What are they so afraid of?
I have always assumed that Christian flatting was largely a natural progression of what some at my hall unimaginatively dubbed “The God Squad” but which I presume to be omnipresent year after year in colleges across campus. I think you know what I’m talking about (eyeballing you, St. Margaret’s): those kids who stay home on Saturday nights transfixed by the TV, enjoy giving high-fives, fist-bumps and side-hugs, and seem to be unusually proficient at a vast array of sports. I had assumed that these individuals’ underlying paranoia about being corrupted by The World would exponentially increase outside the confines of the hall, and thus would logically translate into living in wholly Christian households. After all, there’s safety in numbers.But the know-it-all in me loves to be proven right and I wanted to find out for myself whether or not this was true, so I went about tracking down some Christian flatters. They weren’t hard to find. It turns out that they tend to coagulate in unofficial communes, comparable to the Centrepoints or Jonestowns of yore. These flats were well-known enough that I could show up unannounced to request an interview, having made only rudimentary inquiries at the Critic office about Dunedin’s georeligious landscape, and be fairly certain that these inauspicious dwellings would indeed be inhabited by people who loved Jesus.
My first stop was a four-man flat on Duke Street. From what I came to understand, there were no fewer than five flats brimming with evangelical fervor within a rough 500-metre radius of their house. While these charming lads insisted that this was “a coincidence,” I could not help but muse on whether some sort of religious pheromones exist that attract these people to populate the same territory. Was it a biological survival mechanism?
Not exactly. Those I interviewed said it was important to them to share the same morals and values with their flatmates, which allowed them to keep each other accountable. Martha* put it this way: “a Christian girl is less likely to be bring home random boys or steal or drink excessively. You expect more from a Christian person.”(It was at this point that my brain chose to incongruously remind me of a friend who took his Christian girlfriend’s bottom virginity because anal “doesn’t count.” Christians are known for a lot of things, but consistency of canon and conduct is not one of them.)
It was not just about shared morals and cracking the whip when someone had sinned, though. In the same way that med students often end up flatting with and/or married to each other, through sheer overexposure and the loss of the ability to interact with regular humans, my interviewees also pointed out the obvious: that people, Christian or not, generally prefer to live with likeminded individuals.
This little light of mine
That didn’t sound particularly conspiratorial. But given the obligatory Student Life component that featured in every flat I visited, one would have thought that these, ah, enthusiastic individuals would be foaming at the mouth to live with heathens. I mean, talk about a literally captive audience – the flat would be an inexhaustible opportunity to rack up points on God’s heavenly scoreboard. You know, the one that keeps a tally of how many jandals and sausages Student Lifers give away, and how many quizzes they lure people into filling out.Indeed, Samson*, whose girlfriend Delilah* is the only non-Christian in an otherwise all-Christian flat (cue “only gay in the village” reference), suspects Delilah’s flatmates of doing exactly this. When I asked if he thought exclusively Christian flatting was a good idea or not, he thought for a moment. “I think as long as everyone knows what they’re in for, it’s fine,” he said. “But the fact that they sort of roped in my girlfriend – probably in order to convert her – and then started putting limitations on her, wasn’t very good.”
When I suggested the aforementioned idea to my Christians flatters (perhaps not using quite those exact words), they all agreed with me as I smugly recited some Bible verse about being a “light unto the darkness.” While they concurred that light-shining was undeniably important, they did not think that living in an all-Christian flat prevented their ability to do this effectively. The Duke Street lads explained (in fluent Christianese) that “living together as a Christian flat, we find strength in our home place – where we rest – where we can actually encourage each other in the faith, and that means that we can still be a light to those around us.”
To be sure, the virtues of both cleanliness and hospitality were things these guys took deadly seriously. I had nary crossed the threshold before I was being offered a cuppa and a seat. The flat was spick-and-span, and the flatmates had a palpable sense of pride about this. Indeed, I was assured that, “all I did to tidy up before you got here was fold up that blanket.” Later, as I was being plied with a plate of freshly-baked cookies that rested atop not one, but two Bibles (“there’s also another one behind you,”) they explained to me: “We always open the door for anyone to come in, so we invite a lot of people over for dinner, Christian or non-Christian. We always buy extra food at the supermarket and stuff, just for people who come round. We’re having a barbeque tonight,” they added. “You should come, if you want.”
Scarily, had I not had prior commitments of the pre-St. Patrick’s-drinking-and-blazing variety, I probably would have gone. They left me, I’m ashamed to say, with a warm, fuzzy feeling in my heart but also, more notably, a lead. “We do feel that we need to be a light to people, show them who we are,” they said. “We actually have friends on Castle Street that are Christians, and they were very intentional in flatting there so that they can be a light to the people around them. Are you planning to interview them?”
I hadn’t been, but I did. Like many other Castle Street flats, the house was almost entirely devoid of furniture, although this was not, regrettably, due to the tenants having burned it (I was sure to inquire about this). Unlike many Castle Street flats, there was a cleaning roster written neatly in green on the side of the fridge. The flatmates met through Student Life. When I inquired as to whether they chose their location to gain maximum exposure to the unsaved market, this is what Simon* said: “A lot of my friends live on Castle Street and it was really important to me to set an example for them ‘cos most of them take it way too far … I wanted to support them, show them that there was an alternative to just going out and getting trashed to the extent that those guys do it.”
Christians are people, too
Is life in an exclusively Christian flat fundamentally different from your average Scarfie dwelling? In contrast to the chronic TV addicts of my first year, the people I interviewed seemed to spend their Saturday nights much the same way most students do. The Duke Street flat said, “It’s definitely a social night for us. We generally aren’t even here – we’re just, like, socialising.”Apart from the cleanliness and the intentional hospitality, the differences in lifestyles seemed to lie in the little things. When asked their opinion on mixed flatting, for example, the Duke Street guys said they were fine with the idea, but would have to be conscious about things like “walking around with your shirt off.” “You mean you wouldn’t do that if you lived with girls?” I asked, incredulous. Without hesitation, there was a unanimous and scandalised “No!” “She’d stumble!” they cried. “Have you seen us?”
Hell hath no fury like a Christian flatmate scorned
Disappointingly, all the interviewees said their households didn’t have hard-and-fast rules about things like getting drunk, having sleepovers, or masturbating in the shower. When pressed, however, Martha admitted that if one of her flatmates brought a boy home she would “probably tell him to leave.” Having roared with laughter at my very question, she added “there’d be some serious problems if that happened.”Samson has been That Guy. Before meeting him, I was told that that his girlfriend, Delilah, had “a Christian landlord who has some specific rules about what can go on in the house, and the flatmates actively police those rules.” Chillingly, this turned out to be true. On one unforgettable occasion, Delilah’s landlords, upon discovering that Samson had slept over, rang his parents. “I thought that it was a bit of an abuse of their power, because Delilah is paying to live there, it’s her home, and she should be able to do whatever she wants in her room,” he said.
Evidently, some landlords have not improved one skerrick since that one time when Mary and Joseph were refused lodging at all the inns in Bethlehem. And we all know how that turned out. Still clearly disconcerted by the whole fiasco, Samson added, “At 26, I just don’t need it. A lot of the time I have to turn up quite late and come through the window. It’s pretty sad.” Ironically, one of Delilah’s flatmates now has her long-distance boyfriend staying with her in her room. When I asked Samson how he felt about this, he paused, before saying quietly, “I’ve just found them to be really hypocritical.”
The whole notion of student Gestapos policing their Nazi landlords’ diktats runs completely counter to the traditional student-landlord divide on which North Dunedin flatting culture is founded. Bitching about our landlords is one of the most important sources of student bonding, providing endless rant fodder when we earnestly discuss our marginalisation as second-class citizens of this city of broken dreams. How could Delilah’s flatmates have so shamelessly defected to the Dark Side?
Never were these “morals police” more visible than in an interview that did not actually end up happening. On the morning my first interview for this feature was scheduled to take place, I received the following text from the girl: “Hey Britt, I’m in a wee bit of an awkward situation. None of my flatmates will help with the interview and they’re telling me I shouldn’t be doing it because I’m not a very good role-model Christian.” My jaw dropped. I didn’t even have to do an interview and I already had soundbite gold. But my feeling of hand-rubbing glee didn’t last for long. My worst fears had been confirmed – and I wished they hadn’t been, for the girl’s sake. If you’re reading this, flatmates of my interviewee that wasn’t, shame on you for proving the student body right about Christians. Who’s the poor role model now, bitches?
Martha could relate to the above story. She flatted with non-Christians in her second year, but since then has lived in exclusively Christian households. While this year has being going well, she was miserable in her third-year flat. “Something happened, there was an altercation … You don’t expect a Christian to treat you really badly, because they’re supposed to be living with God in their life. But I was treated better by non-Christians who don’t have God in their lives, so how does that work?” Martha thought for a moment. “I was very disillusioned. We’re friends now, it’s fine … But they never apologised for it.” While the relationship between Martha’s shitty flatting experience and its monoreligious overtones is one of correlation and of not causation, she did add that, “I wouldn’t expect anyone to do what they did, even if they weren’t Christians, but because they were, you don’t understand how they could do that to you.”
