Evangelicals are moving into power, but ends can be unclear, author says

Posted: 10/26/07

Evangelicals are moving into power,
but ends can be unclear, author says

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

WASHINGTON (ABP)—There’s no question that in the last few decades evangelical Christians have asserted their growing power in America’s public life.

But veteran reporter Hanna Rosin asks, “By what method and to what end?”

Rosin, a former Washington Post reporter, spent more than a year observing life at Patrick Henry College, a 7-year-old liberal-arts school in a Virginia town just outside the nation’s capital.

The result was God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.

Patrick Henry, named for the famous Founding Father and headed by home-schooling activist Michael Farris, aims to give ambitious evangelical students the ammunition they need, via a classical liberal-arts education, to fight the so-called “culture wars.”

“They explicitly put themselves close to Washington because they kind of see themselves as a training academy for politics,” Rosin said of the college.

She noted that its early graduates already have made a mark on Washington, with many of them rising through the ranks of President Bush’s administration as well as serving powerful Republican members of Congress.

The students, faculty and administrators at Patrick Henry tend to be very conservative, and most favor

using government to advance what they believe to be the Christian cause.

“You’ve got the most extreme in religion and the most extreme in ambition, and you try to marry those two together,” Rosin said.

However, she said, many former Patrick Henry students—who often come from sheltered backgrounds—get to Washington or the statehouse and discover politics isn’t always as pure a calling as they imagined.

“They discoverer that young Republicans drink, and they sleep around, and they go to Oktoberfest and all the things that … young conservative Christians are not supposed to do,” Rosin said.

And, since legislative work in a democracy often requires significant compromise to get anything done, ideological purity becomes difficult to maintain when holding the reins of power.

“As we all know, becoming part of the mainstream tends to dull your edges a little bit,” Rosin said. “I think there’s just an inverse relationship between vocalized religious extremism and political success.”

While Rosin did her research, Patrick Henry went through a significant amount of turmoil due to a conflict over academic freedom between administrators and many of the faculty and students. Several faculty members left the school.

Rosin noted many would-be culture warriors, when confronted with ideas in the books Patrick Henry’s curriculum very purposefully includes, often reach conclusions other than those the school’s founders might have envisioned.

“It’s perfectly possible that Nietzsche and Kant are much more interesting to you than your Bible class, all the sudden,” she said.