God's army marches onto campus

A Washington Post reporter profiles Patrick Henry College, the school that aims to offer an Ivy education to evangelicals.

By Marjorie Kehe

from the September 11, 2007 edition

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They're young, they're bright, and they're so eager that they make the rest of us look half asleep. In between canvassing relentlessly for their favorite politicians and earning SAT scores that would turn most other kids chartreuse with envy, these young crusaders remind themselves to "take vitamins, do sit-ups, study, read [the] Bible."

They're the "Joshua Generation," the youthful Evangelicals who hope to "shape the culture and take back the nation." Whether these kids terrify or delight you has everything to do with your political and religious views but, one way or the other, they are people that you should probably start getting to know. God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin offers an intriguing introduction.

Rosin is a reporter for The Washington Post and, as she is a secular Jew, this is hardly her natural constituency. She approaches this world as much an outsider as will many of her readers.

Her subject is Patrick Henry College, a small Christian college outside Washington, D.C. Founded in 2000, by 2002 it had already become a major pipeline supplying youthful interns to the White House.

In fact, such activity is the college's raison d'être. "You are the tip of the spear," the college's founder, homeschooling activist Michael Farris, likes to tell his students. These kids – many of whom were homeschooled – are the academic elite of the evangelical world. Farris aims to mold them into "shape-shifters" – bright kids who, combining Ivy-caliber educations with conservative Christian values, will "move between two worlds with their essential natures intact."

These are students like Derek Archer, an earnest, appealing homeschooler from Ohio, who, Rosin notes, "in any other generation ... probably would have been a missionary, or a pastor."

But Evangelicals like Farris, tired of watching a secular elite (as they see it) run the US, have other hopes for bright lights like Derek: senator, governor, judge, secretary of State, or maybe even president. (Farris dreams of the day when he will introduce his college's ultimate graduation day speaker: "President So and So, an alumnus of Patrick Henry.")

Rosin spent a year and a half visiting Patrick Henry and got to know students like Derek – sometimes even traveling to their family homes – and what she saw were "the children of Ralph Reed ... ambitious, entitled" and unwilling to accept a marginal role in the future of their nation.

This new generation of Evangelicals, writes Rosin, "move easily in and out of the mainstream. They love their iPods almost as much as they love Christ, and they don't see the need to choose."

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