God's Harvard

A Christian College on a Mission to Save America

Hanna Rosin

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780156035361
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Behind the scenes at Patrick Henry College: "A deft and honest narrative of evangelical education...historical background, close observation and skeptical wit" ( Publishers Weekly ). One of the Christian Science Monitor 's annual "Books We Liked Best" Take a walk down the halls and into the dorms and hearts of tiny Patrick Henry College, a Christian school just outside the nation's capital, where ambitious young evangelicals are groomed to become tomorrow's conservative elite. The future front lines of politics, entertainment, and science will be commanded by these idealistic graduates, who plan to lead the battle in reclaiming a godless nation. God's Harvard reveals the evangelical movement at a moment of crisis and climax, its future leaders struggling to resist the temptations of modern life even as they try to remake the world in their image. This is a vibrant, insightful look at kids who may very well be in charge of our country one day. "A rare accomplishment for many reasons—perhaps most of all because Rosin is a journalist who not only reports but also observes deeply." — San Francisco Chronicle "Rosin is at her best when chronicling sympathetically the lives of these young evangelicals, as ambitious as their secular peers but single-minded in their focus on politics." — Chicago Tribune "Nuanced and highly readable... With her feisty, richly detailed prose." — The Washington Post

CHAPTER 2

Harvard for Homeschoolers

The drive from Patrick Henry College to Michael Farris’s takes you past all the landmarks of a rapidly changing Loudon County: a McDonald’s, a Subway, a few tiny strip malls, and a creamy new subdivision (“Quaker Village”). At some point along Route 7, a sign pokes out—BROWN EGGS, $2 DOZEN—a relic of the kind of place Purcellville used to be when Farris moved there twenty years ago. His place is still past the end of the blacktop, down a dirt road. A profile in the Washington Post implied that the dirt road was Farris’s private driveway, tarring him with the showy materialism of his new neighbors. The mistake so irritated Farris that he once drove me to the road in the middle of lunch to prove it wasn’t true.

Tech-boom money has put Jaguars and BMWs in the local high school parking lots. The few barns left around town are destined for “reclaimed” wood benches in somebody’s new mudroom. Only a thin line of trees separates Farris from yet another new subdivision going up across the road. But on his side the view is still mostly pure. On the March day I visited, the neighbor’s horses grazed by a white picket fence as a couple of rabbits hopped by. It was quiet enough to hear squirrels scratching bark or the first songbirds of spring—the perfect sound track to Farris’s fantasy of protected wholesome living, of the kind of life where barefoot children chase butterflies on the grass while their father supervises from a nearby hammock, a C. S. Lewis hardback resting on his chest.

When you hang around the paternalistic culture of Patrick Henry long enough, some part of you comes to believe that Farris really does control everything. As I pulled up to the house just before 8 A.M., NPR was airing an item about the White House drug-policy office’s latest finding that, out of thirty teenagers, seven use drugs, thirteen drink, six smoke, and ten are sexually active. “Believe it or not, officials call that an improvement,” said the host. Touché, I thought to myself. Could such timing of a story that puts NPR to the right of the Bush White House, and that happens to justify everything Farris believes, be mere coincidence?

At this time in the morning, most kids would be getting ready for school, but at Farris’s house he was the only one up and about. Homeschooling families set their own schedules, and many start their day at a much more reasonable hour. The house was orderly but not fancy, with evidence of ten children and various grandchildren in every room—high chairs and a Barbie graveyard and piles of schoolbooks and the verse of the day on the blackboard in the sunken living room where Farris’s wife, Vickie, still home-schooled the three youngest of their kids: Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.

Farris was in the habit of taking advantage of this quiet time every morning to commune with God. More specifically, he sat down at the oak desk in his study—a halfhearted replica of a Victorian library, with a Persian rug and Christian bestsellers lining the shelves—and copied out a passage of the Bible by hand. He was writing out the whole thing, in longhand, on plain loose-leaf paper, on a surface cluttered with other papers, stray acorns and wires from unplugged gadgets; his golden retriever, Sunny, lay down behind his chair. He was doing it because it says in Deuteronomy that this is what the head of a nation must do. The people are to choose a King whom the Lord in turn has chosen. The King shall not enrich himself with either gold or wives or horses. He “shall write him a copy of this law in a book,” which in Farris’s case means some cheap-looking plastic binders from Office Depot.

In this prophecy, Farris does not get to be King. He had his moment in 1993, when he ran for lieutenant governor of Virginia and lost; the following year he declined to run for the senate. Instead, he views himself as God’s consigliere, or recruiter, or anointed messenger, St. Gabriel of the Beltway. His job now is to teach himself “by what standards we should measure political leaders, and how to recognize one,” he says. “We want to train leaders to be the way God wants them to be. I’ve encouraged people at the school to think that if you want to be a godly leader, don’t deviate from God’s standards.” The Bible’s command not to take too many wives translates into: Don’t get a divorce. The injunction not to accumulate lots of silver and gold means: Don’t use your public office for personal gain. Don’t lead your people back to Egypt means: Don’t use the world’s way, use God’s.

Farris took out a few sheets of paper and began to write in the same careless handwriting he might use to write a note to his secretary or a Post-it to himself. I Corinthians 14:2: “For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God.” This verse is used by more charismatic denominations such as Pentecostals as the justification for speaking in tongues. If Farris were one of his students, he might have cursed his bad luck to have come upon this verse in the presence of an NPR-listening reporter such as me. The average Patrick Henry student may have attended a charismatic church in his youth, or even been overcome by ecstatic moaning now and again. But the student, especially if he had any serious political ambitions, would not want to leave me with that image of his ten-year-old self lost in religious ecstasy. However, Mike was from a different generation, and he was unfazed. “There are phonies out there but I think it’s real,” he says about speaking in tongues, “because God can do anything.”

By 9 A.M. the house started coming to life. Michael Farris’s youngest son Peter, then nine, played scales on their piano. His nineteen-year-old daughter, Angie, turned on the computer in the hall behind him.

“Dad, what’s that site that reviews movies?”

“Google ‘Ted Baehr.’ I think it’s ‘movieguide.com.’ Why? What movie are you looking at?”

“I was thinking of going out with Lydia Sunday night, and she was suggesting several movies and one that looks kinda iffy.”

Movieguide.org is a Christian parent’s best friend; it rates movies from “EXEMPLARY: Biblical, usually Christian, worldview, with no questionable elements whatsoever” to “ABHORRENT: Intentional blasphemy, evil, gross immorality, falsehood, evil worldviews, and/or destructive, horrendous worldview problems.”

Angie scrolled down to Date Movie.

“What’s it say?” Farris asked.

“‘Abhorrent,’” she read. A red warning box. “‘Strong Romantic worldview in which morality is reduced to pursuit of individual desires, and a flamboyant homosexual character; 12 profanities and 29 obscenities, many of them strong, several vulgar gestures, and crude bathroom humor. Media-wise families will avoid this detestable movie targeted at teenagers.’”

“Okay,” her father said, “I guess that’s a no.”

Farris is a constitutional lawyer and Baptist minister who has worked in Christian causes for decades. When I met him he was fifty-three, but he seemed younger, with thick, sandy brown hair and a slightly amused expression. In his writing Farris can sound morose, warning parents about the land of “MTV, Internet, porn, abortion, homosexuality, greed, and accomplished selfishness.” But in person, and especially with the media, he aims for charm and even irreverence; he sees very few movies or television shows, but he absorbs just enough decadent culture to talk about “chick flicks” or joke about some woman he met who looked like a “very expensive prostitute” and turned out to be a Republican Party chairwoman.

He loves to tell stories that put him at the centers of power, arguing before the Supreme Court, having dinner with Clarence Thomas, making Justice John Paul Stevens laugh so hard his bow tie shook. But his favorites are tales out of school: standing on the floor at the 1996 Republican National Convention after Bob Dole’s speech, watching Senator George Allen throw a foam football forty yards to hit Sam Donaldson in the head, or challenging the constitutionality of parking tickets as a law student in Spokane.

Farris founded Patrick Henry in 2000 after fielding requests from two constituencies: homeschooling parents and conservative congressmen. The parents, who looked up to him for his work with the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, would ask him where they could find a Christian college with a “courtship” atmosphere, meaning one where dating is regulated and subject to parental approval. The congressmen asked him where they could find homeschoolers as interns, “which I took to mean someone who ‘shares my values.’ And I knew they didn’t want a fourteen-year-old kid.” So he set out to build what he calls an Evangelical Ivy League, and what the kids call Harvard for Homeschoolers.

Farris bought the land for the Patrick Henry campus with $400,000 from the Home School Legal Defense Association’s reserves; he raised the rest of the money for the college—$9 million—from parents and such donors as Tim LaHaye and James Leininger, a San Antonio businessman who is a part owner of the Spurs and is known in Texas as the “sugar daddy” of the religious right. Farris decided the school would not accept any federal funding.

In The Joshua Generation, his manifesto for the school, Farris places himself in the “Moses generation” that “celebrates the fact that it left Egypt.” But “leaving Egypt is not the end goal.” The homeschooling movement will be counted successful only if the kids—the Joshua Generation—“engage wholeheartedly in the battle to take back the land.” They are the nation’s future senators, governors, residents, and Supreme Court justices, he writes. “The goal is not a political coup or the establishment of a new Israel . . . It is about raising men and women of faith who, because they love God, refuse to sit silently by while their nation hates what He loves and loves what He hates.”

The problem was, when homeschoolers graduated from high school, they faced a résumé dilemma. Elite universities are “pathways to power,” but for Christians they are full of pitfalls, places where knowledge of God is considered “unenlightened” while “homosexuality and other perverse forms of sexual behavior” are “pronounced good and celebrated.” Places where you take classes on “sex and gender” and learn that America is the real terrorist state (“Yes, we should shudder,” he writes).

“You cannot fight something with nothing,” Farris writes. “For us, to give the top Christian students the best possible opportunities, there must be a Christian equivalent of the Ivy League.”

At Patrick Henry, Farris tried to re-create the education of the Founding Fathers. In their first two years, Patrick Henry students take a “classics” core with a Biblical slant; they read Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Milton, and analyze them through a Christian lens. They suffer through Euclidean geometry. Latin is not required, but many students take it as a sign of their commitment to rarefied intellectual pursuits. They are encouraged to form tight bonds with their professors, who make themselves available after classes and even at home. For the second two years, especially for government majors, school turns into a kind of Beltway training camp. Students take practical courses in state government, polling, and statistics. They find internships in the offices of Republican politicians or conservative think tanks. All seniors do a directed research and writing project that is designed to mimic the work that an entry-level staffer would do because “a whole lot of elected members of Congress started out as Hill staffers,” Farris said. “If you want to train a new generation of leaders, you have to get in on the ground floor.”

The school is too young to turn many students away, but the applicants are fairly self-selecting. The average SAT score is a tier below Ivy League—1230–1410, the equivalent of the University of Virginia or Rice. The atmosphere is very much pressure-cooker—the first time I visited, the students had just petitioned the library to open before 6 A.M. so they could get in earlier to study. “Everyone here is going for the same prize,” said Sarah Chambers. “Nothing here is chill.”

The best students are offered full or near full scholarships, and for everyone else tuition and board costs around $20,000. The students are mostly white; about 15 percent qualify as multiracial and a handful are Asian or Hispanic. Derek’s freshman class included a Korean American, an Indian American, and someone from Taiwan. There was also a student who was legally blind. In Derek’s class there were no African Americans, although the following year there was one. They come from all over the country, and about 8 percent come from conservative military families. By its own insular terms, the school considers itself theologically diverse because it attracts a wide range of evangelical denominations. But because it bills itself as a pipeline to official Republican Washington, political viewpoints vary little. When Farris travels to homeschooling conferences and Christian-education seminars to recruit new students, he often emphasizes the school’s “vast network of political connections.” One day, Farris tells them at chapel, “An Academy Award—winner will walk down the aisle. He’ll get a cell-phone call congratulating him. It happens to be the president of the United States, his old roommate from Patrick Henry.” So far, his students are working hard to prove that he’s not delusional.

Three times a year, the White House chooses about one hundred students for a three-month internship. Patrick Henry, with only three hundred students, has taken between one and five of those spots in each of the past five years—roughly the same as Georgetown. Other Patrick Henry students volunteer at the White House. Tim Goeglein, the Bush administration’s liaison to the evangelical community, told me the numbers reflect the talents of the Patrick Henry students, who “have learned a way to integrate faith and action.” For the White House, it’s also a way to reach out to the base while helping to build a generation of young political operatives.

Of the nearly two hundred fifty graduates so far, eight or so have had jobs at the White House (one in Karl Rove’s office), dozens of others have been at various federal agencies. Nearly every conservative Republican senator or congressman has had a Patrick Henry student work on his or her staff or campaign. Farris used to call his friends in Washington to recommend his students individually; this year, he said, he no longer had to. Patrick Henry interns were well known enough that the internship program was running on “autopilot.” Every year two students were invited on a trip to Israel sponsored by the Foundation for the Defense for Democracies, a group founded after 9/11 to promote American values abroad. The other students came from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other better-known colleges, but Patrick Henry was included because, as the trip’s organizer told the students, “We hear you guys are good at getting into the White House.”

One year there were five White House interns from Patrick Henry and four volunteers; so many that the Patrick Henry Herald ran a weekly column called “Inside the White House.” Students wrote dispatches that ranged in tone from reverent (“I finally realize I’m working for and meeting the very people I’ve always emulated”) to cheeky (overhearing Bush say, “I stepped on Laura’s foot”), but never disrespectful. After four columns, the White House asked the students to stop, and of course they did.

In 2003 the college began offering a major in strategic intelligence—students in the program learn the history of covert operations and take internships that allow them to graduate with a security clearance. In their junior year, they write “open-source” intelligence reports as free research for the CIA and dream of becoming spies. “Thou shalt not lie” hangs heavy over these majors, but they balance it with God’s commanding Moses to send spies to the land of Canaan. In the hierarchy of campus cool, SI majors consider themselves on top; to guard their secrecy, they’re not allowed to be quoted in the student paper or even to tell fellow students their major, a warning they take very, very seriously. Several graduates have landed at the FBI and the CIA, and one worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. One person working in military intelligence sent Farris an e-mail saying a Patrick Henry student was the best intern he’d seen in sixteen years.

On paper, the great majority of students supported the Iraq war—at least in 2005. But many harbored a Vietnam-era ambivalence about actually signing up, lest it interfere with law school. So students were always thankful when the handful that was patriotic or reckless or just not cut out for politics announced they were joining the forces.

A cross section of Patrick Henry on a typical day looks like a microcosm of the Beltway, with every sector of official conservative Washington life represented; one girl had just finished running a state legislator’s campaign, another starred in campaign commercials for her father. One crew had returned from a Blogs4Life convention, another was collecting petitions for a marriage amendment in their home state. One student was running for local office in Loudon County. Someone else had just gone overseas with the State Department; another was applying to intern at the Supreme Court. One student was fund-raising for a group that supports privatizing Social Security; another was headed to Senator Sam Brownback’s weekly meeting of social conservatives.

This year several students started a new blogring “for all those who aspire to run for Political Office one day (or become a First Lady), whether it be Senator, Governor, Congressman/Congresswoman, or PRESIDENT!!!” Within a week, a quarter of the campus had signed up. If you could live anywhere in the whole world where would it be, one student asked. “Washington, D.C. OF COURSE!!!!!!!,” another answered. Their online names included christandcountry, futureprez, and elect35.

During election season, the school excuses students from classes on the days that coincide with the Republican Party’s 72 Hour Task Force—the on-ground blitz to get out the vote. Students say things like, “We played a major part in George Bush winning Ohio”—and they believe it.

You can divide the student body by different Washington character types, too. Some are front men likely to run for office—tall, clean cut, respectable, charismatic yet cautious. Others are Karl Rove types, behind-the-scenes operators who possess a wickedly clever sense of strategy but have trouble sustaining eye contact. There are shiny, happy Bush administration press-secretary types who smile and speak in empty sound bites. There are protest warriors who infiltrate antiwar rallies with cleverly obnoxious signs, and who would wear their hair longer if they were allowed to. There are self-important secrecy freaks who will only tell you their class schedules “off the record.” There are political junkies who’ve been working campaigns since they were eight years old and by junior year sound totally burned out. Most common are the kids who seem like ambitious kids from Georgetown or Harvard or any other place where being twenty-one and working near power gives you a high.

“So he was kinda bored, distracted, glancing down my résumé and I was saying stupid stuff like ‘I definitely support the president,’” one of the graduates was telling her friend at a party at the beginning of the year. “And then he cut in with: ‘Oh, you’re from Patrick Henry? Why didn’t you say so? That’s all I needed to hear.’”

“Psych!” and they high-fived. (She got the job, at the Department of Labor. )

For Farris’s generation of conservative Christians, political power came as a giddy surprise. Farris barreled into politics in the eighties and early nineties with the Moral Majority, delighted at rocking the establishment. He and his cohorts never expected to be invited into official Washington, so they behaved as if they had nothing to lose; Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, u...