Huh. It's like the Gossip Girl books, but about Christian teens.

Part of me wants to read it, to see what it's like.

Huh. The threatening to "out" someone as a Christian seems odd. I mean, when I was in high school and college, it was not being Christian that was weird.

I suppose it depends on your definitions - being nominally Christian is certainly the norm, but I suspect that being highly observant or a member of one of the more fundamentalist sects would be less so at most colleges.

I suppose so. At my high school, though, the CYO retreats were huge big deal social events, and in college, I got plenty of "Add your name at the bottom of the list and send this on to everyone you know if you love Jesus!" chain emails.

Interesting. I don't really recall seeing any of that.

At my high school, there was a Jewish girl who went to all the CYO events so that she wouldn't miss anything with her friends. (She was kind of on the edge of the popular crowd, which was almost entirely Catholic.)

Well, I did grow up in liberal elitist enclaves, urban public schools, and university in (gasp) Canada, so it's possible my experience isn't representative. I guess.

I grew up in suburban NJ, which tends to be pretty split politically, and then college in New Orleans. In high school, religion was a pretty big defining factor -- just one of those things that you knew about everybody, like you knew what their parents did, or what extracurriculars they did, or stuff like that. One of the things that let us put other kids into categories pretty easily.

Eh, I suppose being uberChristian and fundie or something would've been looked down a bit on as geeky or "square", but usually those kids would look right back at people as being evil, so...

Regular "goes to church with the family on Sunday" Christians were not in any way considered odd though. Even "participates with the youth group and goes on occasional social outings with them or camp or something" wasn't weird.

Songmaster was the one where the walkon gay character was a pedophile.

The main character and hero was also happy to explore his sexuality with another young man once he was a teenager. It screwed him up forever, which could, I suppose, be read as an anti-gay-sex statement, but the reasoning was that he had all these weird drugs in his system that would have screwed him up no matter who or what he slept with. He didn't blame the other boy afterwards or seem to experience any remorse about the decision, despite his thereafter permanent impotence.

But anyway, yeah, I'm totally over the guy in many respects.

I loved Farnham's Freehold when I was in my teens and eating up everything Heinlein ever wrote. Perhaps I should revisit it.

I read it again just last week! It suffers from much of the same terribleness that too many of Heinlein's not-aimed-at-Juveniles novels have (older, wiser man paired up through circumstances with younger, beautiful, wicked-smart-but-somehow-completely-without-agency female, for example) with some serious added racial squick.

So much Heinlein is ridiculous to read because he was ahead of his time in some ways, but completely batty and off-the-wall in others. You see it all the time in his treatment of women - I think he would have declared himself a feminist, but rarely if ever do his female characters really seem like people - they're usually more like Mary Sues of convenient sexual availability to the hero. I almost think that Farnham's Freehold was trying to be a fictional treatise against the ridiculous of racial inequality, but he failed so thoroughly at overcoming his own internal prejudices there that it just came off gross. My grandparents, parents, and to some extent even I have similar issues there (I'm ashamed of them, and am glad I've moved from the South so hopefully I'll be able to raise my kids without those instincts at all) but we never tried to write a novel exploring it in its extremes.

...that got long. Oops.