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.
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