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In today’s GNED II class, Dr. Parks announces that we will be talking about gender roles in the evangelical world. Dr. Parks spends the first ten minutes of class laying out the two main positions evangelical Christians take on gender issues. The first position, egalitarianism, means exactly what you’d expect it to mean — men and women are equal, both in the church and in the home. Women can be pastors of a church, they can teach Sunday school, and husbands and wives share equal authority in marriage. The second position, called complementarianism, means, in Dr. Parks’s words, that “God created man and woman with different roles that complement each other.” Complementarians believe that only men can be pastors, that only men can teach Sunday school or other Christian education classes (unless it’s an all-female class). Complementarians also maintain that the husband should be the head of the household. They quote Ephesians 5:24, “As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything (NIV).”

“You can obviously tell where I am on this,” Dr. Parks says. “I am definitely a complementarian, without apology. I think the egalitarian view is greatly skewed.”

Dr. Parks clicks a few buttons on his laptop to start a PowerPoint slideshow. The text is accompanied by photos of white, midthirties couples clutching each other, loving gazes plastered on their faces. As the presentation plays, we fill in the blanks in our workbooks:

Dr. Parks realizes that to a nonevangelical, the complementarian view of gender roles can sound misogynistic, but he assures us that it’s not. Women can still hold high-power jobs under the complementarian model, he says, and they should still get equal pay for equal work. But when push comes to shove, a woman’s priority should be her family. “For a woman,” Dr. Parks says, “if the career is most important, and the family gets left out, that’s a problem.”

At first, I couldn’t believe Liberty actually had a course that teaches students how to condemn homosexuals and combat feminism. GNED II is the class a liberal secularist would invent if he were trying to satirize a Liberty education. It’s as if Brown offered a course called Secular Hedonism 101: How to Smoke Pot, Cross-dress, and Lose Your Morals.

But unlike that course, GNED II actually exists, so I’ve had to figure out how to process it. I keep thinking back to Marcus Ross, the creation studies professor who was written up in the New York Times for his doctoral research on 65 million-year-old reptiles. Ross was able to compartmentalize his brain into two functional halves — a religious half and a secular half-and for a while, I was too. I could sit in History of Life class and hear Dr. Dekker talk about the flaws in Darwinism without going crazy, because I convinced myself that I was just filling an alternate space in my brain. What’s the harm in that?

GNED II is different, though. I can’t convince myself that those lessons about fornicators and homosexuals are innocuous. For one, whereas I’m not an expert in evolutionary biology, I do have enough experience with gay people to know that homosexuality is not a “compulsive lifestyle involving many sexual partners.” (In fact, a lot of my gay friends at Brown spend a lot of time complaining about how little sex they’re having.) But aside from the patently offensive content, my biggest issue with GNED II is the way it bundles political and social issues with religious issues, and what that means for a guy who’s trying to give Christianity a fair shake.

Over spring break, I finally finished Left Behind, the apocalyptic novel I started a month or so ago. And per my expectations (spoiler alert!) the secular journalist Buck Williams has a religious conversion. I’ll spare you the details — it involves a Romanian politician who turns out to be the Antichrist — but suffice it to say that Buck deals with his skepticism, gets down on his knees, and accepts Christ as his savior.

That part didn’t bother me so much. The part that worried me was the lead-up to that conversion. A few pages before Buck converts, his thought process is described in these terms: “If this was true, all that Rayford Steele had postulated — and Buck knew instinctively that if any of it was true, all of it was true — why had it taken Buck a lifetime to come to it?”

That middle clause — “Buck knew instinctively that if any of it was true, all of it was true” — is the same rationale Liberty professors use to prove that the earth is six thousand years old or that wives must submit to their husbands. If the Bible is infallible, my professors all say, and if the parts about Jesus dying for our sins are true, then a host of other things must also be true, including the sinfulness of homosexuality, the pro-life platform, and the imminence of the rapture. In Liberty’s eyes, the ultraconservative interpretation of scripture carries the same inerrancy as scripture itself, and if you don’t buy it all — if you’re a liberal or moderate Christian — you’re somehow less than faithful. That sort of prix fixe theology, where Christianity comes loaded with a slate of political views, is a big part of the reason I’ve been hesitant to accept Liberty’s evangelicalism this semester. Somewhere down the road, I might be able to believe in Jesus as Lord, but I could never believe that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle or tell my future wife to submit to me as her husband.

I suppose it’s weird that I’m more attached to my social and political views than my religious beliefs. Is it really more reasonable to believe that the savior of the world was born of a virgin, lived a sinless life, died for our sins, and was resurrected three days later than to believe that the universe frowns on gay people? On a purely logical level, probably not. But it is what it is, and it does me no good to pretend otherwise. The mind, as we know, is a funny thing.

Kevin Roose is a senior at Brown University, where he studies English literature and writes regular columns for the Brown Daily Herald. His work has been featured in Esquire, SPIN, mental_floss, and other publications. Click here to purchase The Unlikely Disciple, on sale now!

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