Collegiate Times

I grew up in a very conservative home, evangelical charismatic, my mother, father and sister. Growing up speaking in tongues was expected of me if I was a spiritually healthy practitioner of our faith. We were also very politically conservative - my parents taught me to not trust homosexuals. We voted Republican. I was in the pro-Life club in high school where we took a public stance against the Gay-Straight Alliance. That was me. I was Bible Boy.

I grew up in a very conservative home, evangelical charismatic, my mother, father and sister. Growing up speaking in tongues was expected of me if I was a spiritually healthy practitioner of our faith. We were also very politically conservative - my parents taught me to not trust homosexuals. We voted Republican. I was in the pro-Life club in high school where we took a public stance against the Gay-Straight Alliance. That was me. I was Bible Boy.

At the end of my sophomore year-beginning of my junior year of high school, I got affiliated with a youth group, which was not where my parents had been going to church. I had a Christian girlfriend at the time, and what Christian couples did was go to youth group together, so I went with her, and when we broke up, she quit going and I stayed. My parents and my sister eventually joined that church with me.

It was definitely a step down from the church I grew up in. Speaking in tongues, for instance, wasn't a common part of the religious service. I got super-involved, working for the church in what was called the "Sound Ministry,"

where I was mixing sound for religious performances and services four or five times a week, probably a thousand people per service. Life was good, I guess.

I had some disagreements with the main pastor there. He would make a lot of gay jokes. There was a student in our youth group who was "struggling with homosexuality," as we called it, which I find terribly offensive now, and we would pray for him so

he could get over his spiritual burden while at the same time

our pastor was making all these gay jokes. And I said, "You know, you're humiliating him." But most of my debates with church at

that time were largely trivial, theological issues.

So my parents forced me to take this course on the comprehensive study of religion taught by the completely incompetent wife of one of the church's main religious figures.

My parents were dead-set on it because they wanted me to have that education before I went off to college. The material was heinously ignorant. My dad was taking the class with me to be

supportive, and he was a little insulted by the quality of some of the material, but he thought some of it was good and said he wanted his son to get that sort of knowledge.

He eventually sat down with

the head pastor once we got through it and said, "You know, I think my son has gone through that class and decided that

Christianity does not compete on the global marketplace of ideas." And he was right. I had.

I was actually very against applying to schools like Liberty University, but Christian issues were important to me applying to college. I didn't choose Cornell University because I didn't find any Christians there. I went there and was looking for a youth group on campus and met up with this one kid who insisted that we pray in the middle of the coffee shop, and all these kids were just sneering and laughing at us, and I picked up this general hostility

toward religion. I had no idea I would be the person doing that in a few years. But I wanted to be an engineer, and Liberty didn't have an engineering school. I prayed a lot

for God to give me direction, and I didn't hear a lot back so

I picked Tech out of several big state schools.

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