by Hanna Rosin
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| List Price: | $25.00 |
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| Lowest New Price: | $5.63 |
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Product Description
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. And God’s Harvard grooms these students to be the elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science, to wage the battle to take back a godless nation. Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half embedded at the college, following the 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.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent, 2008-09-26
I loved this book from cover to cover. It was exceptionally well-researched and well-written. The author did what few have managed: She got behind the scenes of self-righteous, my-way-is-the-only-way Christian conservatives and was able to show readers how the folks living in that world think, live and even question. She also gave us great warning at what techniques they're using to brainwash the rest of us. Good for Rosin!
7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
 Not What I Expected, 2008-05-20
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.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
God's "New" Harvard Looks Like God's "Old" Harvard, 2008-05-05
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.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
What hath God wrought?, 2008-05-03
I enjoyed this highly readable book tremendously. Author Rosin presents her characters, most with their real names, in a sympathetic albeit questioning light. I, as a liberal/agnostic/religious skeptic, was surprised to find myself feeling great empathy for these earnest young people, and even some for their parents and teachers, who would appear superficially to be garden-variety religious bigots. Rosin emphasizes the human aspects of Patrick Henry College and fundamentalists generally, not the theological, philosophical, social, and political background, though she develops that context sufficiently to understand some of the thought process of her protagonists. For example, she provides a fairly lucid description of baraminology, which is the creationist substitute for taxonomy (which is apparently tainted by evolutionary thinking). The downside of her approach is that it provides no answers to such questions as:
-Why are fundamentalists so interested in temporal power?
-What makes them think that their isolated religious/social/educational training is suitable preparation for the exercise of temporal power?
-Why do they want to establish a theocratic state when they have been so successful under our secular constitution?
-Fundamentalists appear to be obsessed with a "biblical worldview," but what is the biblical basis for their near-unanimous position on such issues as social security reform, universal healthcare, and the torture of "enemy combatants," for example?
As interesting as these questions are, the answers will have to be found in a different book. This one is just fine as it is.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A fascinating report, 2008-03-09
Hana Rosin, a Washington Post reporter who embedded herself in the Patrick Henry College for two years so she could get first hand knowledge of how the evangelical college plans to turn the mostly home schooled kids into leaders who will "shape the culture and lead the nation". It was an absorbing read. Rosin detailed the school's plans, the students' dreams and how they deal with the dating vs courtship issue. She was particularly good at reporting the students' personal lives. They opened their dreams and aspirations to her. She was at once intimate with the students yet maintained her distance, partly because she don't share their religious views. This is a fascinating report on how the fundamentalist Christians plans to educate their young to take back the nation. Be aware. The election of George W. Bush to the presidency is only one of their first successes. They have shown that they are a force which others can not be ignored.
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