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Summary Of The Unlikely Disciple By Kevin Roose

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The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester At America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose gives a unique perspective on the different cultures in America and how diverse each one can be. Kevin Roose, an undergraduate at Brown University, decides to “study abroad” at the conservative evangelical Liberty University to see what it was like in stark contrast to his liberal Ivy League. Upon arriving there, he was an outsider who was used to seeing those types of people (evangelicals/born-again Christians) as kooks and weirdos, however, as he really dives into Liberty’s culture, he realizes that the students there really don’t hold secret meetings to create anti-abortion rallies or beat up gay kids in their spare time. There was a surprising amount …show more content…

Roose’s approach was immersion, which could also be associated with ethnocentrism, because he bases his analysis of Liberty off of his native culture. Even analyzing off of these standards, he is still able to assimilate and find his place in Liberty. This gives a more “human” perspective on a culture than just averages and numbers. Roose’s approach is not “scientifically rigorous”, as in he doesn’t use statistics or tests or much less the standard scientific method, but that’s what makes his account all the more relatable. It was important for him to study this subculture through immersion rather than statistics because it’s people like him who this perspective is useful to, which is the more common majority in America than the ever-shrinking fundamentalist Christians. For example, if one just asked students how they felt at Liberty, of course they would say, “I love Liberty! I love the rigidity and discipline to help me steer a straight path towards God!”, and people would most likely discredit it as bias towards Christianity or that the student has been “culturally brainwashed”. In Roose’s case, however, he’s on the opposite side of the spectrum, from a liberal family who are “Quakers”, but which seems to just mean “Agnostic” these days. Roose is an outsider, which is appealing to most of America, because they too are outsiders to Liberty’s counterculture. What makes his story credible and useful

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