There was a lot to learn. Jindal was only peripherally aware of many of the most famous Bible passages Hinkie pointed him to, and he frequently had the stories confused with popular fairy tales or children’s movies. During the course of their conversations, as Hinkie briefly mentioned the story of Noah’s Ark, Jindal interrupted.
“Wait: I thought that was a Disney movie.”
When Hinkie showed him that the prophet and his collection of paired-off mammals were, indeed, in the Book of Genesis, Jindal’s response was to ask, in all sincerity, if the Little Mermaid was also in the Bible.
The two began meeting weekly to work through Jindal’s list of questions. At the end of every session, Jindal would ask for a reading assignment, and Hinkie would give him one—first a few verses from Mark, and then, when the student complained that it was too short, multiple books in the New Testament at one time.
Throughout the process, Jindal kept his flirtation with Christianity a secret from his parents. He knew they would be devastated, and quite possibly enraged, if they found out he was considering abandoning Hinduism. To avoid the confrontation, Jindal waited until late at night, when his family was asleep, before he slipped into his bedroom closet to pray and read the Bible by flashlight.
For a while, he attempted to reconcile Christianity with the traditions of his parents, once speculating to his friend Elaine Parsons that perhaps he could just believe in Jesus as one of the many gods that Hinduism teaches about. He also tried taking ownership of his native religion, reading Hindu religious texts for the first time. When his grandfather died, Jindal immersed himself in Hindu teachings about the afterlife. But while the idea of Nirvana seemed nice, Jindal was far more compelled by the Christian concept of a just God dividing humanity between heaven and hell on Judgment Day.
While Jindal would spend much of his adult life facing accusations from skeptics who believed his interest in Christianity was a product of political ambition, the truth was that any ulterior motives he might have had were probably more hormonal than Machiavellian. His high school crush-turned-girlfriend, Kathy, was a devout Catholic who was eager to see Jindal convert. On one memorable night, the two sneaked away from their hotel rooms during a regional math tournament and spent hours on the roof, flinging pennies into the fountain below and talking about the future. Kathy said her ultimate ambition was to become a Supreme Court justice so she could “stop the country from killing babies.” Jindal was enthralled by her convictions, and also by her smile, and their relationship was no doubt a driving force in his exploration of Christianity.
One afternoon, Jindal sat with Hinkie in the student union, and during a lull in the conversation, the pastor asked, “What’s your next question?”
The yellow legal pad lay untouched on the table between them. Jindal replied emphatically, “I don’t have any. I’m done. I’ve got everything I need.” Then he paused just long enough to reveal a chink in the armor of his teenage bravado and asked, “So, what do I do now?”
Hinkie had been schooled in the evangelistic crusades of Billy Graham, who instructed proselytizers in training that the moment a potential convert expresses faith in Jesus, one should take him by the hands and urge him to say the sinner’s prayer immediately—thus ushering him into salvation before the devil has time to meddle with his resolve. But when Hinkie proposed such a prayer, Jindal demurred.
“Uh, no,” Jindal replied. “That’s not something we need to do together. That’s something I can do myself.”
That night, he knelt in the privacy of his closet and said a prayer that would set him on a new spiritual journey and shape his political destiny—but not before it threatened to collapse his entire world. He accepted Jesus as his personal savior.
The next year, Jindal was driving his father’s Toyota Corolla one day when another vehicle slammed into him, sending the teenager’s head crashing through the driver’s-side window. Miraculously, he endured only minor injuries, and when his parents arrived at his hospital bedside, his mother asked a question any grateful Hindu parent might ask.
“Which god do you have to thank for your safety, Bobby?”
He managed to evade his mother’s question in the hospital room, but he could no longer shake the guilt of lying to his mom and dad. These were his parents, after all, not authoritarian rulers—and he was a teenage son, not a conscientious objector. In a fit of frustration and shame, he went to see Hinkie.
“I’ve got to tell my parents,” he said to his spiritual mentor. “I know it’s time.”
Hinkie tried to offer reassurance. “I’m behind you. And who knows? Maybe the timing is right and their ears will be open.”
Jindal was more clear-eyed about the likely fallout.
“They will see this as a total rejection of being Indian,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘I hate everything about who I am and I reject everything about my family.’”
As they talked, Hinkie was startled by how severe Jindal believed the repercussions of his confession would be. Jindal was so convinced that his parents would punish him by withholding college tuition money that he had secured a full-ride scholarship to LSU as a backup plan. He also seriously believed his parents might kick him out of the house, and he was bracing for the possibility that he would have to finish high school homeless. But he felt he no longer had any choice, so he went home to tell his parents.
A couple of days later, he met Hinkie in his office at the church. The young pastor could tell right away that Jindal was deeply agitated.
“How’d it go?”
“It was really tough,” Jindal replied. “They reacted really, really strongly.”
Raj, Jindal’s mother, was grief-stricken that her son had betrayed their family’s faith; meanwhile, his father, Amar, saw this second life as a reckless detour on Jindal’s path to medical school. Both parents were irate. Rather than kick Jindal out of the house, they decided to transform their home into a sort of correctional facility for their apostate son. He was told he was not allowed to attend church, read the Bible, or even talk to any of his Christian friends anymore, and that he would be expected home every day within fifteen minutes of school ending. He was forbidden from participating in any activities outside his academic work, and was strictly instructed not to talk to any family members about his spiritual dalliance.
And, of course, he would no longer be allowed to see Hinkie.
“What do I do?” Jindal asked.
Hinkie was at a loss—distressed by the news, yes, but also reluctant to advise a seventeen-year-old to wage holy war against his parents’ unrighteous rules. Searching for something to say that would square this pragmatic impulse with a biblical principle, Hinkie felt compelled to open to a verse in Ephesians: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.”
The young pastor proceeded with caution. “As I listen to what your parents have told you,” he said, “you actually can choose to obey both them and the Lord. I know it would be incredibly hard, but you don’t have to go to church. You can obey them on that. You don’t have to talk to those friends you have at school that are Christians. You can obey them on that. You don’t have to meet with me anymore…”
Hinkie felt a wave of nausea come over him. He couldn’t believe he was counseling Jindal—his brand-new convert, his greatest ministerial achievement, his friend—to abandon the trappings of a God-fearing Christian.
He hastened to add, “The only thing they said that you probably shouldn’t obey is that you don’t read the Bible anymore—because there is a higher authority than Mom and Dad. So I would say, figure out a way to keep reading scripture secretively.
“But other than that… God’s word says if you are honoring your father and mother, it’s going to go well with you.”
A pause.
“So, is that what you want to do?” Hinkie asked.
Jindal nodded. “Yes. That’s what I’ll do.”
They said a farewell prayer together and embraced, and then Jindal l
eft Chapel on the Campus for the last time.
As he watched Jindal go, Hinkie said a quiet prayer to himself: “Lord, he’s in your hands—and he is completely out of mine.”
When Jindal arrived at Brown in the fall of 1988, it was a contentious time for the small, tight-knit Christian community on campus. A year earlier, the student-run magazine Good Clean Fun had published a cover story titled “The New Crusaders” that cast Brown’s evangelicals as insular, self-righteous, and anti-intellectual. The three-thousand-word feature was rife with caricature—an almost perfect culture war time capsule showing how secular Ivy Leaguers viewed conservative Christians in the late eighties—and it drew vocal outrage from Brown’s believers. The magazine dutifully ran several incensed letters to the editor in its next edition, and the episode was largely forgotten by the time the leftover copies were tossed in trash cans. But among the school’s Christian students, the feelings of aggrievement lingered well beyond this particular campus controversy.
As a brand-new freshman bulging with pent-up spiritual energy and finally free from his parents’ restrictions, Jindal decided his first act of collegiate rebellion would be to immerse himself in campus Christian culture. He populated his social circles with faithful classmates, and seized every chance he got to wage rhetorical combat with the secular student body in defense of his religion. In one emblematic episode early on, he refused to participate in a student orientation program that sought to teach open-mindedness by inviting straight men to identify as gay. When a resident adviser told him the session was mandatory, Jindal shot back, “You can send my dad’s tuition money back, but I’m not going.”
Jindal’s dual interests in highbrow theology and picking fights with campus liberals made him popular among his fellow Ivy League Christians, who gathered in religious clubs that often functioned as salons for high-minded scriptural discussion. Matt Skinner, who was president of Campus Crusade for Christ during Jindal’s freshman year, described the club—and Brown’s Christian scene in general—as “kind of idiosyncratic… It took on the nature of the college, in the sense that it was primarily more about the kind of stuff going on in our heads.”
But during Jindal’s freshman year, the friendly, cross-denominational unity that held together the school’s conservative Christians was threatened by an unlikely—and jarring—wave of Catholic fervor that was sweeping across the campus. Christian students were turning to the Vatican for spiritual stimulation and in-depth doctrine, attending Mass together, and diving into the catechism. Students who were there at the time later told me this Roman reawakening was driven by Opus Dei, a controversial Catholic organization, known globally for its secrecy and elitism, that was then active on campus. The group, which would later be immortalized (and fictionalized) in the book The Da Vinci Code as a cultish secret society, was famous for targeting intellectual elites and prominent conservatives for conversion, and it worked fervently to cull Brown’s crop of up-and-coming influentials. Its proselytizing paid off: in 1989 alone, at least a dozen Protestant students converted to Catholicism—a phenomenon that plunged the Christian community on campus into heated sectarian debates.
“A lot of us were really concerned about what was going on,” said Michael, a Protestant classmate of Jindal’s. “Why were [so many] students converting to Catholicism and taking that really seriously? I had deep concerns theologically.”
It is unclear whether Jindal associated with Opus Dei while at Brown, but he was one of many campus Christians who became intensely interested in Catholic doctrine at the time. He was confirmed in the fall of 1989, during his sophomore year. The ceremony took place at a Mass in Providence, where he gave testimony to an audience filled with friends who had helped him along his path to conversion. It was a joyous day, and he felt he had finally reached the destination to which his youthful spiritual journey was meant to take him. It wouldn’t be long, though, before his new faith was put to the test one dramatic and unexplainable night; Jindal would wrestle with its events for years to come.
Around the time of Jindal’s confirmation, strange things started happening to the Christian students at Brown. There were reports of a sulfuric odor—supposedly a sign of the devil’s presence—mysteriously surfacing in dorm rooms, accompanied by confounding sights and sounds. One young woman claimed that a demon had assaulted her, leaving scars up and down her arms. Others complained of night terrors they believed were painted by evil spirits.
These phenomena were not entirely out of place at the Ivy League school. Many of the students came from East Asian countries, where charismatic Christian pastors were famous for speaking in tongues and performing miraculous, forehead-thumping healings. What’s more, the past decade of popular cinema had seen a string of blockbuster movies like The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and The Amityville Horror that lent dramatic weight to the notion of demonic forces reaching into the terrestrial world.
The incidents left Brown’s Christian community frightened and flailing, in search of guidance. They sought out help from local priests and pastors, but the staid New England clergy balked at their requests. Feeling helpless, some students began attempting their own exorcism-like rituals to help disturbed peers. Michael recalled one such experience, during which he and three other students laid hands on a young woman they believed to be possessed. As they prayed over her, a larger group of believers huddled in a separate part of campus, pleading with God for a miracle. The exercise was anticlimactic and, looking back on it years later, Michael would acknowledge that it may not have been doctrinally sound.
“If you’re really in faith and you really know Christ, the enemy cannot take possession of your soul,” said Michael, who went on to become a professional minister after college. “Could he get a foothold in that person’s soul and take possession of your voice? Maybe? To be honest, I was twenty-one at the time. What did I know?” He said that if their efforts seemed melodramatic in retrospect, it was only because they were young and grappling with a scary situation. “We were foolish enough to say we cared about these [people] and we were willing to try to free them. I remember saying, ‘We’re trying to cast out a demon, yes, but what we really want is for her to feel spiritually free.’”
Jindal kept his distance from these episodes at first. For all his religious zeal, he was still a biology major, acquainted with the natural sciences and uncomfortable with the more mystical aspects of his new faith. He had once heard a Rhode Island priest confidently declare that biblical references to angels and demons were not meant to be taken literally, and he was happy to cling to that interpretation. But his aloof attitude toward the darkness that seemed to be settling over many of his classmates wouldn’t last long.
Jindal met Susan, a pretty fellow freshman, on a quiet walk to church one Sunday morning shortly after arriving in Providence. “She was beautiful and lost, and I was more than happy to fulfill my Christian duty by showing her the way to church,” he later wrote. They quickly became best friends. “Susan” would surface under a variety of pseudonyms in a series of personal essays Jindal wrote for obscure Catholic magazines years later. In them, he described intense, late-night conversations with her that covered everything from past breakups to abortion policy to theology. They pulled all-night cram sessions together—Jindal double majored in biology, to satisfy his father, and public policy, for himself—and scandalized their see-no-evil Christian friends by frequenting local dance clubs. But despite their intimate connection, their friendship remained stubbornly chaste and romance-free, and Susan eventually grew frustrated by Jindal’s inability to make a move.
Their friendship ebbed and flowed over the following months. On one emotional evening, she confided in him that she had been diagnosed with skin cancer and would need an operation; the next day she avoided him altogether. Soon, though, Jindal began hearing unsettling rumors about Susan from mutual friends. She was behaving erratically, her days derailed by sudden emotional outbursts, her nights defined by terrifying “visions.” Jindal reas
oned that these were natural responses to the stress in her life: in addition to her diagnosis, Susan’s Bible study leader back home had recently committed suicide, and the grief was taking a toll on her emotional well-being. Other friends, however, suspected that Satan was striking again.
On the last week of the semester, the University Christian Fellowship called an emergency prayer meeting for Susan on the eve of her operation. When the night of the meeting arrived, about ten students, including Jindal, gathered in a classroom and sat down with Susan in a circle. They sang worship songs and prayed together, but the enthusiasm that typically characterized their meetings was missing. It was finals week, and many were distracted by academics. After going through the motions, a student moved to close the meeting—but he was stopped short. Jindal would recount what happened next in one of his essays a few years later.
“Suddenly, Susan emitted some strange guttural sounds and fell to the floor,” he wrote. “She started thrashing about, as if in some sort of seizure.” Susan’s sister, who had flown in to lend support during the surgery, rushed to her prostrate body and ordered everyone to place their hands on her.
Jindal, horrified and humiliated, felt paralyzed at first. He refused to move. Then, all of a sudden, Susan’s incomprehensible growling formed a single, audible word.
“Bobby!” she shrieked.
The exclamation sent a chill down his spine. He moved reluctantly toward the group, and placed a fingertip on Susan’s shoulder, “as if afraid of becoming infected with the disease that was ravaging her body.” But the moment they made contact, the unfamiliar voice in Susan’s throat directed itself at him again: “Bobby, you cannot even love Susan.”
The Wilderness Page 21