Excerpted from The New Journal, 1994.

They’re Praying For You Jay Dixit As a freshman at Yale, I’ve heard my share of theories about Yale’s importance vis-a-vis the rest of the world, but I wasn’t really ready for this one. New Haven resident Jere Garceau—and the religious group he founded—thinks the “forces of darkness” may have targeted Yale in a maniacal scheme to take over the world. As Jere (pronounced “Jerry”) puts it, “If you’re the enemy, this is obviously the place where you are going to come to try to take control.” Okay, evangelism is all the rage all around the country. People on Cross Campus hand out the booklets with eyes overflowing with pity for the damned Yale student who brushes past them indifferently. And Jesse Jackson got downright biblical in his Battell Chapel speech last month—but a group that worries that Yale may be the battlefield for a global clash between good and evil? “I’m not talking about Satan walking in with cloven hooves and a forked tail,” Jere clarifies. “It’s much more subtle than that because the Scripture says, he always comes as an angel of light.” Yikes! “Lux” will never sound the same again. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of Jere and his group before—after all, this stuff reeks of Rumpus—it’s because, well, it’s a covert operation. The prayer groups meet in Dwight Chapel and Marquand Chapel at the Yale Divinity School five days a week from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. There they pray for a religious revival on Yale’s campus. For four years now, they have been praying for a spiritual revival at Yale in the near future—and especially praying for every new freshman class. Chances are, if you’re reading this article, they’ve been praying for you too, in the early morning hours, as you agonize over problem sets and papers. When I first met Jere he said to me, “You’re class of ‘98, right? You’re one of the guys we’ve been praying for!” I first heard about the prayer group—which doesn’t have a name—while having dinner with a friend. We were talking about the attitudes people have towards Christianity at Yale. Admittedly, it’s a broad topic, but my friend had an interesting theory. “Suppose this is truth,” he said, picking up the salt shaker and holding it up between us. “When I look at it, I can only see part of it. But when you and I both look at it, we can see almost the whole thing! This is what people think truth is—that the more people you have telling you what they see, the closer we’ll be to knowing what it really is. Maybe people don’t like the idea that Jesus claimed that He Himself was the truth.” “Yale is a very different place from what it was,” my friend continued. “Founded under a Christian covenant: the Yale Charter of 1701, it was chartered as a place to train young men to disseminate the Gospel. They studied Greek and Hebrew, and they had required prayer.” It’s hard to imagine many Yalies disseminating the Gospel today, difficult to picture missionaries spreading out from New Haven into distant, heathen lands as they once did. Then my friend mentioned Jere’s group: underground missionaries, as it were. But instead of traveling abroad for converts, they focus on Yale itself. It’s as if the whole cycle of conversion has come full circle. I was curious. The next day I met with Jere at Ingall’s rink to talk to him about the group. Jere was as nice and as decent as a man could be.  We talked as he watched his two sons play hockey. He explained that he and some of his friends had come together to form the prayer group in 1990 after an international student at Yale committed suicide. Jere was concerned that the event was the worst in a series of manifestations of Yale’s spiritual depravity. If fewer believers means “spiritual depravity,” then it is hard to argue with him on this point. One need only exhume the musty parchment of the Yale Charter from its eternal resting place in the Beinecke Library to see that the university has strayed pretty far from its founding principles. The document is the fervent declaration of ten orthodox pastors so frustrated with Harvard’s moral backsliding that they ran off to found Yale under explicitly religious principles in the hopes that this time the institution would stick to its religious foundation. They would be disappointed today. Yale today is definitely a secular institution. Marena Fisher (GRD ’92) even goes so far as to say, “The general temper of things at Yale is very much anti-Christian, very much anti-Gospel. Things are not friendly to God or to God’s things. Instead, social issues seem to take the place of God at Yale, or they seem to monopolize the discussion.” Mel Sensineg (DIV ’97), a member of Jere’s prayer group, said, “Many people at Yale consider Christianity to be passé, obsolete, a historical artifact.” In light of all this, it’s hard to understand where Jere gets the idea that there is a spiritual awakening just around the corner. Fisher gave me some insight into this way of thinking. “God’s work is like the wind,” she explained. “You can’t see it blowing, but you can see its effects.” Jere believes that he is seeing those effects. “I think people are open,” he said. “Everyone is searching for something, especially in this day and age.  People think there must be some truth that we can grab hold of that won’t crumble before our eyes. I believe—and you may see it in the four years that you’re here—that we’re right on the brink.” But why do we need a spiritual awakening? I had a little trouble buying Jere’s idea that the physical decline of the Yale campus was evidence of the moral and spiritual decay of the student population. And the theory that Yale, as a university founded with such rigorous religious conviction, would be a primary target for the “wreaking of havoc by the forces of darkness?” That seemed a little far-fetched too. What exactly are these “forces of darkness” at Yale? In answer to this question, Jere pointed to “the liberalism, the humanism, the intellectualism that has engulfed this place.” He cited William F. Buckley’s (DC ’50) God and Man at Yale, his liberal-bashing polemic which declared that Yale had been corrupted by the teaching of “relativism, pragmatism, and utilitarianism,” and demanded that any professors who directly or indirectly promoted atheism or socialism be banished from the university. Now Jere’s argument began to sound a little more familiar, a little less radical. Once it had been reduced to the political, I could compare it to the rhetorical ranting of Jesse Jackson in Battell Chapel last month, who even concluded his speech with the very same scriptural reference that had convinced Jere that praying would spark an awakening: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” When I called to arrange a final meeting with Jere to see his group in action, he was excited. “We’ll make a Christian out of you yet,” he joked. I wasn’t so sure. But I felt a little different when the morning of our meeting rolled around. When I met Jere at Dwight Chapel at 6 a.m., after a grueling all-nighter of metaphysical fencing with the Critique of Pure Reason, I was more than usually ready for revelation—something that Kant had conspicuously failed to inspire. I watched Jere, that morning, as he paced in front of me—head bowed, eyes closed, hands clasped, voice fervent and sincere. He asked for God to guide the paths of the freshperson class, of the professors, and of President Levin himself. Then he prayed for me. “We thank you, Lord God for bringing Jay here to be with us this morning, because we know that you have brought him here for a reason. We pray that you might touch him, and open his heart, and show him the truth.” The truth. I recalled my friend’s parable about the salt shaker. I thought how nice it must be to walk around with the whole thing in your pocket—how nice it must be to be sure that you knew the truth. And as eerie as it was to know that Jere was praying for my salvation for reasons I didn’t even understand, I began to find it comforting. After all, maybe he knew something I didn’t.