Leadership and Crisis (7 page)

I bombarded friends and pastors with questions. I read classics of Christian apologetics, books about Biblical archeology, and books like
Evidence That Demands a Verdict
. My mind kept whirring. I wanted to know how the Church worked and how decisions were made. I asked a Catholic layman, “How does one get elected Pope?” “Bobby,” he replied, “don’t become Catholic because you think you’re going to be Pope.” Perhaps he knew me too well.

My constant queries were not always welcomed. At one point a pastor pulled a friend aside and said, “Look, Bobby is just not going to become a Christian. It’s not going to happen. He’s so stubborn. He’s got so many doubts.”

My questions continued until Kent (who had given me that Bible I read in my closet), invited me to hear him sing in a church musical at Chapel on the Campus, a nondenominational church at LSU. In the middle of the performance, they showed a simple black and white film about the crucifixion. I had intensely studied that momentous event, yet watching that film I suddenly realized that Christ was on the cross because of me—my sins—what I had done, what I had failed to do. This was my epiphany. He didn’t die for billions, which was so abstract, but because of me. Suddenly, God was tangible. Everything instantly came into focus. An historical moment in the Bible became a living reality. Christ had died for me, and how arrogant was I to be anywhere but on my knees worshipping Him? I don’t know why God chose that moment to reveal Himself to me, but I remember exactly when it happened.

I started reading the Bible with Todd Hinkie, a youth pastor, and I realized, under his guidance, that it was not just a book of stories and obscure genealogies and laws, but a series of personal letters from God slowly revealing himself to man, to me. I spent hours in fervent prayer, repentant and grateful. In the summer of 1987 I knelt in prayer and accepted Christ as my Savior.

But for a year I postponed telling my parents. The moment of truth came after the car accident, when my mother questioned which God had saved me.

I prepared myself for the worst. I was a senior in high school and I had been accepted early admission to a unique pre-med program at Brown University; now I feared my parents wouldn’t pay my tuition. I thought they might kick me out of the house. I had even quietly secured a scholarship and a job at LSU just in case.

I told the truth, and as I expected, my answer set off an emotional bomb in the family. My parents blamed themselves for being bad parents, and blamed me for being a bad son, and then blamed Christian evangelicals for, well, practicing evangelism.

My father had practical worries. Given the poverty he had seen growing up, he measured success in material terms. He lived by the idea, expressed by Maxim Gorky, that no man could consider his life worthy unless his children surpassed his abilities and achievements. Spiritual interests, particularly something new like Christianity, were a distraction or a diversion from material success. My mom worried that I might have been manipulated, that I might be the victim of a smooth-talking, corrupt televangelist, or that I might be joining some cult.

Many Christians, born and raised in Christian families, take their faith for granted. For me it was a hard-won treasure, the result of a painful and deliberate process of accepting the truth of Christ. If
Christianity is worth risking family and friends for, it is worth practicing every day, whether convenient or not.

My path to Christianity was an intellectual journey followed by a leap of faith. It took me years, and at the end of it I concluded that the historical evidence for Christianity was overwhelming: Jesus had walked the earth and had performed amazing miracles in front of thousands of people. He claimed to be the Son of God, rose from the dead in front of witnesses, and His apostles willingly gave their lives for Him because they were certain of His truth.

That struck me as reliable history. But I also discovered that you can’t read yourself into faith. God is thankfully too big, too amazing to be fully comprehended by the human mind. That’s why, ultimately, you have to make the leap of faith. You need to trust God and accept Him, including all the mysteries.

My parents eventually accepted my conversion to Christianity. Looking back now, I can see they initially felt I was rejecting them. When they realized I still loved them, and respected and honored them and our heritage, they relaxed. They also discovered it was not just a fad, and that I still embraced the same values they had taught me as a child. Our relationship benefitted from the fact that my parents’ Hinduism proclaims there are multiple paths to God, and that there is but one God. It would have been harder for my parents if I had told them I was an atheist. When my children were baptized into the Catholic faith, which is where my spiritual journey ultimately led, my parents were on hand to celebrate the good news.

For my father, my requisite career path was pretty simple, reflecting the deprivations he had seen in his early life. “Son, you can grow
up and become any kind of doctor you want,” he told me. So when I enrolled at Brown in fall 1988, my course of study was clear. I was accepted in the university’s PLME program, which offered automatic admission to Brown’s medical school. In my mind I was on a fast track to becoming a surgeon.

Providence, Rhode Island, was very different from the laid-back southern culture I had known in Louisiana, and Brown was especially distinct. I assumed that many of my Ivy League schoolmates would be better educated than I was—they came, many of them, from elite Northeastern prep schools—but I soon found that a Baton Rouge education could hold its own. What I wasn’t prepared for was the rabid “political correctness” of campus life. This was a campus where the College Democrats were considered the
conservatives
.

A few weeks into my freshman year (oops, at Brown you didn’t use the term fresh
man
—that would be sexist) our resident advisor (who actually became a good friend) took me aside. She told me I was causing great offense because, as she said, “You’re holding the doors for the female students. And you need to call them
women
, not
ladies
or girls.” (Actually she would spell it
womyn
because to spell the word wo
men
would be sexist, too.) She went on for about ten minutes, telling me exasperatedly, “Look, Bobby, this is not how people act up here.” I glanced over at some of my dorm-mates and started to grin
. Oh, I get it. They’re teasing me. This is hilarious.
But she continued with such earnestness that I realized she was dead serious. I sat there for a moment dumbfounded. “But that’s how I’ve been raised,” I finally exclaimed. “That’s who I am.”

I rebelled against Brown’s insistence on politically correct uniformity. I refused to attend a mandatory new student orientation program in which, in the name of tolerance, straight men were asked to
take on the identity of gay men. When the resident advisor reminded me the session was mandatory, I stood firm. “I’m not going. You can send my dad’s tuition money back, but I’m not going.”

Early in my first semester, Rory Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy, called my dorm looking for my roommate, who was a leader in the College Democrats. When I told her he wasn’t there, she said, “I was calling him to see if he wanted to go to a protest. You want to go instead?”

“Really?” I asked. “What are you protesting?” I thought it would be something serious, maybe apartheid or some other human rights issue, or even nuclear power.

“Fruit,” she said. “We’re protesting against fruit. We don’t want people to eat grapes.” I later learned the protest had something to do with Cesar Chavez, pesticides, and the United Farm Workers of America. But at that moment, it struck me as absurd. You already had other groups on campus protesting veal and red meat. Now they were protesting fruit. We had all the basic food groups covered.

“Well, in my family, we like to eat grapes,” I said. “Red ones, green ones, we like them for lunch and dinner. We like all kinds of fruits. Vegetables, too.” Not finding this very funny, she asked me to leave a message for a roommate. I was never invited to attend a protest rally again.

I had never been a terribly political person in high school. Sure, I watched the news and knew who was running for president. But at Brown everything was politicized to the point of absurdity—except to the folks at Brown, I was the absurd one. I was often told, “You are the first pro-life person I have ever met.” I could have kept my head down and my mouth shut, but that was not my nature. Instead, I spoke up for ideas that were incredibly unpopular with my
fellow students. I realized that my own beliefs were conservative, and Brown forced me to think about
why
I was a conservative.

I worked hard at Brown. I was a biology major taking twenty hours every semester, rather than the normal load of sixteen. The plan was to save money and graduate a semester early, which I did. But even with my heavy class load I was active in the College Republicans, Campus Crusade for Christ, and Intervarsity Fellowship.

Years after I left Brown, I was a guest instructor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I remember once discussing diversity and pluralism at a luncheon with Harvard president Larry Summers, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, and an editor from the
Washington Post
. I asked Summers, “Does it bother you that you don’t have a diversity of political views in your student body and faculty? You talk about the need for racial diversity, but what about philosophical diversity? Why are conservatives underrepresented?” His answer shocked me. “You know, the reality is that many evangelical Christian families who vote conservatively don’t want their kids here,” he said. Then he added, “And that’s probably good for them and good for us.”

Imagine if he had uttered the same thing about blacks or Jews or Muslims. Perhaps even more amazing, there was no dissent in the room. No one seemed to note the irony that Harvard had been founded primarily as a Christian seminary.

Summers deserves credit for honestly expressing what many other elite academics think. He was not being malicious or combative. And I certainly do not favor affirmative action for conservatives. But there is a definite disconnect between our elite institutions, which have become liberal cocoons, and the values held by most Americans.

Still, I never regretted my three and a half years at Brown. There is truth to the old Biblical saying that iron sharpens iron. At Brown I
heard some of the best, most articulate and most intelligent arguments against everything I believed in; and I found that at the end of the day, I could hold my own. In the Bible we are taught to be salt and light in the world. But you’ve got to be in the world to make that happen.

After Brown I hoped to go to Harvard medical school. When I was accepted I was genuinely thrilled, but I went through the application process at several other schools just in case. One was Johns Hopkins, where I was required to sit down for an interview. My interviewer didn’t ask about my grades or transcripts. Instead she remarked, “I hope you’re not one of those crazy pro-life Catholics.” She must have looked at my volunteer activities and noticed I had been involved with several Christian ministries.

She spent the entire interview grilling me on my personal views and faith. If I had been a devout Muslim or of any other faith, this would have been considered highly inappropriate, but campus liberals seem to think Christians are fair game. Later, during my exit interview at Brown, I told them about my grilling at Johns Hopkins. The Brown administrator sided with the interviewer, though the dean was conciliatory. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with being a Christian, I just don’t want you to be one of those
crazy
Christians.”

Then something happened that changed the course of my life. I was offered a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University. When I broke the news to my dad, he asked, “Do you need to go?” He saw the scholarship as an unnecessary delay on my path to medical school. “Trust me, dad, this is a good thing,” I told him.