doesn't speak of it during the car ride home. Instead, he talks of an upcoming lit test and his aspirations of someday being a fiction writer. In person, King is anything but imposing. Bashful and bespectacled, he instead has an aura of easygoing acceptance, seemingly unlike the fundamentalist religion he adheres to.
But that implicit conflict is just part of the person King is, and it's something he shares with the numerous other fundamentalist Christians on campus. It's about finding individual identity in a rigid belief system and existing in a tolerant society, while espousing beliefs that most don't consider tolerant.
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Many Christians become wary at the mere mentioning of the word "fundamentalism." Hesitation seeps into their voice, and their words become guarded. "How do you define it," they'll ask, or "what do you mean?"
Few words connote such a broad variety of meanings in contemporary society, and depending on who's doing the defining it, fundamentalism can refer to idealism or close-mindedness. Christians want to know what label is being pinned on them.
"It started as an innocent term describing people who believe the basics," says Lanny Maddox, executive director of the University's Campus Christians group. "In some camps, 'fundamentalist' has come to mean radically illogical, highly prejudiced, hateful bigots."
The word has been used to characterize the bombers of abortion clinics and segregationists who decry the so-called "mongrelization of the races." Joel Carpenter, author of Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, says the label, should only be used to describe Christians of this hostile, militant nature. He says these militant fundamentalists are fighting a "culture war to restore the country to the Christian contingent." As for people such as King, who lives according to a strict Christian code but is not exactly militant, Carpenter labels them "conservative" Christians.
Others, like Maddox, interpret the word more generously, and on the University campus, there are non-militant Christians such as King who would describe themselves as fundamentalists. King says his idea of fundamentalism comes down to believing in the inerrancy of the Bible – that “it's all true in one way or another,” – and believing that Christ is the only means of salvation. Timothy Miller, professor of religious studies, also emphasizes the importance of “truth” when describing fundamentalism. “Fundamentalism, if nothing else, gives answers,” he says. “It's firm. This is it. This is the truth. No question.”
These are key ways that fundamentalism distinguishes itself from Christianity's more progressive forms, which often interpret the Bible in a more academic way and don't always make the same claim to heavenly exclusivity.
This fundamentalism is not an identity that restricts itself to any particular
denomination, and in fact, some of these students refuse to affiliate with a denomination. "I just got to a point where I felt like that was emphasizing the differences," says Mary Westfall, Blue Springs, Mo., senior. "The point is all those things are Christianity."
King's experience at the University of Kansas has relaxed his ideas on some spects of Christianity. For instance, he now considers drunkenness a sin, not drinking.
These students like Mary aren't the wildeyed tent revivalists collapsing in fits to the ground and speaking in tongues, and they aren't God's warriors risen from the moral lassitude of the "flower child" 60s to wreck the Lord's vengeance. They are people who believe the right way to live is according to the infallible guidance of the Bible, which holds the answers to all of life's questions.
Still, whether they proclaim their faith loudly or hold it silently in their heart, they are philosophically black sheep on the University campus, in part because their beliefs conflict with more conventional social values.
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King's experience coming to college is a case in point.
Ness City, where he grew up, wasn't exactly a haven for Christian morality. King says it wasn't uncommon, for example, to see drunks and unlicensed 14-year-olds cruising the main drag on a Friday night, and his high school, like most others around the country, had its share of problems with alcohol and drugs.
Nevertheless, on the surface at least, the dusty, no-stoplight burg southwest of Hays was full of staunch conservatives, and while people might take a kids-will-bekids approach to underage drinking, the environment was by no means as permissive as, say, Lawrence.
So, while the University is only 330 or so miles up U.S. 283 and east on l-70 from the flat, red-brick house where King lived the last 11 years of his childhood, culturally, the divide can't be measured in miles, and King's three-going-on-four years of college have mellowed out his perception of certain aspects of Christian morality.
His attitude toward drinking is his first example. The first drink King ever had was on his $21^{\text{st}}$ birthday just this last summer. "I went to $75^{\text{th}}$ Street Brewery, and I tried some sort of wheat beer," King says. "Then she brought out this shot of something, and I drank it much to everyone's amazement." Up until that point, King's alcohol intake had been limited to Communion wine because he was convinced that ANY drinking was a sin.
Upon coming to Lawrence, however, he investigated the issue more closely in the Bible and concluded that drunkenness was the sin, not drinking per say. No other authority but the Bible could have changed his mind on the issue, because as a fundamentalist, that is where King turns to discern the truth.
Perhaps a touchier issue is King's feelings regarding homosexuality. Among the denizens of Ness City, being openly gay
So don't expect to see King stumbling back from The Wheel on a Saturday night, blitzed out of his skull, but he doesn't see anything wrong with the occasional beer.
was about as common as sprouting wings and flying away. In Lawrence, obviously, at the school lovingly coined "Gay U" by western Kansas homophobes, the orientation is more acceptable.
King had never even met a gay person before he came to college. Since then, he's known a couple just within the confines of K.K. Amini.
Here, King doesn't see the same gray area in the Bible that he discovered with drinking. He still thinks the behavior is wrong. But if nothing else, he says being in Lawrence has chinked away at his sense of self-righteousness concerning the issue.
"You see sin in other people and see what I do that the Bible says is wrong is just as bad as what they do," King says, meaning that he sees his own sin as no less serious than the sin he considers homosexuality. King's statement won't soon be celebrated by any gay-rights activists, but it's as far as he feels the Bible lets him go.
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Besides intolerance, another social criticism commonly applied to Christian fundamentalism is that it subjugates women. It flys in the face of a culture still trying to unshackle itself from a patriarchal past. As such, the stereotypical notion of women minding the home while their fearless-leader husbands are off making all the money doesn't sit well with most people.
Maybe that's why it is surprising to meet Mary Westfall, who in one breath describes her dreams of earning a medical degree and being a pediatrician, and in the next, talks about how she believes in the submission model of marriage, where the wife does serve the husband.
Implicitly, she seems like a walking contradiction. On the one hand, there is nothing dainty or dependent about her. Everything from her purposeful walk to her unwavering gaze to her smooth, articulate voice conveys a sense of capability. And yet, here she is seeming to endorse an attitude that diminishes her.
Of course, she doesn't see it that way. Sure, she says, the Bible puts the man at the head of the household, and some groups have used this to subvert the interests of women, but the Bible also says that men should respect and lay down their lives, if necessary, for their wives. There's a give-and-take there that most people fail to notice, though Westfall doesn't blame them for not seeing it. "People aren't going to understand a relationship based on mutual submission," she says. "God honors servants over all."
Westfall hasn't always thought that way. Toward the end of high school, actually, though she had grown up in a Christian family, she found herself gravitating away from those roots into a phase where she didn't know what she believed. Westfall attributes her period of disillusionment mostly to the hard time she had stomaching the idea that Christians were the only ones saved.
So she came to the University and studied other religions to try and fill the void. She read texts from Buddhism and Hinduism. She hung out with people of different faiths, looking for the answers that eluded her.
As for her feelings about the relationship between men and women at this point, she didn't think much of anything. "I CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
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