The Brown Reader by Jeffrey Eugenides

Author:Jeffrey Eugenides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

How Brown Turned Me into a Right-Wing Religious Conservative

DAVID KLINGHOFFER

Here’s a confession you are unlikely to hear at your next class reunion. Brown turned me into the right-wing religious fundamentalist I am today. That’s not the way I would describe myself, but it is how, very likely, many Brown alums would describe me. In brief, I’m an Orthodox Jew who has argued for seeing political conservatism as a reflection of the blueprint of moral reality found in the Bible. And this happened to me at Brown, notwithstanding its reputation for secular liberalism.

After graduating in 1987, I went straight to work at William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. By now I’m a seasoned professional conservative. I’ve been the literary editor of NR and now serve as a senior fellow at Discovery Institute, which, thanks to its advocacy of intelligent design, is probably the country’s most hated think tank. Among my six books, this title stands out, if nothing else, for its forthrightness: How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. I’ve mellowed out a bit since writing that one, but you get the idea.

No parents, I assume, ever sent their child to Brown in the hope of inspiring a radical political and religious turn to the right. That would include my own liberal and secular Jewish parents, who were startled to realize the effect college was having on me. In high school, I wasn’t content to be just a liberal. In the very Republican suburb of Los Angeles where I grew up, I wore hippie attire and a long beard, though I got rid of the facial hair in time for orientation week at Brown. By that time, I considered myself a socialist and was present, in Birkenstocks, for the school year’s first meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, held in a room in Hope College. Over my bed in Emery-Woolley hung a poster of Karl Marx. My freshman roommate, a lacrosse player from Long Island, seemed to think I was a pretty asinine seventeen-year-old. He was probably right.

By the summer of 1984, still asinine, I found my politics had been transformed. I was a youth delegate to the Republican National Convention in Dallas, which nominated Ronald Reagan for a second term. A noteworthy incident at the convention was the burning of a US flag outside Reunion Arena by a Communist Youth Brigade member. He was arrested (with my hearty approval) and took his case to the US Supreme Court, which ruled, in Texas v. Johnson, that anti-flag-burning statutes were unconstitutional.

What had happened to cause this political conversion? When I was a sophomore, a junior on whom I had a mad crush had a theory on this question: “You’re just a contrarian,” she said. “You’re an anti-chameleon. Whatever other people around you say, you’ll say the exact opposite.” I laughed and half agreed.

We’ll call her Tamara. Back then she was a semiotics concentrator who despised Republicans, took offense at being called a “girl” instead of

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