to talk to someone from within the school to share my frustrations and hopefully come to some sort of understanding with each other, Nasser seemed like the only person where that was somewhat possible. I had already written a letter to Falwell almost a year before asking to meet, but never heard back from him. So I wrote a long text to Nasser letting him know that I was one of the students who had brought Jonathan Martin to campus, that I was upset with the outcome of his visit, and that I wanted to talk with him about what happened. Nasser responded within a day or so and gave me his assistant’s email address, saying that I could reach out to her to schedule an appointment. When I emailed his assistant, she gave me a series of times of when I could meet with Nasser that were all at least six weeks out. I, of course, chose the soonest possible meeting time.
Two weeks into my six week wait, I had put the meeting on the backburner and hoped to get back to some sense of normalcy when I received an email from Nasser’s assistant. She said Nasser’s schedule had suddenly opened up that afternoon, and asked if I would be available to meet. My heart jumped into my throat when I read the email. Was I ready to talk to him? I hadn’t been thinking about it much recently, so I worried I wouldn’t be as articulate in the meeting as I wanted to be. I even wondered if the six week window had simply been a power move so he could spring the meeting on me when I didn’t expect it. Maybe that sounds a bit paranoid, but these were the mental gymnastics I played all the time at Liberty. Either way, it felt like I needed to take the opportunity that had been offered. The school’s administration and those who represented it had a lot more power than me, and if I could just get a few minutes in the office of one leader, I needed to take that opportunity. I emailed Nasser’s assistant back and let her know I’d be there later in the afternoon.
While Nasser was not any sort of celebrity in real life, the process of meeting with him felt like I was setting up a time to interview a movie star. His office was in a remote part of campus that was technically underground. The office was connected to the arena through an underground tunnel so Nasser could host guest speakers in his office until they were ready to go speak for Convocation. But the office was built on a hill, so while it was underground, there was still an entire wall that had windows, and the windows were heavily tinted so that you could not see into them from the outside. It was like some kind of mixture between a hobbit hole and the batcave. When I arrived at the door, I had to email his assistant to let her know I was outside. She came and took me up to the office and let me know Nasser was finishing up another meeting, but that she would give me a tour of the office in the meantime. The office space was massive and included a few other offices for his staff, a common room, and a kitchen. Nasser’s assistant brought me a water and told me to wait in the common room until he was ready. A few of Nasser’s student workers were sitting in the common room with me. I recognized a few of them from parties or the Convocation stage. They were part of the Liberty Elite I talked about in my previous post. We made small talk while I waited until Nasser came out to greet me.
When Nasser finally arrived, he took me into his office through another large room that had a massive oak table at the center of it. One side of the room had floor-to-ceiling windows while two other walls had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Nasser told me this is the room where they served breakfast to Convocation speakers before they spoke. He mentioned that this was all to emphasize the importance of hospitality both in his office and throughout the entirety of campus. It was a bit ironic, I noted, that he would emphasize hospitality to me when I came to talk about how an individual was forcibly removed from campus just weeks earlier. As he mentioned hospitality, he turned to an industrial-sized cooler full of pop bottles and other fancy drinks. He offered me something and grabbed himself a Coconut Bai. Finally, we arrived in his office, which was connected to the dining room. We sat down on beautiful leather chairs positioned in the middle of the office, which had a large desk toward one side and one wall consumed with a projector playing that day’s SportsCenter.
Nasser’s demeanor was cheery and kind, but it all felt a bit programmed to me. The hospitality, the office tour, the fancy drink cooler. Sure, it was kind of them to extend me their niceties, but I was also keenly aware that they gave this same treatment to everyone. In the same way, I knew the smile I was receiving from Nasser was something he would give anyone who came into his office. But it didn’t speak to anything deeper than that.
As we sat, Nasser asked me why I had reached out. I reminded him that I had texted him about the Jonathan Martin situation, and hoped we could talk about what happened. I spent a few minutes expressing my concern with the way the administration had handled the situation, and told him that it had been particularly difficult over the past couple years to see the culture at the school be so intolerant toward anyone who had a different political, theological, or social position than Falwell. Nasser took on a pastoral disposition while I spoke. He listened quietly and showed concern for my feelings. I wondered as I explained myself whether he might engage genuinely with me and help me walk away with a solution. Unfortunately, Nasser quickly fell into his fusion of PR/pastor role in his response. He began his response with an explanation of the importance of safety on campus and the threat Martin posed because he had stated his intention to hold a protest on campus. (Once again, he never stated that he was going to hold a protest. He said he wanted to hold a prayer time on campus to discern what kind of collective action–including protests–could be organized.)
This is the way the conversation progressed for the 45 minutes I spent in Nasser’s office: I continually brought up points about how the administration was creating a culture on campus of repression for those who had differing perspectives, and he would respond with what felt like pre-written PR lines. I told him it was frustrating that Falwell used his platform so often to speak to the media about his political perspectives and that this felt like it reflected poorly on the rest of the student body. Nasser responded by saying they encouraged everyone on campus to think freely and share their opinions with others however they saw fit, and Falwell was doing just that. These kinds of canned responses became incredibly frustrating and time consuming for the conversation. I knew I only had a certain amount of time, and I wanted to make sure I made my point and felt at least somewhat heard.
I would say about 80% of the conversation I had with Nasser was spent listening to him offer his various responses. While most of his responses were stated with his PR tone and precision, there was one moment in particular where it felt like he was really trying to lean heavily on his role as the pastor of the community. After I had briefly explained why I wanted to bring someone from the outside onto campus to help create a space for student dissent, Nasser told me he thought I needed to be more teachable. He told me that by going against the school’s policy of scheduling an official protest with LUPD, I had set myself up for this kind of situation. He told me this with a tone of concern, as if he was telling me this to help me be better. After he said I should be more teachable, he leaned forward from his chair and said, “You know, while I really admire your passion for these topics and conversations, the reality is that most of this student body doesn’t care at all about them. They’re more worried about getting out the door to class on time with a clean t-shirt so they can impress their crush on any given day.”
This brief moment felt like the crux of my conversation with Nasser. He was trying to level with me in different terms than the rigid, plastic ones he had used the rest of the conversation. What he was communicating to me was that I was all alone. I was different and I didn’t fit in there. Liberty wasn’t a school for politically engaged kids. It was a school for normal people who had crushes and struggled to get to class on time. And hearing this inside his big office with a fancy drink cooler, popular kids hanging in his common room, and SportsCenter playing in the background brought home the point to me that he was the leader of the normal people at the school. I didn’t need to be more teachable because I needed better morals or different politics. I needed to be more teachable so that I could learn to be more normal. Until then, I’d just be on my own radical island with no one to help me.
After his assistant came into his office three times to let him know it was time for his next meeting, I finally shook hands with Nasser and left his office (only after his assistant gave me a free copy of his book.) I spent weeks processing my meeting with Nasser, wishing that there might be some nugget of hope I could walk away with. Not only did no nugget of hope show itself, but I continually felt more defeated the more I reflected on the meeting. The dangerous thing about meeting with Nasser was that he was so much craftier at getting into my head than any other student could be. It was easy to blow off a random student who thought what I was trying to do was wrong, but Nasser held a role I had spent my whole life learning to honor. I had been taught that a pastor was someone who had wisdom and leadership. Even if I thought Nasser had huge issues, there’s a level of authority I had already given him in my mind by thinking of him as a pastor.
While I thought this interaction with Nasser was primarily about my activism on campus at Liberty, I have realized in the last few years that it was really one of my final fits of belief in evangelical Christianity. Since beginning at Liberty, my faith had undergone all sorts of iterations and changes, and I had continually felt myself moving away from evangelical Christianity. But in my final encounter with an evangelical pastor as my own pastor, I walked away realizing that there was no way this form of faith could hold truth, liberation, and love in it for me. Nasser’s belittling and disingenuous treatment of my concern was a tone I had experienced before. Whether it was other pastors, homeschool parents, or church friends, I grew up around many people who were experts in the craft of making people who were different from them feel isolated, alone, and wrong. This was their message, after all: to be right with God, one needed to reflect a specific set of actions, beliefs, and lifestyle choices. If you didn’t fit the mold, you needed to become more teachable until you did.
In a way, Nasser was right. The students on campus really didn’t care about the injustices on Liberty’s campus or the corruption in the school’s leadership. They were easily allured by the cool clothes, pop-culturally aware gospel offered by the leadership of the school. I have already written at length about my experiences with the popularity culture of the student body on campus, and my meeting with Nasser ran parallel with these experiences. In many ways, Nasser enabled and propped up this popularity culture on campus. Many of the Liberty Elite were popular because of their proximity to Nasser. For many of them, their proximity to Nasser was seemingly because of how well they fit into the mold Nasser had set out for me in our conversation. He wanted these people to be highly visible to other students so that they had figures to look to. Almost as if they were role models. These techniques of assimilation are common among evangelicals. You could be an influential, authoritative figure if you knew how to present the core messages of the evangelical faith in a way that was cool and relevant.
Nasser had communicated to me that challenging the politics of the school’s authorities in any sort of disruptive way was not part of the mold he hoped students would fit into. Because many students on campus were trying to fit into this mold, I was in many ways on an island. Coming to this realization also helped me understand that I didn’t belong in Liberty’s community or the rest of the evangelical church, for that matter. I had never really fit in, and it was time for me to give up the reality that I ever would. But I wasn’t completely alone. Not everyone at Liberty was trying to fit into Nasser’s mold. I had friends at Liberty who I continued to grow closer to, and who I still talk with regularly today. I would also soon realize that there were other people nearby who were watching the events that took place with Jonathan Martin and would soon reach out to let me know I wasn’t alone. When they reached out, I realized I had enough energy in me for one last push at the end of my time at Liberty.
The Syllabus:
C’MON C’MON - The best movie I saw in 2021. Such a beautiful, warm film that doesn’t shy away from the weight of the contemporary moment. It’s one of those movies where you’re laughing one minute and crying the next.
Ninth House - Shoutout to Madelyn for this recommendation. This novel is such a fun read. I’ve heard it described as a mixture between Harry Potter and The Secret History, and that seems to check out. If you’ve been wanting to get back into reading and need something fun and digestible but still incredibly good, I’d start here.
Switched on Pop - My brother sent me this podcast a couple months back and I honestly love it. The hosts can be a bit bro-y but they offer some really interesting insight into some of the pop songs, artists, and trends you hear every day.
Drive My Car - Another one of my favorite films from 2021. A brilliant Japanese film about loss, memory, and friendship. The acting and cinematography make you feel like you’re completely engrossed in the world the filmmaker creates. It’s based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, so you know the story is going to be good.