Once upon a time, back in college, I sat in an acquaintance’s dorm room. The acquaintance was closer to my best friend at the time–they were both the same major–but I didn’t know her well. As we sat and talked, just small talk and gossip about the classes we shared, my friend brought up something in a hushed whisper: would the acquaintance tell anyone that she was an atheist?

This might not seem like a huge deal, but the college I attended was Eastern Nazarene College, a conservative (for the region) Christian college just south of Boston. Faith was a cornerstone of attending the school; though it’s been nearly 25 years since I filled out the application, I’m entirely sure that you had to give a declaration of faith in order to apply. Daily chapel services were mandatory; lack of attendance meant heavy fines. A fair number of courses began classes with devotionals and prayers, the latter ubiquitous when it came to finals time. In addition to typical college rules about GPAs and plagiarism, ENC had strict rules when it came to student behavior: no sex outside of marriage, no drinking (even if you were of age), no smoking, things like that. A few years before I attended, the school had even stricter rules in which people weren’t allowed to go to the movies (they posted school officials outside all the local theaters) and certainly weren’t allowed to do things like dancing. Even if the rules had lightened up in recent times, the punishments hadn’t. The year before I started, the entire baseball team was expelled for drinking at a party celebrating their recent championship. 

The Abby of 2024 would not attend this school; I daresay, the Abby of 2024 would run away screaming. But the Abby of 2001…

I was raised in the church with all its baggage. In high school, I often felt quite alone even with my handful of friends–the beliefs I’d inherited from my church and parents made it often difficult to relate to my peers, but the fellow Christians in my school were often far more fundamentalist than I was. I occupied that strange space of 90s Evangelical kids, particularly ones in New England. We weren’t as fundamentalist as our fellows in other regions of the country (the fundamentalists in my school hailed from the DEEP deep south), but we were far more rigid in our thinking than our non Christian peers. It was a weird place to be.

So when it came time to choose a college, ENC seemed ideal. It was about an hour from my parents’ house, depending on traffic. It was a Christian school but not one that seemed more like a prison than anything else. It had quick and easy access to Boston. Best of all, it had a robust music and performing arts program. I remember seeing a play one visiting weekend and thinking, “this is it. This is where I need to be.”

(as an aside: while I was VERY involved in the school’s A Cappella Choir, I never once performed in one of their plays. A big fish in a little pond at home is very much a little fish in a big pond at college, even one as small as ENC)

And in the fall of 2001, I was. I started at ENC about ten days before 9/11, living just across Quincy Bay from Logan Airport, where the planes came from. My classmates and I walked candlelight vigils and sat in the chapel crying for days afterwards. I went on so many trips with the choir, from places as close as the next town over all the way down to the Panama Canal. I had the opportunity to study abroad at Oxford University (where I barely passed, but shh). I made many dear friends, fell irrevocably in love, pulled off crazy–and surprisingly sober!–college stunts. If I drove to Quincy now (a drive for which I wouldn’t even need Google Maps), I could walk the campus blindfolded. Give me a route, I could find my way without thought. There’s the TV lounge where I saw the second plane hit the tower, where I saw the Patriots win the Super Bowl for the first time, where I watched Mark Greene’s last episode of ER. There’s Cove, where I learned to really SING, where I felt part of a team–a family. There’s Williamson, the first dorm I lived in, the best freshman dorm I could’ve asked for. There’s Gardner, where I took all of my classes for my English major and argued before so many higher ups that I should be allowed to study abroad. There’s the church, where I spent so many chapel mornings trying not to fall asleep and so many late nights singing. There’s the green where I laughed and played football with my friends. There’s the puddle with the goldfish. 

And that’s all well and good and nostalgic but would also not be on my mind at all if the school hadn’t just announced plans to close.

I haven’t missed ENC at all in the years since I graduated (19 years now!), especially as gradual changes to the school stripped it of everything I loved about it. Not long after I left, my beloved A Cappella Choir ceased to be, and then a few years later, the English department was disbanded. Budgetary reasons, I’d assume. The school was having budgetary issues when I was there 20 years ago; according to the rumor mill (and every alumni email I’d received begging for money), those issues had only gotten worse with time. Beyond that, though, there was something strange about my small Christian college. Not bad, not necessarily, but something that failed me somewhere in there, and I think it was a form of stagnation.

Another alumnus wrote about this before I did, and his blog definitely inspired this, though he’s still a Christian and has more insight into the situation than I do or could. He agreed that ENC was caught between a rock and a hard place–too liberal for the conservative Nazarene denomination, but too conservative for a school south of Boston. My experience as well was that ENC was a place where you could only grow so far, because if you learned something about yourself that didn’t fit the good Nazarene mold, you could never really be honest about it.

Like the acquaintance who was an atheist. I don’t know if she ever told anybody. I don’t remember if she graduated with us. I hope that wherever she is, she’s really living her best life, no matter what she believes.

I’d realized I was bisexual before I came to ENC, but college was when I really grappled with it and eventually accepted that it was part of my identity and not some desperate sin that I could pray away. I can’t tell you how much research and digging and praying and self loathing and panic and all sorts of things built into that realization. And the thing was, I had to keep it under wraps. If I were honest about myself, I’d likely have been expelled.

There are a fair few of us, being completely honest. I thought about it the other day when a friend, who has since come out as bisexual, commented on one of my Pride memes on Facebook. Like holy shit, life would have been so absurdly different if we could’ve all been honest with ourselves and each other. Imagine the support group we could have built! Imagine us coming of age surrounded by love and support and community rather than by the pressure to keep ourselves under wraps.

Which isn’t only ENC’s fault. I don’t know where anyone was on their journey then; I, personally, only got to the point of saying I was “bi-curious” in college because of my beliefs. But still.

I also don’t mean to solely disparage ENC because I did make some really exquisite memories there, I did grow and discover more about myself as a person, I did make very dear friends, but I guess that it’s kind of half and half. On the one hand, good memories, good times. On the other hand, couldn’t wholly be myself. What a place.

The school sort of had a commitment to helping students grow, but not really. In 2005, I was taking an ethics class with a bunch of friends (one of the prerequisites for graduation), and we had to do this final project where we examined a controversial topic from both sides and came to our own conclusions. Several of us decided to do our project on abortion, but that caused a problem. See, the library only had one book that gave any information about abortion beyond “ABORTION BAD,” and that made it difficult to research the topic from both sides. And worse, the word “abortion” was blocked by the college’s filters, so if you–like me–wanted to actually get both sides of the issue, you couldn’t do so on the campus. 

Which, like. Okay. Pick one, ENC. Do you want us to actually look at the issue from both sides and come to our own conclusion, or do you want us to reach the conclusion you’ve already decided we should reach?

(for the record, a friend and I ended up going off campus to research, specifically to Planned Parenthood, and I wound up with a VERY high grade on the project–high enough to make up for me failing my professional writing class the semester before)

(additional note: depression and college aren’t a good mix)

In the end, that felt like a lie, like don’t actually grow, just fill the mold we have for you a little better. And on the one hand, that sentiment is pretty common in churches and Christianity writ large, and it’s not a wholly bad thing: when you grow as a person, you want to grow better not worse. You want to be good at crafts not good at hoarding craft supplies, for example. But on the other hand, we were adults who weren’t allowed to trust ourselves to figure out what was good growth and what was bad growth, and for some of us (me, I’m talking about me), that meant a rude awakening when we were finally out in the real world. 

I don’t know. I feel like that sort of “grow, but not really” mindset is what made ENC lose appeal so quickly. It had a lot of more liberal practices and classes, like a requisite science course taught by a man who’d written a book on how one could accept evolution as a proven theory and still be a Christian (at the time, I hated it, but now I’m like… oh. Oh.) (apparently, lots of influential donors withheld funds while that professor taught at the school, which like. Christians. I need you to accept that when you do this, people are not hating Christ in you. They are hating you for being assholes). That meant that students looking for a Nazarene college would probably go to one of their other schools, maybe in the south or the midwest (California if they really wanted to push it). 

On the flip side, ENC had pretty much no appeal to non-Christian students. How could it? Every class began with a prayer, every day was some form of chapel or worship, every course was through a Christian lens. And I’m not saying that it shouldn’t have been, but it absolutely felt like the school was trying to have their cake and eat it too. Trying to straddle that line ultimately was the cause of their demise, and really made my time there complicated to parse out emotionally.

The complicated back and forth feelings hit hardest when I returned to the school after studying at Oxford. Studying there was enormous when it came to experience, not just because of the freedom we were granted when not in class (because we lived on our own, and the culture of England was different enough from US culture that the rules we would have had at our home schools just would have fallen apart) but because the courses themselves were focused on opening our way of thinking about our faith and history. I remember one course that talked specifically about how archaeological evidence didn’t support the Bible being a historical document and asked us a question without an answer prescribed for us: if Jericho was not razed, is our faith in vain? There was no right answer. There was no expected answer. 

So it’s all. Very complicated. I have a lot of nostalgia and sad feelings, but I also have this sort of feeling of inevitability. Like this thing was trying to tear itself in half and finally managed, and it’s hollow, but it happened. 

I have my nostalgic pictures up. I have my reminiscing with my friends. I’ve uploaded so many pictures lately. I think it’s sad, but also, it’s like watching someone linger in the final phases of death for so long that you can hardly remember what they were like before they were dying. And when they finally draw that last breath, you feel relieved. You hate that you feel relieved because that feels wrong, but the relief is there anyway. 

Well. Relief and some scrambling to order transcripts.