Liberty University
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Liberty University is an evangelical university in Lynchburg, Virginia, which John Kiriakou describes as "the largest evangelical university in the world." He taught there for several years as an adjunct professor of intelligence studies in the Jesse Helms School of Government.

The hiring

Kiriakou says he raised the obvious objection himself when the job was offered: "Are you sure you want me? You and I probably disagree on 95% of the issues. Why would you want me to be a professor?" The answer came "without missing a beat" from the dean of the Jesse Helms School of Government, "because torture's not Christian." Kiriakou's reply: "You know what? I'll take the job."

The standing argument

He says he "really really enjoyed" the post, and that it came with a permanent disagreement: "we clashed constantly over this issue of Middle Eastern Christians." He took the institution to task whenever he heard talk of sending a delegation to convert people to Christianity in Palestine, on the ground that the mission inverts its own premise, "This is where Christianity began. You guys are snuffing out Palestinian Christians."

The exchange he offers as the clearest illustration is with a student bound for a mission. Asked what she would do, she said she would bring people to Christ; asked where, she said Macedonia. His response: "But they're already Christians in Macedonia. They're Orthodox like me." The premise he reads out of the answer is that the tradition does not count its own predecessors as Christians at all, that they "don't consider it their type of Christian."

He also identifies a contradiction he considers structural to the alliance the university's constituency sustains: evangelicals "want eventually for all the Jews that they support to convert to Christianity. The Jews absolutely do not want that." The two ends are incompatible and, in his description, simply deferred, "Let's not talk about what happens after the rapture."

The colleague, and his exam

The senior professor Kiriakou worked alongside in the Helms School had been there thirty years and had also been a CIA officer early in his career. The thing Kiriakou singles out from the association is the four-question final examination the man set his students, which moves from the ticking bomb to the prisoner''s wife to his children and ends by asking the student to justify all three answers to God. "It was such a powerful exam. It has stuck in my mind all these years."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Jerry Falwell Jr.
- Christian Zionism
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
