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.

I remember seeing notices for Keystone on my highschool and college campuses (newsletters, flyers, etc.). And yet somehow, it wasn't till I was 21 that I figured out that Keystone was not some kind of clever reference to Keystone Kops, but to something to do with Christianity.

(I still don't know the specifics, but then, I really don't care.)

Then again, it wasn't till about two weeks ago that I figured out what the Hs in 4-H stand for. (I was at a farm demonstration, and they had flyers.) Yes, I am an urban/suburban creature.

Alpha-bits for the current topic: Christians of any sort were a bit of an oddity at my school, and most of those had extremely liberal interpretations of theology. It was definitely considered weird to be openly Christian in many of the circles there, but they weren't generally harassed.

The one girl who was trying to get her biology degree so as to do research that would help her disprove evolution was especially maligned, but then again she was also mean, annoying, and not especially bright. Not sure what the reaction would have been if she were a nice kid - probably quiet disbelief.

I grew up in suburban NJ, too, and religion was sort of ... something your parents made you do. There was a kind of strict divide between Jewish kids and Christian kids until high school, too.

A huge percentage of the kids I went to high school with were Catholic, and the thing to do was attend 5 p.m. mass on Saturday night, which meant collecting a program from the church and hanging out somewhere until you could safely go home and show it to your parents as proof you'd attended.

There was one group -- Young Life, I think -- that tried to make inroads for a while, and did with some kids, but it was a little ... culty-seeming to the rest of us. Most of the kids in it had "Godsquad!" written on their notebooks, and for a bunch of disaffected 80s teens who were heavily into smoking and drinking, etc., Young Life was a whole different, and not entirely appealing, world.