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By Root 748 0

us and sent us along into the admissions office, where we were met by an extremely friendly, well-scrubbed, wide-eyed female staffer. Like every woman at BJU, she wore a skirt that covered not just her upper thigh, but her lower thigh, and her knee, and her calf, and her either well-turned or not well-turned ankle. No real way of knowing. But she was really nice and showed us the official admissions video, which featured two miniature pirates who introduced themselves as “your guardians.” At BJU, they told us, you’re never alone. Remember I said “constant monitoring” would be a theme? The creepy mini-pirates weren’t kidding.

We scheduled a 1 P.M. interview with “Gerald”1 and decided to grab some lunch, joining the mass of students pouring out of chapel and into the dining commons. There were thousands of them, young men in shirts and ties and khakis, young women in their ankle-length skirts. You could say we stood out. We were about to face our first test.

His name was Doug, an intense, though extremely nice, finance major. In an effort to appear as if I had nothing to hide, I said hi. Doug squinted, looked me over skeptically, and decided to keep an eye on us. Very nicely, he offered to help us get lunch and sit with us, and then asked us lots and lots of questions about who we were and why we were there.

I took this as an opportunity to take our elaborate ruse out for a little test drive. Andrew’s dad, dead. Mom, depressed. Mom finds Jesus. Wants Andrew at BJU. Throws out back carrying boxes of blood. Doug asked if Andrew wanted to go there. Andrew didn’t know, but I pointed out that his mother really, really wanted him to. Doug said that Andrew shouldn’t go unless he really wanted to. Hadn’t Doug read “The Three Shipwrecks”?

Then things started getting sticky. Doug was asking me questions. Like, what did I do for a living? And why did I look familiar? I told him I was a writer, which is true, by the way. Remember, I lie only when it’s absolutely necessary.

To get us off a potentially incognito-blowing line of questioning, I cleverly changed the subject to creationism. You really believe it? Doug said he did, and so did all his friends sitting around us. According to Doug, evolution made no sense at all. No mutation, he insisted, had ever been beneficial. I looked at my thumb, but said nothing, as I used it to hold my fork and shove the worst lunch I’ve ever had into my mouth. It was some kind of creamed broccoli on a bun. But then again, you don’t go to Bob Jones for the food!

Doug told us that the chances of protoplasm evolving into a human being were infinitesimally small: one over ten to the 256th, or something like that. Duane, an intense, but extremely nice, business administration major, came up with a vivid analogy. “The chances,” Duane said, “of protoplasm turning into a fully formed human being are worse than the chances of an explosion in a junkyard yielding an intact Boeing 747.”

Doug could tell that I wasn’t buying. “So, Alan,” he said. Oh, I forgot. I had changed my name to “Alan” as part of our undercover operation. My name really is Alan—remember, only when absolutely necessary. “So, Alan,” he said, “why do you believe in evolution?”

“Well, Doug, I’m not a scientist. But it seems that every scientist in this field at an accredited university [heh, heh] believes in evolution. You know, at M.I.T., Stanford, Wisconsin, Arizona State, Wake Forest, you know, everywhere.”

Doug had a good answer. “So, just because everyone believes something, you think it’s true. Well, remember, the Catholic Church taught for hundreds of years that the sun revolved around the Earth. Then they persecuted Galileo for saying the opposite.”

“I think you’re making my point, Doug. The Church based their conclusions on faith, just as you are. Galileo was an empiricist, like all those scientists at the accredited universities.”

Andrew was growing more and more uncomfortable. Though he was thirty-two years my junior, he felt that I was exhibiting poor judgment by questioning the fundamental belief of the entire institution while