Loathing on Campus

A crowd of nearly 50 students descended like a pride of threatened lions on an unarmed intruder.

I was walking to class, just getting out of work at the bookstore, when I heard a middle aged man shouting. It was Brother Matt. He looked like he came right off of a New York street corner. The classic protestor with a sign strung around his neck and a Bible in his hand.

He had just arrived and was warming up his vocal chords, on this icy November 9. Besides a man standing off in the distance, I was the first person to stop and listen to him.

The man in the distance came over and handed me a tract (a religious cartoon that tells a biblical story). These tracts tend to be very degrading to any non-Christian, from my experience, so I shoved it in my pocket to read later and started talking to the man who gave it to me. His name is Terry.

Terry told me that Brother Matt goes to campuses around the country making “Cannon fodder,” stirring students up by shouting that they are “whoremongers, drunkards, thieves, potheads, lesbians, gays, and rappers.”

Over the next 20 minutes, the crowd grew and confrontations started to arise. When Brother Matt shouted that every “potty-mouth[ed]” lesbian was going to hell, it caused a large stir that made the crowd grow even more. A girl on a cell phone said, “I’m a lesbian and this is my girlfriend on the phone.” Not even startled by this open announcement the speaker looked her right in the face, with a stare that I had seen millions of times throughout my young religious stint, and told her she would “be skipped across the lake of hell like a flat stone.”

Other students began yelling and a few sensible ones got closer to Brother Matt and calmly asked him logical questions. The air was thick now with nearly 50 students laughing and jeering at each threatening statement that he made. But not everyone took his degrading statements with a grain of salt. A student came out of Upton-Hastings Hall yelling that she was doing homework and wanted him to “shut up.” The anger grew from there and I could feel a riot in the making.

About this time I eyed a police officer leaning against the wall of Upton-Hastings Hall. This was not the first time Brother Matt had visited USM (or the University of Sadomasochism, as he liked to put it). The cop was only there to “keep the peace” as he put it, and to “enjoy the show.”

“The Crowd is playing right into his hand,” he said, “if they just walked away he would leave. But it is nice to know that the school can put on a free comedy act.”

An hour and 15 minutes later when I got back from my English class he was still screaming at the heathens. But it was a different crowd that had gathered. A girl was walking around with a sign reading, “You Know Nothing About Us! So Go Home!” I recognized her as the one who told him to shut up. She told me she could not do homework so she made this sign and even threw it at him.

The yelling moved from subject to subject, mostly revolving around the different headings on his sign. “Liars, Thieves, Lesbians, Sodomites, Potheads, and Idolaters.” The topic turned from masturbation to a long talk about homosexuality. He was given a condom, “con-dumb” as he preferred to call them, by a member of the crowd and opened it and begin saying that they are not safe for sex.

A girl came out of nowhere and joined the group but she came prepared. Charlotte came with her own sign reading, “I Love Pussy.” She stood next to the speaker following everything he said with retaliation and a degrading statement. Keeping in perfect step for close to twenty minutes only leaving to buy a bag of ripe tomatoes to throw.

Charlotte later said, “I don’t think people understand that he isn’t going to listen. You can’t talk to people like that with any sense of reason.”

The show came to an end with the last tomato splattering against Brother Matt’s sign and spraying my jacket. I followed Brother Matt and asked if I could speak with him for a moment. He handed me his last business card and said he would not mind talking.

Matt Bourgault, his wife and his four home schooled children, make up Consuming Fire Campus Ministries which has been traveling for five years to 43 of the United States and a few other missionary trips out of America. We stopped in a patch of grass so he could clean the tomatoes off his sign and clothes. We talked for the next half an hour about his military service, which he still continues in the National Guard.

Everything was going very “reporter-like” when Brother Matt and Terry stopped in an odd unison and Matt said, “I don’t believe you are here talking with us because you want to write about it. I feel that God is calling you back from your backslidden state.” I had told him I was once part of the religious scene (a confession that proved to turn on me). We stood there in the deserted freshman parking lot for a few awkward moments when I said I did not have the same calling.

I noticed a Bush-Cheney sticker on his car and quickly changed the subject to politics. He had voted for the Constitutional Party but felt that Bush was God’s choice and would be better than John Kerry.

He offered me a ride back to my dorm, which I hesitantly accepted. He seemed insistent on showing some sign of friendliness though.

In the day that followed I talked with a few Christians who said that it was “those kinds of people who give real religion a bad name.” Non-religious people just laughed him off as a “zealot.” My brief encounter with this childhood flashback left me with a fear. A fear that these people, these zealots might spring up all over America and make us into a nationwide Bible belt.