INDReporter

‘Adam' campaign draws campus backlash

by Walter Pierce

A movement that has popped up on the LSU campus - and possibly elsewhere - seeking to galvanize frank discussions about Christianity and spread the Good News is running into opposition from students.

facebook.com/iagreewithadam

A movement that has popped up on the LSU campus - and possibly elsewhere - seeking to galvanize frank discussions about Christianity and spread the Good News is running into opposition from students.

The movement centers around Christian students wearing orange "I Agree with Adam" T-shirts. The reference, obtuse though it may be, is to 2008 Yale University alumnus Adam Meredith, a member of the Yale Students for Christ who as an undergraduate in 2006 published - or delivered in a speech or posted online (it's unclear) - an impassioned manifesto about the importance of Christ in his life.

For at least a week evangelical students at LSU have been sporting the T-shirts, both in anticipation of a campus event today and in an effort to engage their fellow students and allow the evangelicals an opportunity to spread the Gospel in a way that is more civil than shouting fire-and-brimstone from the campus commons. (IND editorial intern Lyndsy Bradley, a UL student, is on the UL campus at this moment keeping an eye out for the T-shirts; we'll update this later if she spots the movement here in Lafayette.)

But a quick look at social media finds push-back to this low-intensity proselytizing. Comments on an I Agree with Adam Facebook page created in late March are overwhelmingly critical of the movement, and yesterday a Facebook page - Could Adam Please S.T.F.U. (the abbreviation among Nordic seafaring people commonly means "Set The Fjord Up" but for most of the rest of, especially the under-30 set, it denotes "Shut The F**k Up") - was created in opposition to the movement, which appears to be intentionally vague in order to stir dialogue.

Megan Dunbar, the opinion editor for LSU's student newspaper, The Daily Reveille, also spoke out against I Agree with Adam in a Tuesday editorial. Read it here.

Check out I Agree with Adam here and Could Adam Please S.T.F.U., both on Facebook, here.

For more on Adam Meredith and the eight-year-old movement that has inexplicably appeared on the LSU campus, go here.

And for an inspiring image of a magic dolphin leaping into a rainbow, click here.