Little brother has decided to follow in big brother's footsteps and go to Liberty University, rather than following in both sister's footsteps and going to Covenant. Little brother does not like Covenant because he thinks that most Covenant students are slobs with bad hygiene, a problem that going to a school with a dress code avoids.
I was looking at the student handbook last night, and man does Liberty have a lot of rules. The list of all the things that you can get demerits for (they call them "reprimands"), ranges from 1 rep for each half hour past curfew; to 12 reps and a $70 fine for watching a movie with a rating above PG 13; to 30 reps, a $150 fine, community service, and the possiblity of getting kicked out if you get caught with alcohol. There are plenty of other ways you can get in trouble, and if you do, it adds up fast. Most of the higher penalty violations are things that you shouldn't be doing anyway, but some are downright looney. According to their point system, drinking alcohol is seen as just as bad as physical or sexual assult, drug dealing, or commission of a felony. And, just being with someone who is drinking is as bad as sexual harassment or lying to the Dean during an investigation.
I'm kind of thinking that when my parents take my brother to school, they're going to end up having to take most of his music back with them. Students are allowed to have any music they want, so long as it isn't "lewd" (there goes the rap albums) or "anti-christian." He says that none of his music is "anti-christian," but I'm not so sure that the school will agree with that assertion, since he has a large quantity of metal, including death, mellow death, and black metal. He doesn't listen to any music in those genres that have anti-christian content, but Fundamentalists don't generally make distinctions. Having spent most of the first 16 years of my life in Southern Baptist churches, I got it hammered into my head, year after year, that "heavy metal" was "satanic" and "of the devil," and I don't think that position has changed. Oh well, he's good at arguing, maybe he can convince people that his music isn't of the devil, and that if it was, he wouldn't be listening to it.
I do think that he'll have a different experience at Liberty than my older brother did, if for no other reason than that my older brother went into that setting having spent his formative years as a Baptist, while my little brother will go in there having been thoroughly indoctrinated as a Calvinist.
Posted by kathryn at Marzo 12, 2004 12:49 AM | TrackBackand lets not forget that falwell is a bigot
Posted by: JosiahQ at Marzo 12, 2004 08:08 AMall those rules at a place called liberty. I love it.
Posted by: bobw at Marzo 12, 2004 11:31 AMHe should be watching the Left Behind Series and listening to country music.
LOL!
Tony
Josiah, why do you say Falwell's a bigot? He was a segregationist back in the 1960s, but he's since repudiated those views as unbiblical. Is there something else you're thinking of that I haven't heard about?
Not that there aren't plenty of other reasons to complain about good ol' Reverend Jerry.
30 reprimands and a $100 fine for "association with those consuming alcohol." It's a good thing Jesus didn't go to Liberty, he would have been expelled.
Posted by: Matthew at Marzo 12, 2004 01:49 PMI really dug the 9-11 is God's punishment on America for homosexuality. That one was great. I guess it comes from my belief/concern that most fundamentalists are a *position of power* away from being bigots, and well, Falwell is in a position of power.
Posted by: JosiahQ at Marzo 12, 2004 03:08 PMJosiah--Oh yeah, I forgot about his 9-11 comment. That, and when he said that the purple Teletubbie was gay. My older brother and one of his roommates liked to make fun of Falwell, and the funny thing is, when the roommate got married, Jerry Falwell had pull strings to get a judge to come down and issue a marriage license, because neither the roommate or his fiance remembered that the courthouse would be closed for Robert E. Lee Day (so yeah, if Falwell says jump, people in Lynchburg will do it--that's a lot of power).
Matthew--it's only 18 reps if you are associating with people who are drinking and not drinking yourself, so Jesus would only have gotten expelled if he did it for two semesters in a row. Unless of course he was on the basketball team, in which case the punishment would be less (when my older brother was there, half the basketball team got caught drinking at an off campus party, and they didn't get kicked out).
Posted by: kathryn at Marzo 13, 2004 01:03 AMMan, for the life of me I can't figure out why your brother would even want to attend Liberty. You say he's been "thoroughly indoctrinated as a Calvinist" and he is not afraid to own music that some "christians" would condemn him for (just to name two small examples. of course I don't know your brother and I know there is a lot more to him than that, obviously). The whole thing sounds like a major aggravating headache to me.
Posted by: andy at Marzo 13, 2004 03:33 PMI'm not entirely sure why he's going there either, because I think that the rules are going to grate on him somewhat more than they did for my older brother. Part of it has to do with him liking what he saw when we would visit my older brother, and it is a good school. I think that the rules (and those who made the rules) are a lot more fundamentalist than a good many people who go there. The other thing is that the only rules that would directly effect him are the movie ratings and possibly his music. He won't be the legal drinking age till after he graduates (which also means he's too young to get into any clubs to go dancing--not that Lynchburg has anything anyway, the roll up the sidewalks at 10:00), and he doesn't care about the dress code since his fashion sense tends to run towards "metrosexual" and he wears collared shirts and nice pants to class most of the time anyway.
What I do know is that there is a broad spectrum of belief among students at Liberty, from ultra-fundamentalist to anything but. My older brother came out less conservative than when he went in. We had grown up hearing that secular music is bad to listen to, but then after hearing the ultra-fundy guys on his hall going on about how Christian rock is evil, he decided that if he was already condemned for listening to Christian rock, then why not just go all the way and listen to everything else. And, the thing that I think is kind of funny is that it was LU's Bible department that turned him into a Calvinist--infant baptism was a no no, but Calvinist none the less (apparently there is rather heated disagreement in the Bible department on the subject of Calvinism).
Posted by: kathryn at Marzo 14, 2004 12:48 AM
This is not on the site, but you know what the punishment is for producing alcoholic beverages, associating with drunks, long hair and a beard is? Crucifixion.
Posted by: Matthew at Marzo 17, 2004 11:18 PMLiberty gets a lot of bad publicity for their fundamentalist stance on things, but I think that the student body would tell you that there is a totally different flavor on the campus than the rules would lead you to believe. When I visited there periodically throughout the four years that my brother went there, I never felt like there was an air of stifiling fundamentalism. Heck, we've got plenty of 'fundamentalist-type' people here in the student body at Covenant.
Posted by: Rebekah at Marzo 27, 2004 03:59 PM