Since 2000, America’s most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school just outside the nation’s capital. Most of them are homeschoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. At "God’s Harvard" they are groomed to become tomorrow’s elite. Diplomas in hand, they are dispatched to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science, where they will lead the battle to take back a godless nation. Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half embedded at the college, following students from the campus to the White House, Congress, conservative think tanks, Hollywood, and other centers of influence. Her account captures this nerve center of the evangelical movement at a moment of maximum influence and also of crisis, as it struggles to avoid the temptations of modern life and still remake the world in its own image. The Washington Post - Dan Gilgoff …how can a school introduce some of the country's most sheltered youth to the ways of the secular worldeven in hopes they will reshape itwithout their being corrupted in the process? It's a dilemma that makes for constant tension in Hanna Rosin's nuanced and highly readable God's Harvard. A former Washington Post reporter, Rosin went more or less native at [Patrick Henry College] for the past couple of years, earning the trust of many students, professors and, apparently, Farris himself. Paired with her feisty, richly detailed prose…the access makes for a gripping tour of a parallel universe that's typically closed to the mainstream media by evangelical gatekeepers.
Introduction 1Welcome, Surfer Ninjas and Knights 9Harvard for Homeschoolers 40"Elisa Muench, Republican, for Idaho's Senator. She Will Make a Difference." 73America Is a Christian Nation, Capital "C," Capital "N" 104Farahn's Attempt to Hide Her Midriff 125"This Is It! Go for Smiles! Go for Christ!" 151The Den of Sin 167From Humanzee to Liger: A Brief History of Evolution 183The Fifth Quadrant: Hollywood Finds God 205Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry 231Obey, All You Little Children 250Conclusion 268Acknowledgments 284Endnotes 287