{"id":585,"date":"2005-06-28T12:11:43","date_gmt":"2005-06-28T19:11:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=585"},"modified":"2005-06-28T12:11:43","modified_gmt":"2005-06-28T19:11:43","slug":"god-and-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/28\/god-and-country\/","title":{"rendered":"God and Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Patrick Henry\u00d5s president, Michael Farris, is a lawyer and minister who has worked for Christian causes for decades. He founded the school after getting requests from two constituencies: homeschooling parents and conservative congressmen. The parents would ask him where they could find a Christian college with a \u00d2courtship\u00d3 atmosphere, meaning one where dating is regulated and subject to parental approval. The congressmen asked him where they could find homeschoolers as interns and staffers, \u00d2which I took to be shorthand for \u00d4someone who shares my values,\u00d5 \u00d3 Farris said. \u00d2And I knew they didn\u00d5t want a fourteen-year-old kid.\u00d3 So he set out to build what he calls the Evangelical Ivy League, and what the students call Harvard for Homeschoolers.<\/p>\n

Farris is fifty-three but seems younger, with thick brown hair and a slightly amused expression. He and his wife, Vickie, began to homeschool their children (they have ten) in 1982, and the next year he founded the Home School Legal Defense Association, to challenge state laws that made it difficult to homeschool children. In 1993, he ran, unsuccessfully, for lieutenant governor of Virginia. At the time, evangelicals had yet to emerge as a national political force; many preferred to keep their distance from secular culture, which is one reason that Patrick Henry parents educated their children at home. Since then, Rove has built an entire campaign around mobilizing Christian conservatives. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute after the 2000 election, he said that the President had lost the popular vote because fewer than expected \u00d2white, evangelical Protestants\u00d3 had come to the polls. One of Rove\u00d5s principal strategies for victory in 2004 was working to increase this group\u00d5s numbers, and on Election Day four million more evangelicals voted than in 2000.<\/p>\n

Farris\u00d5s manifesto for the school, \u00d2The Joshua Generation,\u00d3 embraces the Rove principle: the \u00d2Moses generation,\u00d3 he wrote, had \u00d2left Egypt,\u00d3 and now it was time for their children to \u00d2take the land.\u00d3 Farris is the author of nine nonfiction books and three novels, all with Christian themes, and in them he warns against \u00d2MTV, Internet porn, abortion, homosexuality, greed and accomplished selfishness\u00d3; he calls public schools \u00d2godless monstrosities.\u00d3 But students are not expected to avoid the secular world entirely. Farris told them at chapel recently that one day \u00d2an Academy Award winner will walk down the aisle to accept his trophy. On his way, he\u00d5ll get a cell-phone call; it will be the President, who happens to be his old Patrick Henry roommate, calling to congratulate him.\u00d3 <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker: Patrick Henry\u00d5s president, Michael Farris, is a lawyer and minister who has worked for Christian causes for decades. He founded the school after getting requests from two constituencies: homeschooling parents and conservative congressmen. The parents would ask him where they could find a Christian college with a \u00d2courtship\u00d3 atmosphere, meaning one where dating is regulated and subject to parental approval. The congressmen asked him where they could find homeschoolers as interns and staffers, \u00d2which I took to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-journalism","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-9r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}