Falwell's Fast Talkers for Christ

For College Debate Team, Sport Is a Mission

Melissa Hurter furrows her forehead when she gets keyed up, and this was a three-furrow morning. At the center of a tiny, crowded classroom at Catholic University, the 19-year-old was letting rip an argument against genetically modified food at the rate of 300 words a minute -- average for a college debater like Hurter but about three times as fast as a regular person.

"AndgeneticallymodifiedfoodwillleadtothedestructionoftheThird- Worldstarvationandviolence . . ."

Hurter spoke without inflection, interrupted only by the occasional gulp of air -- a luxury when you're arguing against the clock. Unintelligible to the untrained ear, her argument charged "GM food" with trashing the environment and the economies of developing countries. She won the competition, and later named her powerful debating ally, an ally upon whom her entire team relies: Jesus Christ.

"I try to emulate Him," Hurter said. "It makes me well tempered. It's a motivation."

This is true for all the debaters at Hurter's school, Liberty University in Lynchburg -- a college founded in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains in 1971 by the Rev. Jerry Falwell to foster his strict brand of evangelical Christianity. Falwell -- whose argumentative talents are familiar to television watchers worldwide -- calls debate "the most important of our 18 sports," and the team has delivered for him: At the sport's premier national championship last spring, Liberty racked up more points than any other school, including such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Dartmouth, Northwestern and Cornell.

The Liberty students debate with a fervor that grows out of Falwell's belief that Christians are under attack and don't know how to fight back. "I don't think the average Christian could defend themselves," said Alyse Kraus, a 19-year-old varsity debater from Fort Walton Beach, Fla., "but because of the training you get in debate, you can anticipate arguments."

Part of the team's mission is to break stereotypes -- particularly on liberal, secular campuses -- of religious Christians as backward or unintelligent, debaters said.

"If you're a great Christian debater, you'll be able through your life to explain our beliefs," said John Borek, Liberty's president. "They should be better at defending the way we believe and convincing others that they should believe that way, too."

The Debate Debate

Liberty's success comes while the college debate universe is accused of straying too far from its moral ancestry. Critics argue that the traditional form of college debate in this country -- policy style, the style in which Liberty competes -- is inaccessible to the public, specialized, expensive and focused solely on winning. Worst, they fear that it creates cynics who believe in nothing.

Policy debate today looks almost nothing like it did when it took root in the United States about a century ago with the aim of informing audiences about civic issues. Since the 1950s -- regarded as debate's heyday in this country -- it has become increasingly irrelevant to the university community, and the number of debaters has nose-dived. Because the debates are impossible to understand, the events aren't publicized on campuses, and students don't go.

But Allan Louden, debate director at Wake Forest University and a historian of the sport, defended its metamorphosis. Debate has simply become more specialized, he said. Better technology has led to better research, which has led to debaters' being judged more on their research than on their persuasive speaking skills.

"We're not training them to have a vehicle for their personal vendettas," Louden said. "That's why I think the end product is a more open-minded person."