A former member of Campus Crusade for Christ explains the political power of belonging

In the 1980s, David Morris was really struggling.

He was growing up in an affluent suburb of San Diego, and went to a high school with a social hierarchy that felt tough to navigate. His parents were divorced, and he felt himself going off the rails.

"I had been sort of a miscreant. Shoplifting, porn loving, cigarette smoking, bad kid. I often describe myself as a bad kid who wanted to be good," Morris said.

That's when he discovered Campus Crusade for Christ, a ministry that recruits high school and college students to advocate for evangelical political causes.

Morris wrote an essay about his time in Campus Crusade recently for the literary journal the Believer. He joined to The Show to explain why he was an ideal target for the group.

Full conversation

DAVID MORRIS: It brought me, you know, a whole group of friends. ... Suddenly I was being given what felt like the secret keys to the universe. ... This was this theory that explained and harmonized every element of my life. It taught me how to dress. It taught me how to think about immortality It taught me how to think about dating, It taught me how to think about gender. It taught me how to think about politics.

So it was this ready-made identity. It wasn't just a Bible study group. This was a group that functioned as a team. And we were there, as I would learn over the coming months, we were there to, "light our campus on fire for Jesus."

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, so talk a little bit about what that looked like in a practical sense. Like when you guys got together, what kinds of things did you do?

MORRIS: The idea with Campus Crusade, some people have described it as evangelicalism meets mass marketing. And we were expected to use every free moment going out and converting people. They want to select campus leaders who are football players, academic leaders, basketball stars — and convert those people. And then through force of peer pressure, people will look up to these basketball stars or football players and also join the movement.

DINGMAN: The idea is to find these people who have this pre existing social capital to whom people are already predisposed to be drawn, and then add this Jesus layer to it, basically.

MORRIS: Exactly. And what was fascinating, and I did not know this at the time, but they were born out of the Red Scare of the 1950s where godless communism was going to take over the United States if we did not commit the nation to Jesus. And a lot of these principles were built on basically communist guerrilla strategy to convert people to communism.

DINGMAN: Well, that's such a pretzel of logic there. You know, this idea that this group is founded to counteract the teachings of those groups, but is leveraging the techniques of those groups to push back against their teachings.

MORRIS: Yeah, it's really interesting. Mao famously said "all combatants end up resembling their enemies." And they would speak to us in those terms. They would say, "In Russia, Soviet soldiers are willing to die for their system. Can you say the same about your convictions for Jesus?"

DINGMAN: Right. But you know, it's so interesting, David, there's a very important — and maybe sort of subtle difference there, which is that — and I'm gonna speak very generally here, but a lot of times in authoritarian political regimes, belonging to these groups is a requirement. You know what I mean? It's like a top down thing.

And yeah, there's propaganda that goes along with it that we're all joining together to fight against the evils of the West or whatever it is, but there's not really an option. But in Campus Crusade for Christ, they have stepped into your life at a period of great instability, when the thing you want most is belonging and offered it to you. You've already said yes. So when they then tell you there's all these other things you have to say yes to, it's not, I would imagine, like it even has to be forced on you.

MORRIS: Exactly. I volunteered to join this Jesus-based army. ... And I genuinely believed it. But I think there is this sort of child-abuse-like aspect to indoctrinating people under the age of 18 who really aren't, you know, they aren't able to vote, you know, or participate in an actual army until they turn 18. When you're socially pressuring young people into joining this all-encompassing, intellectual-control group and it becomes your identity. You know, I just, looking back on that part of my life, I have a big problem with converting children.

DINGMAN: Well, and one of the other things that you mentioned voting just there. And one of the other things that you're pointing out in your essay is that whether explicitly or implicitly, movements and organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ have very frequently also been aligned with extremely conservative political causes. We've talked about anti-communism in the '50s and in the '80s. When you were a part of the organization Crusade had taken up the cause of "family values."

MORRIS: Campus Crusade held a number of rallies, sometimes one a month. And they would be attended by several hundred people. We were encouraged to invite our classmates and teammates from, you know, I played on the football team. And the message of these abstinence rallies was that premarital sex is destroying the United States. The AIDS virus is a God-created entity that is designed to show the corrupt in the United States. It's not an accident.

And that if we did not commit ourselves to abstinence, it would eventually destroy the United States. And that's my biggest source of anger and regret and resentment about Campus Crusade. Is that when you're 13, 14, 15, you are learning what you like, the people that you're attracted to. And that the level of brainwashing that we went through — that I went through — this has become known as purity culture.

And leaders like Joshua Harris, who was a huge, huge purity culture leader, he has since renounced all of his work. And he has affirmed that he thought it was an extraordinarily harmful enterprise to be involved in. And that period of time was stolen from me. And you can't ever get that back.

DINGMAN: To come back to your essay, one of the things that was really profound to me about it and the framing that you use, is you somewhat recently went to a gathering of what was previously known as Campus Crusade for Christ and is now referred to as CRU. Which is still active, still recruiting. And one of the things you write about is that though you have renounced so many of these beliefs, there was still a tangible sense of how good it feels to belong.

MORRIS: Yeah, I went to CRU's winter conference. And I really expected to be greeted with suspicion and, you know, paranoia almost. And then the music started. And I was just back in that warm bath that I had spent my high school years in. And I felt accepted and not judged. And Crusade does a really good job of just meeting people where they are. ... You know, there were no MAGA hats at this CRU rally. But the underlying, the political subject understructure of CRU remains right wing. They are supporting bathroom bills to get people to return to traditional male- or female-only bathrooms. They're tacit supporters of Trump's vision for.

DINGMAN: America, and they're doing it all — if I'm hearing you right, and interpreting your story correctly — by leading with this very fundamentally enticing offering. Which is: Wouldn't it be nice to belong?

MORRIS: Correct. They entice you with the idea of social support and belonging and identity and friends. And then once you get ... deeper into the theology, you learn these other unexpected things that are far less pleasant and not really good for you as a human.

DINGMAN: Well, David Morris is a writer and we've been talking about his essay, "Adventures in Jesusland," which appeared in the Believer. David, thank you so much.

MORRIS: Thanks for having me, man.