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What happens when a secular Washington Post reporter spends hundreds of hours hanging out with the students, faculty, and founder of a Christian college full of homeschooled students who aim to take America back for God? You might expect a hatchet job, but Hannah Rosin, the author of God's Harvard, produced a book about Patrick Henry College (PHC) that is a model of engagement between two worlds.

Rather than attempt to disguise her worldview, Rosin writes about life at Patrick Henry from a frankly personal perspective. Feminism is of the standards by which she measures the college and students. In the high value PHC and its homeschooled students place on traditional marriage and family roles, Rosin sees a system that marginalizes women and forces them to embrace motherhood at the price of their career ambitions. She sees a sadness in the lives of the PHC girls she studies. It's difficult to discern whether that sadness is really there or whether it is superimposed by her worldview.

Rosin also sounds a warning to the secular culture she identifies with: The kids of PHC are more sophisticated in their approach than earlier waves of Christian conservatives. The current crop of homeschoolers has been groomed to "take back the nation" and rescue "a lost and fallen world," she writes. She concludes, "If Christians want to take back the culture and shape the nation, this is the first generation that has a real shot at it."

Although Rosin seems alarmed by the bright and ambitious students of Patrick Henry because of their conservative agenda and Christian worldview, she is not sure she likes where mainstream culture is going. At one point, she describes a New York Magazine story about her old high school and "bi-queer, metroflexible friends." A girl from the school posed on the cover with "her lightly acned cheek on the chest of an obviously naked boy." Rosin is disquieted by the story and concludes, "Given a choice for my daughter, I'd take all-girl reading circles over that any day."

Rosin's ambivalence about the liberal edge of American culture shows up again in her reaction to abstinence. Though she makes it clear that she thinks sex before marriage is natural, Rosin seems to appreciate the preservation of innocence and wholesomeness among some of the Patrick Henry students.

Rosin retells the courtship story of PHC students Christy and Matthew. Matthew, who made the highest possible score on his SAT, wrote a long letter to Christy's parents explaining his desire to spend time with her. "My name is Matthew du Mee, and I was a good kid," he began. As a senior, Matthew drove to see Christy at her home over Christmas break. Matthew shaved and changed in a gas station, but showed up in a suit but no socks because he couldn't find them in his suitcase. He knelt in front of Christy and her family members and proposed. It is a love story, Matthew says, that God wrote.

Rosin also follows a young woman named Farahn, who is frustrated by the strictness of the dress code at PHC. Modesty is a big deal at PHC, and Farahn hasn't got the hang of it yet, despite her conservative Christian upbringing. Farahn goes to New York to try out for the Rockettes and look for other work that doesn't conflict with her values. Rosin writes, "New York is full of beautiful women, but Farahn in her white sundress and Southern innocence, stood apart like an angel floating above the grime."

Rosin's analysis is reminiscent of a passage from Abraham Kuyper's Stone Lectures at Princeton:

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October (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51