God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America » (Unabridged)

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 editor David Plotz, and their two children.

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 world—even in hopes they will reshape it—without 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     1
Welcome, Surfer Ninjas and Knights     9
Harvard for Homeschoolers     40
"Elisa Muench, Republican, for Idaho's Senator. She Will Make a Difference."     73
America Is a Christian Nation, Capital "C," Capital "N"     104
Farahn's Attempt to Hide Her Midriff     125
"This Is It! Go for Smiles! Go for Christ!"     151
The Den of Sin     167
From Humanzee to Liger: A Brief History of Evolution     183
The Fifth Quadrant: Hollywood Finds God     205
Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry     231
Obey, All You Little Children     250
Conclusion     268
Acknowledgments     284
Endnotes     287