A thin, coated figure trudged up the Charles Library’s front steps, ferns of wispy white hair potted beneath a silver ballcap. He dragged a silent speaker through the vestibule and past the front desk, wordlessly, before settling down in the egg-blue nest of reading chairs clustered at the base of the library’s vast, grand, modern staircase.
And then the man known around campus simply as The Street Preacher began to speak.
When he was 17, Patrick Donlevy’s life seemed to stretch infinitely before him, he recounted — he treated life like one long party. He figured he could worry about spiritual things once his best years were behind him.
Then, a diagnosis nearly sawed off the rest of his life: Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It is by no means a death sentence — up to 90 percent of those afflicted with Hodgkin’s reach remission after treatment, according to the National Institutes of Health’s Cancer Institute. But Donlevy was still contemplating his own mortality after doctors handed him a clean bill of health.
The ordeal launched “a search for the true God” that Donlevy says began with the story of Jesus Christ in the New Testament and ended, coincidentally, at a college dance. Mid-conversation with a classmate on the floor, he says he had an epiphany.
“I realized I was screwed up, messed up,” he said. “And I realized Christ was alive.”
Not long after, he became a Christian.
Donlevy tried his hand at Bible teaching in bits: He participated in the Night School at Philly’s Manna Bible Institute. He taught Bible classes at German churches for much of the 1990s. In fact, he’s working on a Master’s of Theology from Missio Seminary — formerly Biblical Theological Seminary — right now.
But 20 years ago, he accompanied a few friends to the boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey, he said. He remembered watching them paint Bible stories on a giant canvas and preach as beachgoers stopped, clustered, listened, stared. Soon after, Donlevy pulled up to Temple to build an evangelistic enterprise of his own.
For some time, Donlevy came off as the bright side of an accidental good-cop, bad-cop routine. Another band of asphalt evangelists led by local pastor Aden Rustfeldt roamed campus in the mid-2010s, deploying brightly-colored signs and megaphones as fountains of sexist and homophobic bile, among other things.
“I grew up going to church and everything, but what they were preaching was definitely more extreme than what I was exposed to,” said Nina Parraway, a junior sport, tourism, and hospitality major who was raised by a Jewish mother and a Christian father. “I was never told to hate anybody because of certain ways that they choose to identify themselves.”
In the moment, the sign-waving gang seemed like performance art props — and they knew how to grab eyeballs. Students thronged them, drawn to the great American pastime of collective outrage. And Donlevy would often simply roll past the hubbub, setting up his speaker on another part of campus.
The posterboard bros, if they haven’t completely vanished, are a greatly diminished presence of late. Donlevy remains.
“He’s just kind of there,” said Nigel Andrews, a freshman environmental studies major. The sound of Donlevy’s teachings doesn’t bother him.
Yet questions of tolerance have long circled Donlevy’s maverick ministry, too. A 2008 article in The Temple News examined Donlevy and fellow street preacher Chuck Harrison’s “impromptu sermons” among students. In 2013, when Temple’s main library was Paley Hall, TTN columnist Casey Kallen wondered, “how do these people”— Donlevy and other evangelists — “get away with standing on the steps of the Paley library?”
The rules of campus speech were different back then, before events in the Middle East put stateside activists at loggerheads with school administrators. But the crackdowns on other kinds of speech haven’t yet touched Donlevy. In fact, he’s still using that mic-and-speaker setup. Temple administration moved to limit the use of similar amplifiers in the summer after a rash of high-profile protests against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
Which is not to say Donlevy’s views are themselves uncontroversial.
Yes, he thinks being in a same-sex relationship can send someone to Hell. No, he doesn’t believe atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists or even the Muslim and Jewish faithful are on the path to life everlasting. The Bible says so, Donlevy argued. And much of Christian tradition agrees with him.
But say a 21st-century reader concedes the Bible is talking to them — rather than singular tribes of people living in different times, with understandings of phenomena like sex and pregnancy so far from our own that it’s impossible to fully describe the distance here.
What the authors of Scripture actually say about some of Donlevy’s convictions remains at issue: To paraphrase the great theologians at Earthworm Jim, it’s like those guys wrote in a whole other language.
Genesis 1:27, which Donlevy said made clear the unchangeability of gender, is in fact a kind of creation-story code-switch: Before Eve arises from his rib, the text initially refers to the biblical Adam as “ha-adama,” a gender-neutral moniker meaning “the one made from earth” — since God forms the first human out of the dirt.
The same goes for the parts of Leviticus said to condemn same-sex relationships, or any number of other issues: Donlevy sees the words of Scripture as closing the debate. Other Bible scholars, though often a small minority, see ambiguities in translation and interpretation as opening the door to more controversy.
“I was like, ‘Who is this man and what is he talking about?’” said senior biology major Cassia Hagley.
Hagley, a child of the South, is herself a Christian. But her theology did not mesh with Donlevy’s.
“It felt like he was using the Word of God to divide people,” Hagley said.
Evangelical Christianity — born, in large part, of the street-preacher, tent-revival tradition — cozied up to conservative Republican politics more than ever in the late twentieth century. As it did, Right-wing causes célèbres, like opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, loomed ever larger among the faith’s priorities.
But Donlevy’s beliefs on poverty, for example, don’t neatly map on to that marriage of political convenience. He spent much of his adult life playing Wall Street and was even a certified stockbroker for a time before the turn of the century.
It all ended, Donlevy said, with a hard lesson. The Volcker Shock, the dot-com disaster, and the Great Housing Meltdown of 2008 lent him new skepticism towards wealth-watching, new concern for the plight of the poor—and the sense that the relatively cash-flush American church might itself have committed a sin by not doing more about it.
Donlevy thought for a moment. It was a sin, he decided, very much like his own.
“I have assets,” he said. “I should be giving that away now.”
In the spring, author and journalist Jeff Sharlet watched a man promote “Bible courses” on a bare, lonely Dallas sidewalk. No one stopped to partake — few even noticed.
“Don’t mock, friends,” Sharlet, who’s written prolifically on American Christianity, wrote to his followers on the site formerly known as Twitter. “It’s more interesting to imagine feeling something so fully in your heart that you’d put on a tie and stand in public offering that which you’re aware almost nobody wants.”
After 45 minutes, Donlevy grabbed his speaker by the handle. Public proselytizing was once more contentious than it is now, he said. Arguments with passersby were frequent and intense. He himself was a little more forward and more aggressive in getting the message out. Now, many students simply hustle past, ears sealed by the latest noise-cancelling technology.
That hasn’t dimmed the street preacher’s thinking — at least, not much.
“Some are listening,” he said. “Some have earphones, or all kinds of things going on. But that’s not my concern. My concern is to preach the Word as well as I can.”
Kajsa Morse contributed reporting.
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