Customer Reviews

God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America

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Several intertwined stories:

*How several overly-religious, over-achieving youngsters cope with a new and unique overly-religious, over-achieving college.

*How these students decide where to draw the line when it comes to participation in today's seductive secular culture - with the help of prayer, a personal relationship with Jesus, and Patrick Henry College's conduct manual and "snitch" policy.

*How an attorney, who made a career out of representing the interests of home-schooling parents, opened an evangelical college designed to put high achieving home-schoolers on a career path leading to politics. Student volunteers are given time off to assist the Republicans during each election cycle. A huge number of them get positions assisting Republican Congressmen and Senators in Washington DC during their off time.

*How these kids have been taught since birth that God is on the side of the Republican Party.

Patrick Henry College must tweak a continuous balancing act to maintain their offense and defense against secularism. Founder and President Michael Farris would like PHC to be part of the movement that would return the United States to be the God-fearing society it believes the founding fathers intended. This means an education that enhances a working knowledge of and working relationship with the enemy. That knowledge, at times, enhances the inadvertent defection of some of their brightest stars to the dark side.

Robert Stacey, PhD, consistently was a role model and favored teacher at Patrick Henry. Among other things, he caused students to question whether, for example, Bush's every move had been the correct one, and whether, in truth, all the founding fathers were as religious as these home-schoolers had always been taught. Jennifer Gruenke, PhD, taught biology. She didn't believe in evolution but she taught it - on the basis that you have to know the correct theory in order to honestly oppose it. She also taught alternatives - intelligent design and even a 10,000 year old earth inhabited by a naked lady and a snake, as portrayed in Genesis.

These instructors and several others are no longer at Patrick Henry. They resigned en mass when Farris tried to enforce a more Biblical code on their curriculum - caving in to complaints from home-schooling parents.

Not my cup of tea, nor is it the author's, who is a journalist specializing in religion and is a non-practicing Jew. In the hands of other authors, this book could have been a scathing indictment of a Taliban-like fundamentalist sinkhole - or it could have presented PHC to be a suger-coated nirvana-land, but she has done neither. For a year and a half she was granted freedom to the campus and to those who live and work there. She is open-mindedly empathetic, but realistic about them.

It appears PHC will be a significant force in the future, influencing politics and culture wherever they think they can. This is a very interesting, timely book and I recommend it.

In God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America Hanna Rosin, Washington Post correspondent, was embedded in the environment of the Patrick Henry College student for a year and reports what she witnessed and learned.

Patrick Henry College is a very small institution, but also newly founded under the clear authority of its president Michael Farris, a Christian homeschool advocate and clear supporter of the link between political conservativism and orthodox evangelical Christianity. The story she tells shows us remarkable resilience and fortitude of the students of this institution Farris can coined "God's Harvard". Indeed it's students will be among the elite of all secondary school graduates much less the creme of the crop among homeschooled teens. The student body which boasts a rather generous helping of homeschooled undergraduates alone supports any assertion that homseschooled teens can compete with the best and brightest of all high school graduates.

Rosin tells tales of highly competitive students who are in the throes of political training at Patrick Henry. these students have unprecedented access to Washington with a clear sense of mission and pride about their task to reform American government to be something in which God can exercise domain and rule. That God is not currently doing so is at the very heart of the curriculum. In any college, one would be thrilled to have such a critical mass of bright and passionate students and this is part of the picture that Rosin paints for us.

There is, of course, another side to the story. This side is the authoritarian nature of the administration with a special emphases on Michael Farris and Dean of Students Bob Wilson. There are very clear limitations on behavior and dress along with unwritten expectations of the role of women along the lines of clear complementarianism. Infallibilism of Scripture is not only preached from the pulpit at mandatory chapel services, but it is a clear expectation to be integrated into all facets of the curriculum. And more than just integrated, but this view of Scripture should hold all other forms of knowledge as a contingency upon its truth. To wit, the biology program focuses on a rather odd anomaly in biology called baraminology, which is a taxonomic system that re-casts speciation in terms of what was likely to have been the case in the literal six day creation of Genesis (see Ch. 8, 183 ff.). History and politics are taught with the indubitable assumption that the founders intended to favor evangelical Christianity as the structure in which government and civility would be administered. So this is not just about abortion and gay rights. These are only symptomatic issues of a wider evangelical worldview that hold the structure of quite literally everything in different terms and under different standards of truth compared to even other evangelical colleges (Rosin points out differences with Wheaton College in a few key places such as science).

Finally, the ethical administration of the behavioral code is brought out in Rosin's stories of a few students that she followed intently. Chapter 7 "Den of Sin" (p. 167 ff.) recounts one such conflict in which one student informed the administration of behavior infractions of other students whom he had befriended.

"Someone was getting expelled. No, five people were getting expelled, or maybe three. A couple of them were Farahn's friends. Rumor was that the boys had been caught drinking, smoking, abusing prescription painkillers, and possibly cheating on exams. No wait, they had not been caught. They had been turned in by one of their roommates. He had written a long letter to the dean of students (p. 168)."

The problem here is not so much that students get caught and punished for such behaviors. The problem is that the institution made as part of its rules that students should hold each other accountable if they catch another breaking any rule to any degree. Rosin's tale shows that this has created among many of the students a culture of distrust and paranoia rather than one of moral fortitude.

Indeed, Rosin points out such details with the tone of a mother who feels bad for these children; that in spite of their brightness and passion in what they do, there is a stir of conflict that rages beneath the surface. The college's position is to use biblical infallibilism to hammer any such conflict into submission with perhaps a follow-through of a hug and even an "I love you" from the Dean. But with he influence of Tim LaHaye and other Christian Right conservatives who support Farris unflinchingly there is a clear pejorative tone to Rosin's narrative even in terms of the homseschooling environments from which many of these students came.

"Experimental communities almost always implode. One faction wants to hold on to the purest version of the mission while another begs for a little fresh air. The men fight for power, while trying to protect an image of unified authority. But eventually, their adoring subjects catch on" (p. 257).

For PHC, such an implosion was the resignation of four professors who did not support the same premises of Farris in their classrooms. Indeed, it is clear that for Farris, this version of "God's Harvard" hearkens back to the ante-bellum Harvard itself, perhaps more so of Yale. But this is even more radical in its understanding of the evangelical nature of government and the role of the student. This is an interesting and thought-provoking engagement of a new kind of evangelical college that seeks to dissociate itself from the controversies of Falwell and Robertson, but maintains a clear kinship in its very mission.

This is a very humane, sometimes amusing, occasionally sharp-eyed, often sympathetic look at a determined subculture.

It is not a chronological narrative but a series of episodes--detailed snapshots illuminating the lives of Patrick Henry students and faculty. Thankfully, Mrs. Rosin doesn't limit her focus to the campus itself, but shows these characters within larger frameworks--the home schooling movement, the ID movement, politicking, and Christian filmmaking.

You feel as if you know these characters--Farahn the (somewhat) rebellious student, fiercely determined PHC founder Tim Farris, good-hearted young Mr. Archer--in the round, as if they were old friends.

Mrs. Rosin's curiosity and open-minded humanity have given birth to an excellent book--perhaps a classic of cultural anthropology and sociology.

A must-read.

It probably should be mentioned at the outset that the term "Christian" as used in the context of this review refers to a particular brand of Protestant Christianity -- evangelical or fundamentalist -- which differs in many theological essentials from other Protestant Christian churches. Commonly, these believers are referred to as the "Christian Right" in contrast to members of the latter churches who often are considered "liberal" or "moderate." With that caveat in hand, then, let's begin.

I am pretty astute at keeping up on public affairs, especially regarding political and religious issues, so how I missed this important story I can't explain. Of course, it is always possible that I did hear some reference to Patrick Henry College and its special program somewhere along the way and simply let it pass by or didn't focus on it with any deliberate attention. That, if so, has now been rectified. Hanna Rosin, a veteran reporter who has covered religion and politics for many years, has, I think, done an excellent job of exploring the ins and outs of an evangelical Christian college, founded in 2000 by Christian activist Michael Farris, which is dedicated to the proposition that the future of America rests in the hands of a college-trained Christian elite which itself is dedicated to saving America from "secular humanism" or any variant thereof.

Rosin's book is titled "God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America." I might suggest an alternate title: "God's Military Academy." It seems to me that Patrick Henry College is much more than your usual, traditional liberal arts college; at the least it does not share many of the important features I am familiar with in my undergraduate experience. I attended and graduated from a small, religious-run liberal arts college but it was dedicated to, among other things, Enlightenment values such as freedom of thought, free speech, tolerance of differing views, and the exploration of things secular, as well as sacred. My impression of Patrick Henry College from Rosin's description is somewhat at odds with my conception of a true liberal arts institution. Furthermore, by the end of the work, I had formed a picture of an institution preparing an "army of God," marching out onto a cultural battlefield to defeat a "worldly" and "permissive" enemy, intent on "saving" us from our social, personal, and political "wickedness." It seems to me that today that is a pretty ambitious mission.

The author spent around eighteen months within Patrick Henry College's surroundings, talking with its president, Michael Farris, interviewing students and faculty, interacting informally with both groups, socializing with some of them outside the campus environment, and even attending classes. The result is an interesting and insightful narrative about a contemporary phenomenon with which, I suspect, few Americans are actually acquainted: the training and nurturing of a young, dedicated, highly sophisticated, and militant cadre of college graduates for direct political involvement (including holding public office right up to the presidency itself) or occupying positions of influence and leadership within various professions in the arts and sciences, all in the pursuit of saving a nation from its currently "godless" path.

At Harvard, or Princeton, or Stanford, or at any one of the other thousands of colleges and universities in this nation of ours (including my own alma mater), the fact that many young students major in political science (as I did) or some other relevant discipline to prepare themselves for government work, public service, or elective office, would not come as a surprise to anyone. However, at Patrick Henry College, there is an additional element which makes this subject all the more interesting and, to some probably, worrisome: the intent to produce a generation that can bring about a fundamental and, above all, religious change in the governance and culture of America. The author writes that "They are the 'Joshua Generation,' as Farris likes to say, the first ones savvy enough to 'take back the land.'" Take back the land? Well, I find that somewhat worrisome myself.

Now, far be from me to take the position that Farris and his colleagues should cease and desist from their stated mission or tear down their college. This is a free country, after all, and all voices ought to be encouraged and welcomed. I have no problem with religion in the public square; I just don't want it to be running the public square. But that's the Enlightenment secularist in me speaking. That being so, I do think movements on a mission to narrow or censor public discourse or that potentially could "remake" the body politic into their own special (and, all too often, intolerant) image, especially those of a religious nature, need to be carefully analyzed, watched, and confronted. That, to me, is the real value of Hanna Rosin's book. She has examined, albeit with much understanding and kindness, a potential hazard to this nation's political structure and cultural framework.

As we have seen over the past twenty-five years or so, the so-called "Christian Right" has become a powerful force in American politics. For seven years now, a particular institution of higher learning -- Patrick Henry College -- has committed itself to becoming the academic evangelical training camp for the future leaders and power-brokers of this nation, as Rosin documents in her book. But there is somewhat of a conundrum here. How does one go about reforming an increasingly secularized and "permissive" society or culture, replacing it with one solidly planted on a traditional Bible-based Christian dogmatic and moral theology, without becoming intimately involved within the "worldly" community itself, thereby presenting to young "reformers" the risk of succumbing to the very temptations of the world that they desire to confront and eliminate? We've already seen a number of seasoned, highly influential evangelical leaders "fall from grace" over the past decades.

So, can the graduates of Patrick Henry College handle the task of converting, reforming, and transforming a "godless" culture once they are out of the protected environment of the academy? Only time will tell. Some clues, I think, may be deduced from the informal conversations which Rosin had with some of the students to which she became particularly close. At least I noticed some chinks in the religious armor of some of them. I'll leave it up to other readers to draw their own conclusions about that matter. All in all, "God's Harvard" is a compelling read and a valuable contribution to the public discourse surrounding the place of religion in American society and politics and the future role of evangelical Christianity within the secular marketplace. Highly recommended!

This book was not what I expected. The reviews on the back cover proclaimed it to be an unbiased work, but the author's negative, cynical tone towards Christianity is set forth in the first chapter. What follows is mainly criticism of Christian teenager adolescent behavior with a pinch of poking fun at home schooling interjected. I'm sorry, but that's my take on this book. To be fair I considered the possibility that my interpretation be influenced by my faith, however the digs are blatant. The author is a capable writer, and some parts were interesting, but based on the title be careful not to think this is something else.

This is just a wonderful book. I've been fascinated by the impact of the Christians on American politics and this book really brought it home for me, how influential this movement is, and how sophisticated it has become in educating its young people on the workings of government. Hanna Rosin is very fair-minded in her dealings with the young Christians in this book, and I have to say, she is also a very entertaining writer, who is very funny and engaging, even when dealing with weighty subjects about the future of our country.

The most remarkable thing about Hanna Rosin's magnificent book is that the Christian right now feels sufficiently secure and confident to let a heathen like her into its midst and allow her to roam freely. The characters who populate "God's Harvard" are clearly not afraid of coming off like gap-toothed fools, and indeed, they are not. To me, the most touching character in the book is a teenager called Derek, who comes to Patrick Henry College with sparkles in his eyes and doesn't really lose them even once he discovers that the world outside is a terrible, evil place where even (gasp!) Republians are sometimes dishonest or sly.

That said, "God's Harvard" is also a cautionary tale about the rise to power of a group of people who should and, indeed, must be kept as far away from it as possible. The book is about a college set up expressly to educate young men and women who have been "homeschooled" -- in other words, who have undergone the process which without much exaggeration could be called "religious bigots training children to be bigots, too." In the America of George the younger, graduates of this establishment can hope for jobs in government departments, think tanks, and perhaps even the White House itself. And yet it is a school which constantly shoots itself in the foot. Even "homeschooled" teenagers seldom fail to be teenagers with exploring minds, and anyone with even a small modicum of intellectual curiosity must surely see that some of the basic tenets of the fundamentalist faith which underpins the school are at least questionable, if not far, far worse. So, too, even the most buttoned-down teenager will at least think about loosening the top two buttons, if not actually going ahead and doing it (there are, it must be said, several young people in the book who never loosen any buttons, go through the process of "courtship" as if they were in the 19th century, and, in one case, never ever kiss until their wedding).

Inevitably, "God's Harvard" deals in large part with the twaddle (and there can be no other word for it) that hides under the quasi-intellectual title of Intelligent Design. The book reveals that this is twaddle which has attracted a certain number of people with important educational credentials. There is one young man who is repored, with wide-eyed amazement, as having learned at the foot of the great Stephen Gould himself. But "God's Harvard" ends with the school's most popular professors -- those who asked students to think, rather than just parrot Bible phrases -- resigning in exasperation. The premise of those scientists who stick to the party line, as it were, must necessarily be that science is the sum of all that humankind have discovered through observation and evidence, and faith is a process whereby people must seek to reduce that sum of knowledge, not enhance it. There can be absolutely no intellectual argument whatsoever for the ludicrous idea that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that the reason for fossils is that God is a frisky kind of character who scattered them about as a trick. No intellectual argument. No scintilla of intellectual argument. So how a person with a doctoral degree can stand in front of students and seek to apply Genesis, no matter how questioningly, to issues of geology, biology, etc., is incomprehensible, and Hanna Rosin's book makes it absoutely clear that anyone with true intellectual integrity must necessarily turn away from such a position. Or else, presumably, find it terribly difficult to sleep at night or to look at themselves in the mirror.

I write this review as a person of faith myself, and I sometimes struggle with the question of how I can receive God's message so very much differently from the leadership of Patrick Henry College. I can only conclude that God gave me a brain for a reason, and I cannot believe that He wants me to use faith to ignore that which is readily evident and patently clear. Hanna Rosin has written an important book which illustrates that struggle very well, and I thank her for it. I recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who is concerned about what the "religious right" is doing in America's educational system. I live in Europe, and I can assure you that no university in Britain, France or Germany would put up with that kind of nonsense for a single, solitary moment.

Ms. Rosin is a good writer and makes her book easy to digest. Unfortunately, I can tell you from personal experience that she does not give a complete picture. As the PHC graduate said in her comment, Ms. Rosin focuses on the things she can comprehend and dissect. This results in an unbalanced focus on the negative things (and there are negative things about PHC, just as there are with any school) while just glossing over or skipping the positive aspects altogether. It is very disappointing. I was hoping this book would be an honest, yet fair, look into the world of PHC, but it is not.

Caveat: I am a theologically conservative Pentecostal.

This was down right scary. This book shows how far the Evangelical movement has gone too far into politics. Instead of evangelism and preaching the Gospel, these kids are used as a free work force for the Republican party. The Bible might as well be replaced with the Republican Handbook or something like that. Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world! I found myself getting very frustrated reading this because of how Jesus and Christianity was made in a political cause.

The author does a very thorough job in reporting on what she saw and heard. I would love to know what Patrick Henry College thinks of the book! The book reminds me of Jesus Camp in that politics are so important to the president of the college. The "culture war" seems to be the most important thing.

Sad....

Also see With God on Our Side - George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America

Rosin does a wonderful reporting job and writes eloquently on the culture she sought to understand. However, having worked at Patrick Henry College for a time, I found her examples too extreme and not typical of the students I met. She never gives a 'normal' example of students there, but instead focuses on the more peculiar types of students. This does make the book more entertaining to read. Her perception of the controversies among Christian circles is profound, and it would be helpful for Christians to read this book and see themselves from an outside perspective that is both respectful and insightful.