College campuses are strange places, to be sure. They’re never entirely like the rest of the world. Nowhere else can you find all-service cafeteria’s where you can eat for free, or entire buildings dedicated to hanging out. Nowhere else will you see crowds dancing with determined purpose around each other at regular fifteen-minute intervals, or straggling twenty-year olds at nine-pm forcing themselves sleepily home carrying poetry books or texts on comparitive politics on their backs. Nowhere but in these towers of learning will you find people struggling to ingest Yeats or multivariable calculus at a table on a floor where speaking is strictly forbidden at three in the morning. Colleges aren’t like anywhere else.

You’re also, here in Richmond, at least, not going to find anywhere else in the city the dedicated insanity of OpenAir Outreach, a street-preaching organization that makes it a point to come down to VCU two or three times a semester. They stand up on the brick railing on Shafer Court, a large, brick walkway notable for being bound by two sizeable churches and featuring prominently a large directional compass, and will preach sin and hell for hours. They usually bring signs, like in the picture, but not always, and invariably form large, impassioned crowds. 

The first time I saw them, I was fairly turned off. I’d been here for several years, but my schedule had always precluded me from actually catching any of the action. I’d heard, of course, about them, and assumed they couldn’t be as bad as the Abortion Day protesters, who carry graphic pictures of aborted children (which always seems to me very disrespectful of the dead). But when i finally caught them in all their day-long vitriol, their passionate pleas for repentance and their shear conviction and venom, I had to stay, and I did, for three hours.

The core of their message was fairly simple: college campuses are cauldrons of sin and vice, full of sex and drugs and homosexuality, hellbound Sodoms worse than the original. They will preach, shout to the skies and to the assembled crowds that God will destroy them for their wickedness, that their refusal to submit will see them ashes in the fire-pit. They preach little of love, saying God loves only those who come to him, and that their grandstanding is, in fact, motivated by love. I disagree with that last point, to be sure, having once been a fiery apologist, and know that most of this sort of thing is motivated by immense pride. But that’s me.

I ended up having a long discussion with some of the preachers after they’d torn down for the night, as we walked to Five Guys Burgers and Fries, they having asked for a good place to eat, and they explained their theatrics were deliberately controversial, so as to draw a crowd. I disagree with that tactic, but they sure as hell draw crowds. They also demand that people tell them their sins, not for absolution, but so that they can condemn them, and refuse to acknowledge their own. I didn’t understand them, much as I tried, and I didn’t see what they were trying to accomplish.

As I was walking past them the other day, heading home, things were a little different. For one, the crowd was one of the largest I’ve ever seen. But it wasn’t a receptive crowd. Many were simply passers-by who had stopped to see the show, and what a show it was! No signs, no shouting, but a single young man with the Bible in hand. Granted, he was preaching the same message as I’d seen before, but there were no theatrics to the man apart from the standard “raising-hands-and-looking-heavenward” every now and then. And dancing around him was a tall, lanky, bearded fellow, who I can reliably call OpenAir Outreach’s own personal nemesis.

He will spin circles around them, dance and shout and interrupt, ridiculous messages and condemnations of Christ and Christianity, the witness of hypocrisy. He’s a hostile force, even I can see it, who seems to make a point of disrupting their little revivals. As I stood there a few minutes, watching him try to crush whatever good was happening here, I thought to myself “I finally see it.”

You have to understand the level of hostility in these crowds a lot of the time. They will scream and jeer, obscenities issuing for from their mouth, bring home-made signs with things like “Jesus is Hitler” and “Jesus Has Come To Know The Love of Gay Sex,” or they’ll stand up beside them and start screaming in opposition to Christ — not to their preaching, but to mock Christ — or two men or two women will start kissing, or someone will begin undressing, or, in at least one case, will physically assault the preacher.

In my dealings with them, as with everybody, I try to get in their head and understand how they see the world. In this I largely failed. But I sort of see what they see, now, because there seems to me little other explanation for the response of the crowd in this way, for them to do evil and think it good and just, than the movement of the Devil among them. This is not something I go to often or say lightly, and if nothing else, it’s an abstracted movement caused by the hardhearted stubbornness of sin. This was active hostility, not passive derision, but the practiced chaos of those who hate God, and let me assure you, there are few real atheists in the Western world. Western atheism is deliberate rebellion against the God of Abraham, and in chatacterized much of the time — not all, by any stretch — by mockery of him and his adherants, studied scorn and active antipathy. All alliteration aside (ha!), it’s hard to avoid reaching such a conclusion, that the enemy of this world is so opposed to the Gospel, he’ll fight against a crooked, bent version of it with the vitriol we used to pour on Nazis. 

I’ve seen good street preachers who will admit their own sin, will preach the love of God, and they get ignored, passed by, because they’re not making a scene, and because there’s nothing there to rebel against. What those men speak are little better than pleasantries, the crowds mumble to themselves as they go by, platitudes barely worth responding to. After all, they think, what Christians want is to judge the sinner, not to save the world. The only people to stop and listen are Christians like myself, pleased to see someone presenting the truth of the Gospel, and nodding politely to those who stand beside us, before we all head off to lunch.