Now that I am full-fledged Liberty University graduate student, complete with ID…though, I haste to mention, completing my master’s online, as I refuse to abide by LU’s ridiculous set of rules, which makes Houghton look like the den of sin.

Which it was, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but that’s beside the point.

LU, as part of the new student packet, sent me a car decal reading Liberty University Graduate Program.  For a brief second, I though about putting it up next to my Houghton College Alumni decal, and then quickly came to my senses.  What am I doing at a school famous(infamous) for it’s fundamentalist Republicanism?  I am not an Evangelical, I am not fundamental, and I am not Republican; and I most certainly do not like Jerry Falwell. 
And I cannot put this on my car…but if I cannot even put the decal of the school I am attending on my vehicle, how can I possibly tell people I go there(albeit over the internet)? What happens when my master’s degree diploma reads “Liberty University”?  What does it say when I am asked where I’m attending school, I dance around it and finally settle glibly on “A college in Virginia. Online. It’s accredited.”

What happens when I am against almost everything they stand for?

Such as, in 1994, Mr. Falwell accepting 3.5 million dollars from Sun Myun Moon, the Korean cult leader who claimed he was Jesus Christ’s succesor and superior.  This may have had something to do with the fact that LU was about to go under because of a staggering debt load.  Or the simple fact that he was one of the founders in 1979 of the Moral Majority, an organization which blessedly seems to have disappeared. Or his consistent anti-choice, anti-gay stance.  

Yet somehow I think that I, somewhat pro-choice, certainly pro-gay-rights and semi-liberal me(I might be more liberal if they’d shut up about gun control and worked on reforming health care), will stay at Liberty, even though my professor deducted 3 points out of 20 on an otherwise perfect essay, simply because I wrote(in response to a question asking what testing and treatment options I would choose in a high-risk pregnancy, and mine was carrying a child with Down’s Syndrom) that I, in that situation, would heavily lean towards abortion.  I think I’ll stay because I can see first hand the silliness of fundamental Christianity, an experience, perhaps, that will forever keep me from falling into the same fuzzy logic.

(Plus, I think their views are academically interesting…)