God’s Harvard: The New Grooming Ground of the Evangelical Movement

By Hanna Rosin, Harcourt. Posted August 23, 2007.

When I first began covering religion for the Washington Post, more than ten years ago, deflecting conversion attempts became a routine part of my work. Although they are unfailingly gracious, evangelicals are not so good at respecting professional boundaries. What did it matter that I was a reporter doing my job if I was headed for eternal damnation? To a population of domestic missionaries, I presented as a prime target: a friendly non-Christian who was deeply interested in learning more about their beliefs.

The first time someone tried to share the gospel with me, I naively explained that I was Jewish and born in Israel, thank you, thinking this would end the conversation. This was a big mistake. In certain parts of Christian America, admitting I was an Israeli-born Jew turned me into walking catnip. Because God's own chosen people had so conspicuously rejected Jesus, winning one over was an irresistible challenge. And the Holy Land glamour of Israel only added to the allure. Preachers told me they loved me, half an hour after we met. Godly women asked if they could take home a piece of my clothing and pray over it. A pastor's wife once confided to my husband, "You're so lucky. She looks so ... Biblical." Once, at a Waffle House in Colorado with some associates of the influential Christian activist James Dobson, a woman in our company stared at me so hard it became uncomfortable for me to eat. Finally, I looked up at her. "When I look at you, I see the blood of our Savior coursing through your veins," she said.

"Thank you," I gulped. "More maple syrup?"

Explaining that my family had been Jewish for many generations and that, by converting, I'd be breaking a deep, rich tradition only encouraged them to break out the big gun. I've heard it so many times that I can recite it by heart. Matthew 10:36: "For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -- a man's enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." This didn't stick with me, either. Clearly they had not met my mother, or any Jewish mother for that matter. The Jews haven't endured for nearly 4,000 years by giving their cubs up so easy.

Biblical verses, like turtlenecks go in and out of style. During the nineties I heard Matthew 10:36 on nearly every reporting trip. This was a paradoxical decade for evangelicals. The Christian right had become a fixture in American politics and the nation was about to elect George W. Bush, the closest thing American evangelicals have had to a pope. At the same time the Christian home-school movement was booming -- a relic of the age of separatism and retreat. Evangelicals were poised to move from the fringe to the elite power circles of American society, but they just couldn't seem to make the jump. Unless they learned to polish their act and stop telling people to renounce their mothers, they would never make it.

I first visited Patrick Henry College in September 1999, a year before the school opened its doors. The "school," that afternoon, consisted of founder Michael Farris, a Christian homeschooling activist, manning an excavator on a construction site just off a Virginia highway exit. Farris was affable, his usual manner with reporters, as he laid out the plans for his revolution. The school would enlist the purest of born-again Christians in a war to "transform America" by training them to occupy the highest offices in the land." Year after year, it would churn out future congressmen, governors, and federal judges, until they finally had the majority. "Few students will know more about the political ramifications of reinforcing homosexuality through special rights than ours," he told me. One day, he bragged, he would introduce the ultimate graduation-day speaker: "President So and So, an alumnus of Patrick Henry."

It all sounded a little far-fetched. After all, he hadn't even laid the first brick.

Then Bush ran for president as a born-again former alcoholic, and won. Suddenly Farris seemed much less delusional. In the early winter of 2005 I visited again. The central building, Founders Hall, was now an impressive Federalist structure. Inside, the walls were covered with posters for an upcoming production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. A Whiffenpoofs-style singing group occupied the grand staircase. After talking to some kids having lunch, I concluded they were some of the most anal, competitive teenagers I had every come across. They input their daily schedules into Palm Pilots in fifteen-minute increments -- read Bible, do crunches, take shower, study for Latin quiz, write debate briefs. After Jesus Christ they bowed down to the "1600's" -- the handful of kids each year who'd gotten perfect scores on the SAT. The atmosphere was much more Harvard than Bob Jones.

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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 deputy editor David Plotz, and their two children.

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