Sunday, August 5, 2007

God's Next Soldiers

God's Next Soldiers is a documentary about Patrick Henry College, a Christian college that trains young evangelicals to push their vision for a Christian Nation into the arena of power politics.

Patrick Henry's mission is to:
Aid in the transformation of American society by training Christian students to serve God and mankind with a passion for righteousness, justice and mercy, through careers of public service and cultural influence.

[... and]

to promote practical application of biblical principles and the original intent of the founding documents of the American republic, while preparing students for lives of public service, advocacy and citizen leadership.

Patrick Henry College was opened in 2000. Most of the students at Patrick Henry come from conservative Christian homeschooled backgrounds. In spite of it's questionable academic credentials, Patrick Henry graduates find themselves equally situated with graduates of Georgetown and Harvard in terms of job and internship placements in the Bush Administration.

In the spring of 2004, seven of the 100 White House interns came from Patrick Henry (with a student body of 240). That's the same number that Georgetown sent to the White House that year.

The New Yorker has another good article here.

Things like this scare me a lot more than the skinheads I wrote about in an earlier post. The graduates from Patrick Henry and many members of the Republican party share the skinheads' worldview and ideology.

The difference is, the evangelicals in the Republican party are pushing their vision of a Christian Nation through legitimate democratic channels, which is far more effective (and stealthy) than waving guns around and burning crosses at a trailer park compound.

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