The University of God: I shit you not…. and we’re in trouble!

This place makes Regent U. look like a den of iniquity.


Patrick Henry College
http://www.phc.edu/a…

The Mission of Patrick Henry College is to prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding. Educating students according to a classical liberal arts curriculum, and training them with apprenticeship methodology, the College provides academically excellent baccalaureate level higher education with a biblical world view.

Ok, that’s pretty standard for a Christian school.

Here’s the scary part…They have a Department of Government it seems…

…fire down below

The Mission of the Department of Government is 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.

Did you notice that there is no mention specifically of the Constitution? Which founding documents are they referring to? Here’s a clue from PHC founder Michael Farris. 

Farris, an ordained Baptist minister and self-described “constitutional lawyer,” declares in Where Do I Draw the Line? that “the founders of this country believed that the principles of God’s word should be used in our nation.”

“The laws of Massachusetts,” he explained, “once proclaimed that ‘The ordinances of Jesus Christ shall be enforced by the magistrate in every community.”

Farris wistfully notes that: “In order to hold office in Delaware, the state constitution of 1776 required the following oath: I do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the Holy Scripture in the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”

“The founding fathers,” he concludes approvingly, “employed the Word of God in the public arena.”

http://www.publiceye…

Q Who are the students?

A: 29%ers, but we’re not talkin’, NASCAR watchin’, beer bellied Billy Bobs from Bugtussel, Alabama.

  Polls would place them among the 29 percent of Christian teens who attend church weekly, pray, read the Bible, and describe religion as “extremely important” in their lives.

snip~

When they use the word “Christian,” they are speaking their own special language. To them, a Catholic or Mormon, with some exceptions, is not really a Christian. Someone who goes to church three times a year and sings hymns is not a Christian. Someone who goes to church every Sunday and calls themselves “evangelical” is not even necessarily a Christian. “She thought I was nice and Jesus was a great guy and she went to church a lot, but she wasn’t a Christian,” Farris once told a group of students about an acquaintance, and they understood exactly what he meant. To them, a “Christian” keeps a running conversation with God in his or her head always, Monday through Sunday, on subjects big and small,and believes that at any moment God might in some palpable way step in and show He either cares or disapproves.

…cares or disapproves, or wants to start a war perhaps? (zwoof).

http://www.alternet….

Hanna Rosin,
http://en.wikipedia….  a well-known writer who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the New Republic, GQ, and the New York Times, describes Patrick Henry College in a post on AlterNet.com entitled,God’s Harvard: The New Grooming Ground of the Evangelical Movement

Her interview with founder Michael Farris is a dark look into the mind of a fanatic whose views would surely cause the Founding Fathers to spin in their graves simultaneously so rapidly that the Earth might be knocked off of its axis..

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.”

More background on Farris and PHC
http://www.christian…

Michael Farris is  a constitutional lawyer and general counsel of the Home School Legal Defense Association that founded the school in 2000 as a “Christian college blending classical instruction with apprenticeship methodology.” It prides itself on the high number of White House internships secured by its students, whose SAT scores average over 1300.

Yep, they are in the White House and more than likely working side by side with the lyin’ lawyers from Regent U.

Here’s Hanna’s description of a PHC student that stayed in her home.

For a few weeks during the summer of 2005, Sarah Chambers lived with my family. She’d gotten an internship at a national magazine based in Washington, D. C., and needed a place to stay.

When I told my friends this, most of them would give me a quizzical why-are-you-harboring-Nazis-in-your-attic look. Once they met her, they were even more worried.

Sarah is charismatic, funny, and adventurous. She climbs, snowboards, and plays the guitar.

Her musical tastes range from Jack Johnson to Puff Daddy. She’s a terrific writer and was the only intern in her class hired for a full-time job. She could be one of those power girls in a Nike ad, looking glamorous even at the end of a marathon.

On top of that, she’s an astute judge of character with an introspective side. Sometimes in the mornings I’d find her upstairs in her bed, reading her Bible and taking notes.

  “If they’re all like this,” one of my friends said, “we’re in trouble.”


Wiki stuff:

In the spring of 2004, of the almost 100 student interns working in the White House, seven were from Patrick Henry College, which had only 240 students at the time. This is the same number of interns Georgetown University had during the same period.

Teaching faculty must also sign a statement of faith and “Biblical Worldview” stating that they believe that the Bible is the authoritative word of God. This includes the biblical account of the creation of the world, sometimes referred to as six-day creation. The claims of both evolution and creation are part of the curriculum at Patrick Henry, though the college’s official position on the issue is that six-day creation is “both biblically true and is the best fit to observed data”.

The college has a 100% placement rate among graduates who have applied to law school, with the majority of students receiving admission to first tier law schools, such as Georgetown Law School and University of Virginia Law School.

23 comments

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    • Zwoof on September 15, 2007 at 12:34
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    how are you?
    Don’t ya know me?

    • lori on September 15, 2007 at 13:35

    Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting
    also in the works with Pastafarians popping up all over the place.  Remember this one? Classic snark.  (and that’s a photo of a birthday cake from their site) 

    Thanks for that scary bit of early morning sci-fi, Zwoof.  I think my head just spun clear around. 

  1. Christian or otherwise, terrifies me.  I just cannot for the life of me understand what kind of a world these people want to live in. 

    Zwoof – have you seen any of dogemperor’s diaries on dominionism over at DKos?  Scary shit.  This sounds like it’s a part of the parallel world they are trying to build.

    • on September 15, 2007 at 15:45
    • documel on September 15, 2007 at 15:55

    It used to be that religious colleges were proud to call themselves non-sectarian–I’m thinking Georgetown, Notre Dame, and Brandeis.  Also, this statement was a requirement to get any government funding or loans–has this changed?

    I’m also thinking that the days of these christian (please use lower case when describing this disgrace) schools is about to end.  All government agencies have been become so incompetent, and abused, that the pendulum will swing the other way, hurting the reputations of even the aforementioned tier 1 religious institutions.

  2. discovery channel or some such…it was really quite SAD…for many of these kids it was their first time in a school, having been home-schooled.

    there was an incident of public shaming of a student who —gasp—drank alcohol…

    socially its nothing more than a home-school-away-from-home, with the same rigidity and intolerance…the same brainwashing and isolation…

    made me want to open a hooters across the street..or a frickin’ record store…or a movie theater…ANYTHING that would be representative of the real world

    …and im not ordinarily a temptress…;)

  3. I was raised with this kind of thinking. And the college I went to was just a few hairs less crazy than this one sounds. A friend of mine who graduated from the same school said something interesting to me about it all years later..

    The reason the school struggles is that they are trying to do two mutually exclusive things:

    1. Teach dogma
    2. Teach students how to think

    Maybe this school totally gave up on the 2nd one.

  4. at dKos seems appropriate. I think I’ll use it here for a while lest I forget the insidious creeping of the theocratics’ influence.

    Thanks for this essay, Zwoof.

  5. It’s the long-in-the-making answer to the powerful development of humanistic and secular education in the 20th century. These people are extremely motivated to make true liberal education irrelevant. When true liberal educational institutions realize that they’re becoming irrelevant (when will they wake up?), maybe they’ll get motivated, too.

    We need a new generation of Reeds.

    • pfiore8 on September 15, 2007 at 20:24

    we need to stay loose to figure out how to make them and their message irrelevant… how to firmly position with the evils associated with true believers…

    one great weapon against true beilevers is a sense of humor, laughter, dancing, jokes… and a good natured fuck inserted used like this:
    are you for fucking real… hahahahaha…

    but let me say it again and again and again: we have to restructure our rhetoric because we are too heavy with the facts and we don’t know how to move people with facts… so we HAVE to figure out a better way to get out of the way of the story and let it settle over people… the way the truth does… truth has its own power and it will find a way out of the rubble lies mess shit…

    we have to have to be a better delivery system for the facts and learn how to wield the truth better…

    and this essay? a great way to rally us… so how do we respond???? saying they are idiots or ideologues or they’re wrong? we have to be better and smarter and wiser…

    incite the heart and invoke the mind

    • pfiore8 on September 15, 2007 at 20:27

    this is all in response to US, isn’t it

    so let’s use our reputation … even though we look like a lion we’re really more like the cowardly lion looking for our courage

    it’s time to be willing to lose. as i said in my essay last night: we need to be that fearsome… life doesn’t stop at the next election… we can’t win without our principles

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