Operation Trojan Fundie, part 9

When I listened to my recording of Morgan’s Monday talk, I remembered a conversation I’d had in the Granville Towers computer lab just before burrowing back into Waymaker. Several girls recalled being in a restaurant when they ran into a crowd of Waymakers coming back from a retreat. The Waymakers immediately started pushing to get them saved–and wouldn’t let up even when the other girls made it known they didn’t want to listen.

Given what I already knew about the level of fanaticism in this bunch, it made me wonder–was this standard operating procedure? I fired off an email to several of my “closest friends” in that bunch asking whether I should tell people about Jesus if they didn’t want to hear it. It would have been a reasonable question from a “baby Christian.”

The first response came from Christina Roland. If there was any doubt that the Waymakers had her completely indoctrinated, it was erased when she replied, “OF COURSE! you should tell people about the Lord even if they don’t want to hear it.” She then went on to say that “once they’re saved, believe me, they’ll thank you.”

A couple of days later, I ran into Christina at an orientation session for sophomore journalism majors. At Carolina, then as now, most students begin their heavy-duty major work in the second semester of their sophomore year. We talked for a bit afterwards, and she told me that two of our “brothers” had kept after her for much of the spring semester of our freshman year about being saved. Apparently they’d finally broken her down, because by the time our sophomore year began, she had become a 200 percent rabid fundicostal.

I walked back to Granville in the middle of an El Nino-fueled driving rain, and tried to process what I’d just heard. When I saw Christina getting into a car with Rollan Fisher and Aaron Kinson earlier in the year, my visceral reaction had been, Those bastards must have done something to her.

But the more I thought of it, it seemed to be a stretch that they would go as far as keeping after someone. For one thing, if they were still keeping up their charade of being a smaller version of InterVarsity and Campus Crusade, keeping after someone about accepting Jesus wouldn’t exactly be a smart move, for obvious reasons. And that was especially true if they were still keeping a low profile–the only way for their snow job to keep going.

And yet, Christina had just told me that this was exactly what happened to her. It had been all I could do to keep my composure. And not just because of the harassment itself. I knew that, on some level, “Darrell the Waymaker” was supposed to be happy that they’d done this to her. After all, in their contorted and distorted world, she was saved now, so that was all that mattered.

So once again, a situation that I’d initially ruled out as being a bridge too far even for this bunch had actually happened. And once again, I’d discovered that this staggeringly fanatical outfit was even more off the wall than even I had suspected.

If there was any good that came out of this, it was that I may have had an out to possibly alert the student judicial system about Waymaker’s tactics. While I believed that at the very least I’d get enough to put a bug in the ear of the parents of one or more of my “brothers” and “sisters,” I had hoped from the beginning to get enough evidence to file a formal complaint with the student attorney general. However, I knew that in order to do so, I would have to prove that they were engaging in behavior that was not protected by the First Amendment. While I knew that this was exactly what was happening, I knew I’d need a lucky break in order to prove it. And I may have just gotten it.

At the very least, this would have never happened had the Waymakers not fostered an environment in which this was even remotely acceptable. Remember, this was an outfit that saw nothing wrong with lying about who they really were so as not to scare anyone away. Not only did they have no problem with Pastor Ron lying about his Maranatha past, but they were perfectly willing to help do his bidding.

The mere fact this even occurred at all was enough to arraign Waymaker and KPIC. But in the back of my mind, an obvious question remained. What did the Waymakers–especially the campus ministers–know about the birddogging of Christina, and when did they know it? While on paper it seemed like there was no way they couldn’t have known, the truth seemed to be a lot more complex than it appeared at first glance. More to come on that later.