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GOD AND COUNTRY
A college that trains young Christians to be politicians.

...Muench, like eighty-five per cent of the students at Patrick Henry, was homeschooled, in her case in rural Idaho. Homeschoolers are not the most obvious raw material for a college whose main mission, since its founding, five years ago, has been to train a new generation of Christian politicians. Politics, after all, is the most social of professions, and many students arrive at Patrick Henry having never shared a classroom with anyone other than their siblings. In conservative circles, however, homeschoolers are considered something of an élite, rough around the edges but pure—in their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity—a view that helps explain why the Republican establishment has placed its support behind Patrick Henry, and why so many conservative politicians are hiring its graduates....

...Farris’s manifesto for the school, “The Joshua Generation,” embraces the Rove principle: the “Moses generation,” he wrote, had “left Egypt,” and now it was time for their children to “take the land.”...

...On a Wednesday afternoon, I sat in on a class on the Presidency. There were fourteen students, all of whom arrived on time and got out their laptops to take notes. Today, they were talking about Machiavelli. The professor, Robert Stacey, who has a trim ginger-colored beard and is a popular, lively teacher, pushed the students to think about Machiavelli’s suggestion that leaders create fear to maintain their authority. He brought up the example of the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. One student asked, “Did they really represent such a big threat to our country?”

“No, but it unified the country, in an us-versus-them sort of way,” another answered.

Then Stacey moved on to Machiavelli’s principle that politics is governed by conspiracies and lies. “Come on, we know politicians lie,” he began. “This is a bit sensitive. How about our beloved George W. Bush? Does he deceive us with what he says in public? Does he lie?”

The students, who had been fully engaged on the subject of Machiavelli and Waco, were silent. Bush has been President since they were teen-agers, and the school newspaper’s editorials never deviate from the White House position. Finally, one student said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Stacey didn’t say anything. After a pause, the student said, “I mean, it would be nice if he didn’t.”...