COLUMN: The Locust Walk Apostles

From Michael Periera's, "The Raw and the Cooked," Fall '97 From Michael Periera's, "The Raw and the Cooked," Fall '97You walk Locust Walk, seeing and being seen, carefully gauging the elegance of your step and the duration of eye contact. You're in a hurry; you have to choose your acquaintances carefully. Tarot card readers on your left wear thick mascara and pink, rococo headgear. Three bald Hare Krishnas sit surrounded by swirls of incense and books on spiritual healing. Banners announce events you won't attend. Somewhere a band plays live muzak? High drama walks arm-in-arm with low comedy -- tenured professors next to religious imposters in gabardine cloaks. Moonies and academics wearing tweed and corduroy. It has a personality that changes with ages, a promenade weathered by fads and time. Now in our age of cults, comets and candid memoirs, Locust Walk also hosts that strange, vocal slice of Americana -- the aggressively religious. You always know who they are. In some cases, their dress is conspicuously plain: white shirt with black pants, black tie and iconic black sneakers. They carry clipboards and smile beatifically. Sometimes, they go incognito: J. Crew mufti, ball cap, and windbreaker. Appearances notwithstanding, their mission is constant and ecumenical: to evangelize, to convince, to win over. Our Locust Walk Apostles -- like self-styled Loyolas or Jim Bakers sans TelePrompTers -- have become regular and regularly ignored fixtures on the Walk. They make uneasy eye-contact, they ask if they can ask you a question, and, feeling ironic, you may even stop to talk to one. Conversations usually follow a predictable trajectory: "Do you believe in God?" "Sometimes. He's old and hoary. He can be found outside Wawa wearing a suit and tie with running shoes." "God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent?" "Neitzsche said God is dead." "God said Nietzsche is dead." "You can't prove God exists." "Look around you." "God is a high rise?" Etc., etc. They hand out recyclable leaflets that reduce big metaphysical matters to short Biblical quotes. They speak of salvation in terms of bliss and brimstone. The soul takes its place next to bake sales, ticket hawkers and projects-in-progress for Management 101. Apparently unbeknownst to them, these Apostles are doing their dogma a disservice. They reduce the philosophic difficulties of faith to a catechism. Televangilism comes true. Penn's Locust Walk Apostles, therefore, are guilty of academia's original sin: condescension. Do they really think we as Ivy leaguers, as tomorrow's leaders, haven't heard their dog-eared mantras? That we are unfamiliar with Christendom's long empire of conquest and crusade? They talk down, in a sense, repeating themselves with a numbing effect. Their MO comes across as disingenuous, at times, almost insulting. Aggressive religion becomes a watered-down theology, anesthesia against its own contagion. Religion is an opium again; but because this is America as opposed to Marx's short-lived capitalist interlude, Locust Walk Apostles have every right to do what they do. Similarly, students have every right to ignore them. Outsiders should respect their religion, nonetheless. These groups obviously take their mission quite seriously; what to you may be farce may to another be tragedy, and vice versa. Problems enter when campus evangelism obscures the line between religious freedom and asexual harassment. The fault lies not in their doctrine, but in their method, that they are offensive. Within the confines of Penn's unwritten rules, loud proselytizing sticks out like a sore thumb. At its most vocal, the sound and fury of the soapbox can be an eerie sight indeed. The image trespasses on your personal space, it molests the sovereignty of your thoughts. In a word, it's sketchy. An otherwise plain looking man is converted to something altogether strange and shocking when he mounts the bully pulpit: yelling at the top of his voice, depicting Styx in vivid geographies, promising damnation while dry spittle collects at the corners of his mouth. He conjures pictures of possession and padded rooms, snake-handling cults and paramilitary groups. What happened to the lofty and the divine -- those ostensible aims of his enterprise? Yes, the soapbox style is just one extreme manifestation but the alienation it produces comes closer to a rule than an exception. Campus evangelism is a spectacle, not an enticement. In the wake of Heaven's Gate-gate, Penn's apostolic order seems suspiciously cultish. But as a "typical cult apologist" pointed out in the New Republic, "every religion is 'bizarre' for those who do not accept its strictures or practice its tenets." One man's cult may be another man's religion. In some cases, though, cults may actually be cults. Where's the distinction? Basically, a cult is defined not by its doctrine but by group dynamics involving mind control and demagoguery. Cults are not mystic, but psychological phenomena; their holy city is the Freudian couch. Coercion and "corporeal colonization" are conventional scare tactics. A privileged relationship with otherworldly beings is not uncommon. Tire-lined compounds in the middle of nowhere are a dead giveaway. In many cases, though, so-called "cults are little more than syncretic Christian heresies, mixing the gnostic, the phallic, the occult, the extraterrestrial and so on. Where, then, does religion end and cultism begin? The answer is a matter of semantics and fine lines. Do Penn's Locust Walk Apostles constitute a cult? That, too, is a judgement call. One thing is for certain though: they add a far-out, eldritch element to Penn's main artery: tasteless, perhaps, but for the most part benign. They are harmless because Penn still fosters free, critical thought, and Penn's population is not intimidated by ideas. We are open and discriminating. And we're not afraid to learn from the clash of concepts -- the sound and the absurd, the mystic and the mundane? the raw and the cooked.