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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
God's Harvard: A
Christian College on a Mission to Save
America
by Hanna Rosin
Harcourt - September
2007
Introduction
to Patrick Henry
College
When I first began covering religion
for the Washington Post, more than
ten years ago, deflecting conversion
attempts became a routine part of my work.
Although they are unfailingly gracious,
evangelicals are not so good at respecting
professional boundaries. What did it
matter that I was a reporter doing my job
if I was headed for eternal damnation? To
a population of domestic missionaries, I
presented as a prime target: a friendly
non-Christian who was deeply interested in
learning more about their beliefs.
The first time someone tried to share
the gospel with me, I naively explained
that I was Jewish and born in Israel,
thank you, thinking this would end the
conversation. This was a big mistake. In
certain parts of Christian America,
admitting I was an Israeli-born Jew turned
me into walking catnip. Because God's own
chosen people had so conspicuously
rejected Jesus, winning one over was an
irresistible challenge. And the Holy Land
glamour of Israel only added to the
allure. Preachers told me they loved me,
half an hour after we met. Godly women
asked if they could take home a piece of
my clothing and pray over it. A pastor's
wife once confided to my husband, "You're
so lucky. She looks so . . . Biblical."
Once, at a Waffle House in Colorado with
some associates of the influential
Christian activist James Dobson, a woman
in our company stared at me so hard it
became uncomfortable for me to eat.
Finally, I looked up at her. "When I look
at you, I see the blood of our Savior
coursing through your veins," she
said.
"Thank you," I gulped. "More maple
syrup?"
Explaining that my family had been
Jewish for many generations and that, by
converting, I'd be breaking a deep, rich
tradition only encouraged them to break
out the big gun. I've heard it so many
times that I can recite it by heart.
Matthew 10:36: "For I have come to turn a
man against his father, a daughter against
her mother, a daughter-in-law against her
mother-in-law -- a man's enemies will be
the members of his own household. Anyone
who loves his father or mother more than
me is not worthy of me." This didn't stick
with me, either. Clearly they had not met
my mother, or any Jewish mother for that
matter. The Jews haven't endured for
nearly 4,000 years by giving their cubs up
so easy.
Biblical verses, like turtlenecks go in
and out of style. During the nineties I
heard Matthew 10:36 on nearly every
reporting trip. This was a paradoxical
decade for evangelicals. The Christian
right had become a fixture in American
politics and the nation was about to elect
George W. Bush, the closest thing American
evangelicals have had to a pope. At the
same time the Christian home-school
movement was booming -- a relic of the age
of separatism and retreat. Evangelicals
were poised to move from the fringe to the
elite power circles of American society,
but they just couldn't seem to make the
jump. Unless they learned to polish their
act and stop telling people to renounce
their mothers, they would never make
it.
I first visited Patrick Henry College
in September 1999, a year before the
school opened its doors. The "school,"
that afternoon, consisted of founder
Michael Farris, a Christian homeschooling
activist, manning an excavator on a
construction site just off a Virginia
highway exit. Farris was affable, his
usual manner with reporters, as he laid
out the plans for his revolution. The
school would enlist the purest of
born-again Christians in a war to
"transform America" by training them to
occupy the highest offices in the land."
Year after year, it would churn out future
congressmen, governors, and federal
judges, until they finally had the
majority. "Few students will know more
about the political ramifications of
reinforcing homosexuality through special
rights than ours," he told me. One day, he
bragged, he would introduce the ultimate
graduation-day speaker: "President So and
So, an alumnus of Patrick Henry."
It all sounded a little far-fetched.
After all, he hadn't even laid the first
brick.
Then Bush ran for president as a
born-again former alcoholic, and won.
Suddenly Farris seemed much less
delusional. In the early winter of 2005 I
visited again. The central building,
Founders Hall, was now an impressive
Federalist structure. Inside, the walls
were covered with posters for an upcoming
production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal
Husband. A Whiffenpoofs-style singing
group occupied the grand staircase. After
talking to some kids having lunch, I
concluded they were some of the most anal,
competitive teenagers I had every come
across. They input their daily schedules
into Palm Pilots in fifteen-minute
increments -- read Bible, do crunches,
take shower, study for Latin quiz, write
debate briefs. After Jesus Christ they
bowed down to the "1600's" -- the handful
of kids each year who'd gotten perfect
scores on the SAT. The atmosphere was much
more Harvard than Bob Jones.
They resembled the overambitious junior
executives who populate the Ivy League
these days -- only without the political
apathy. Hardly a dorm window, car bumper,
bathroom mirror, or laptop went unsullied
by some campaign slogan -- for George
Bush, John Thune, Bobby Jindal, or one of
the many Christian conservatives who won
during the 2004 campaign. Many students
had taken a sanctioned two weeks off
classes to volunteer for campaigns, and
they were giddy with victory. One senior
told me how she'd sacrificed a couple of
weekends helping out Bush adviser Karl
Rove. One Saturday afternoon, he stopped
by to give her a thank-you present. "Good
thing it was an ice-cream sandwich or I
would have kept it forever!"
"You are the tip of the spear," Farris
likes to tell his students at morning
chapel, drawing on his limitless arsenal
of military metaphors. Polls would place
them among the 29 percent of Christian
teens who attend church weekly, pray, read
the Bible, and describe religion as
"extremely important" in their lives.
Sociologically speaking, they are a
parent's dream. They are less likely than
most teenagers to cut classes, do drugs,
have sex, get depressed, feel alone or
misunderstood, talk back, or lie. Within
the third of Americans who call themselves
"evangelical" or "born again" they make up
an elite corps, focused, disciplined, and
not prone to distraction.
When they use the word "Christian,"
they are speaking their own special
language. To them, a Catholic or Mormon,
with some exceptions, is not really a
Christian. Someone who goes to church
three times a year and sings hymns is not
a Christian. Someone who goes to church
every Sunday and calls themselves
"evangelical" is not even necessarily a
Christian. "She thought I was nice and
Jesus was a great guy and she went to
church a lot, but she wasn't a
Christian," Farris once told a
group of students about an acquaintance,
and they understood exactly what he meant.
To them, a "Christian" keeps a running
conversation with God in his or her head
always, Monday through Sunday, on
subjects big and small, and believes that
at any moment God might in some palpable
way step in and show He either cares or
disapproves.
On the issues that have come to define
the modern Christian right, the students
at Patrick Henry generally cleave to
orthodoxy. During my year and a half on
campus, I never heard any student argue
that homosexuality is not a sin, or that
abortion should be allowed in any
circumstances. I heard people criticize
Bush, but only from the right. After the
2004 campaign, I heard a rumor that
someone had voted for John Kerry. I chased
down many leads. All dead ends. If it was
true, no one would admit it publicly. At
Baylor University in Waco, Texas, a much
older Baptist institution that's lately
been trying to modernize, the student
newspaper defended gay marriage in 2004.
Such a transgression is unthinkable at
Patrick Henry -- so beyond the pale that
the possibility is mentioned only in
passing in the otherwise-very-thorough
student code of conduct.
Yet a Patrick Henry student is unlikely
to be caught on camera giving a loony
Jerry Falwell-style rant about gays and
lesbians causing September 11. They worry
about gay rights, but they worry just as
much about mainstream culture's thinking
they're homophobic. "Yes, it's a sin, but
so are a hundred other things," one of the
students told me, in a self-conscious nod
to the "whatever" cadence of his peers.
One day a CNN crew came to film a feature
story on the school on the same day some
students had made two snowmen holding
wooden paddles. The snow sculpture was an
inside joke about the students' fratlike
ritual, recently criticized in the school
newspaper, of paddling newly engaged boys.
But Farris was mortified. "Do you really
want a story to develop that suggests a
connection between PHC and those that have
beaten homosexuals, etc.?" he wrote in an
e-mail to some students who had defended
the snowmen as a harmless prank. "PHC 'a
school for vigilante justice.' Is that the
image you want?"
At first, when I encountered students
who were wary about being interviewed by
me, I assumed it was because of the usual
evangelicals' suspicion of outsiders.
After a while I realized it wasn't that at
all. Mostly, they were protecting their
résumés. "If I want to get
into politics, no history is a good
history," class president Aaron Carlson
told me. "I want to be prudent that
nothing I say is ever misconstrued." The
Patrick Henry generation will not repeat
the mistakes of their fathers. They are
not the reckless, fuming, fed-up
generation that left Egypt -- evangelical
code for the modern world. They are the
"Joshua Generation," as Farris likes to
say, the first ones savvy enough to "take
back the land."
Patrick Henry students are supposed to
be lights unto the world, an example to
the unsaved. And yet, there I was, blind
as can be, and no one on campus tried to
convert me, at least not outright. I never
once heard Matthew 10:36. No one told me
to turn against my mother, and no one told
me I looked like Jesus. Once Sarah
Chambers, a PHC student I knew well, left
me a note about a book I'd loaned her, a
memoir by a former evangelical. She said
the book was charming and funny and
astutely observed but ultimately
unsatisfying because the author
fundamentally did not understand what it
meant to have a close personal
relationship with God. ("If you don't have
it yourself it's hard to understand what
motivates these 'crazy fanatics,'" she
wrote.) I took the note personally. Months
into my reporting, I still didn't
understand.
I began to ask around: What does it
mean to keep up a running conversation
with Jesus in your head, and at the same
time to function in the modern world? I
asked as a reporter, but the question kept
striking people in a way I didn't intend.
To Farris and many of the students I knew,
I seemed to be sending out the signal that
I was open to hearing The Word. Farris
loaned me Dallas Willard's Hearing God and
one afternoon pulled a splinter out of my
hand, which at the moment felt close to
bathing the feet of the sinner. He prayed
"that things come up to help me really
show her what it means to have a
relationship with God. I feel so
inadequate. This is so strange." One sweet
freshman told me, "Uhm, well, I like you
and I'd just feel really bad if you died
and you weren't sure."
Farris must have known I'd be a hard
case. I am Jewish, and most of my family
lives in Israel; I spent my teenage years
in Queens, New York, in the eighties,
where my idea of a dress code was matching
my miniskirt to my handball gloves. I work
and leave my children for several hours a
week in the charge of a babysitter who is
(gasp!) not related to me. I firmly
believe the earth is 4.5 billion years
old, or whatever the current scientific
consensus says. I have many beloved gay
friends and have never once suggested to
any of them that they enter into
reparative therapy to "cure their
disease."
I am naturally democratic almost to a
fault. (I've always been grateful that I
don't live in a country ruled by a despot,
since I could have ended up the one to
"humanize" him.) So, despite our
differences, I had no trouble letting them
in.
For a few weeks during the summer of
2005, Sarah Chambers lived with my family.
She'd gotten an internship at a national
magazine based in Washington, D. C., and
needed a place to stay. When I told my
friends this, most of them would give me a
quizzical
why-are-you-harboring-Nazis-in-your-attic
look. Once they met her, they were even
more worried. Sarah is charismatic, funny,
and adventurous. She climbs, snowboards,
and plays the guitar. Her musical tastes
range from Jack Johnson to Puff Daddy.
She's a terrific writer and was the only
intern in her class hired for a full-time
job. She could be one of those power girls
in a Nike ad, looking glamorous even at
the end of a marathon. On top of that,
she's an astute judge of character with an
introspective side. Sometimes in the
mornings I'd find her upstairs in her bed,
reading her Bible and taking notes. "If
they're all like this," one of my friends
said, "we're in trouble."
Often, in the evenings, we would sit
around and talk about what she believes.
One night my husband finally asked her the
question: "So, are we going to Hell?" The
Patrick Henry statement of faith, which
Sarah and all the other students have to
sign, is quite explicit on this question.
Satan is real, it says, so is Hell. "All
who die outside of Christ shall be
confined in conscious torment for
eternity." Barring the Second Coming,
chances are quite high that my husband and
I and our two young children are going to
die outside of Christ.
At this point, Sarah had been living
with us for almost a month. She'd bathed
our children and read them bedtime
stories. She'd given my five-year-old
daughter a magnificent white model horse,
Snow White, that she herself had loved as
a child.
"Yes," she answered. "But I'm not
jumping up and down with joy about
it."
Copyright
2007 by Hanna Rosin. Published with
permission.
Hanna
Rosin has covered religion and politics
for the Washington Post. She has
also written for the New Yorker,
the New Republic, GQ, and
the New York Times. She lives in
Washington, D.C., with her husband,
Slate deputy editor David Plotz,
and their two children.
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