By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 15, 2007; A01
Danny Leydorf's world was about to be turned upside down, and he couldn't wait.
The extroverted teenager had shined at the mostly evangelical Annapolis Area Christian School since kindergarten, but now he wanted to test his faith in a more diverse world. With hopes of becoming a lawyer or politician, he badly wanted to understand people who didn't think like him.
"I feel like I exist to be interacting," the lanky, towheaded 19-year-old said eagerly one day last summer, shortly after his graduation.
So he'd deliberately picked a large, secular college: the University of Maryland. But the week before he was to leave, the wider world dealt him a blow.
"I hate evangelical Christians," read the Facebook.com profile of his roommate-to-be, who had seemed so perfect on the phone. He loved politics and "The Simpsons," like Leydorf, and they even had the same views about how to set up the room. Could it still work?
That was to be just the first of many challenges and unexpected twists Leydorf has faced this school year as he plunged into the mainstream. He's gone from student body president back home to outsider. He struggles with when to talk about God and when to keep his mouth shut. He wrestles with how Jesus would define tolerance.
As atypical as he sometimes feels, Leydorf is traveling an increasingly common path for graduates of private evangelical schools, institutions that sprung up in the 1970s specifically to shelter students from the broader culture. In decades past, graduates of the fast-growing movement often went on to religious schools or overseas mission work.
But today's young evangelicals live in a less tidy world, where Capitol Hill and Wall Street are considered mission fields and evangelical leaders are taking more diverse positions on issues including global warming and homosexuality.
Since last spring, The Washington Post has visited with Leydorf as he has sought a toehold in the new landscape.
* * *
Leydorf had long been certain he wanted to go to a secular college -- a top secular college. He had founded the debate team, had played junior varsity soccer and was on the student disciplinary board. But what he really craved was the chance to deconstruct the religious and political beliefs with which he was raised. He'd even set aside his own "right-of-center" political leanings during his senior year and pursued an internship with Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), "a notorious liberal," Leydorf said.
"I want to sincerely seek the truth," he said in May, "not just what you want to believe."
With his secular ambitions and accommodating views, Leydorf is a curious product of the 30-year-old evangelical private school movement. Educational historians say the movement was one of the fastest-growing segments of the private-school world from the 1970s, when the schools began, until recently, when growth flattened.
The Association of Christian Schools International, the largest group of such schools, represents 5,000 U.S. schools, compared with 1,000 when it was founded in 1978. But today such academies are at a crossroads as they become more focused on academic success. Parents increasingly want top-of-the-line teachers and SAT prep courses. To pay for such programs, tuitions have gone up from the days when every parent volunteered and teachers were willing to accept lower pay to be part of a idealistic venture.
But the changes in Christian private schools mirror the debates U.S. evangelicals have had through this century about how to best bear witness to a seemingly godless culture: by changing it? Rejecting it? Incorporating it?
Mary Sue Burgess, who was Leydorf's guidance counselor, knows these questions well. Ninety-eight percent of Annapolis Area Christian School's graduates go to college, compared with 57 percent in 1986. And just 20 percent of the college-bound go to Christian schools, nearly half of the number who did 20 years ago.
In the past, she says, the goal of schools such as hers would be to send graduates on to religious schools or mission work. But things have changed.
"A generation ago, it was assumed that if these kids didn't go to a Christian college, their immortal soul was in danger. Now everyone is more relaxed about it," said Charles Glenn, interim dean of the Boston University School of Education and an expert on private Christian schools.
The result of that is a much broader definition of "mission" among evangelicals. Mission work today can mean being a lawyer or professor, as well as building houses in Guatemala.
"I think we have gotten more assertive and more fearless as far as looking at the whole world," Burgess said. "We want to train our kids to be contributing citizens and not be afraid, not to be stuck in a bomb shelter."
His first week of school, Leydorf estimated he was different from 90 percent of the people on U-Md.'s campus. One kid in the dorm bragged that he hosted a sex talk show. Another invited Leydorf to a strip club. "I'm definitely out of my comfort zone," Leydorf said nervously then.
With his flip-flops and collection of "The Simpsons" DVDs, Leydorf could be any other guy in his hall. Except he's not the one with the video boxing game or the posters of Tupac Shakur or Bob Marley. He's the one with the index card taped to his desk: "Romans 1:16: I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile."
But the biggest change for Leydorf was the feeling that he was squelching his personality. At home, his friends nicknamed him "The Politician" for his tendency to confidently schmooze. He didn't like this newfound reticence.
He'd also decided not to say anything to his roommate about the Facebook remark. He concluded that the roommate was using the term "evangelical" as shorthand for religious-right leaders such as Jerry Falwell whom Leydorf, despite his conservative nature, considers intolerant.
One late August day, he compared his sentiments about Maryland to biting into an apple that's mealy. The apple is still good for you, but doesn't taste so good, he said as he walked across campus.
By October, some of the Politician was back. Leydorf had applied for a seat in student government, joined the student group InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and was attending any event he could fit into his schedule; one day it was a Muslim student discussion group; the next it was a dialogue between an evangelical student group and a gay student group.
And he was diving into his new challenge: understanding the secular psyche. For example, what exactly was driving the activism he was seeing among unreligious people?
"For me, if I didn't believe in God, it seems that the natural conclusion is to live life as selfishly as possible," he said. "If I wasn't religious, I can certainly see living my life quite differently."
He also felt himself opening up a bit on the subject of homosexuality. He'd gone to the dialogue and also had been assigned a book condemning anti-gay discrimination for a class on civics. Even before coming to Maryland, he'd wrestled with the idea that God sends people to Hell, but now he felt even less comfortable judging who.
"You put more faces to [a subject], and it makes a little bit of difference, and you understand it from their point of view more," he said. "If Jesus was here today, he would hang around with the gay community; these guys are shunned."
Then he paused.
"To me, that's the definition of tolerance -- for us to be able to say to one another's face. 'You're wrong,' and be okay with it."
Shortly after Christmas, Leydorf and a few other recent Annapolis Area Christian School grads were asked back to talk about college. They were asked: "What was your biggest temptation, and how did you deal with it?" For Leydorf, it turned out not to be such things as drinking and sex, but rather a type of religious hubris.
"It's tempting to feel like you're better than other people because you're keeping to the standard better than they are, that you're doing things the right way," he recalled telling the younger students.
But Leydorf found there might be only one thing that truly is absolute -- his faith.
"Now I feel that I'm very entrenched in my faith, my view of God. But when it comes to other things, like gay marriage or any number of things, I'm not deeply entrenched in them," he said.
"I feel like I'm different, but I don't feel alienated. And that's not a bad place to be."
An extended version of this article is athttp://www.washingtonpost.com.
