Welcome, Surfer Ninjas
and Knights
Many seventeen-year-olds brag or exaggerate on their college
applications. Not Derek Archer. Even when he wrote
to Patrick Henry College about the year that had set the course
of his life-the year when he, a homeschooled missionary’s kid
from a depressed suburb of Akron, got to see President George
W. Bush in person-Derek kept his hubris in check. “I would be a
fool to believe I made it through the past few months by my might
and my power, for truly it was by the Lord’s grace and His Spirit
alone!”
Derek was not one of the school’s usual incoming freshman
stars known as “the 1600s”-the handful of kids each year who
get perfect scores on their SATs and ignore courting letters from
Harvard and Stanford to come to Patrick Henry. What he had was
not something the six-year-old college could easily boast about
in press releases, but what it valued much more: a near-perfect
balance of ambition and humility, the one impulse pushing him
toward the White House and the other always reminding him
Who was really in charge.
In a few heady months during the fall of 2004, the Bush campaign
had served as one endless, amazing high school field trip-better
than going to Europe or Disneyland or Papua, New Guinea,
where his family once lived in a house on stilts. He had made
phone calls and knocked on doors in the critical swing districts in
Ohio, near where he lived. He had won a contest for registering
more than 100 voters. He had learned to take verbal abuse with
grace. He had created a minor local celebrity by writing articles
and flyers under the fogyish nom de plume “Franz Holbein” who
complained about “some of the most appalling displays of disrespect
this nation has ever seen.” Twenty minutes before the polls
closed, a car full of rowdies whizzed by him, screaming “Kerry
won! Kerry won!” He prayed it couldn’t be true, and his prayers
were answered. In the battle between the “forces of righteousness
and unrighteousness,” the right side had won.
“Those few months have had a powerful impact on my life in
preparing me for the ministry of political activism,” he wrote to
Patrick Henry. “If in any matter I can bring glory to my God and
King, may He grant me the grace to do just that.”
It’s not just that Derek was a missionary’s kid and knew how
to say the right things. Patrick Henry prides itself on not being
your run-of-the-mill Bible college: It doesn’t give automatic preference
to MKs, who can be just as rotten as any kids. Instead the
school takes the measure of its students constantly, probing the
nature of each individual’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ
with the care and trepidation of a parent monitoring a fever, or a
schoolgirl checking whether you’re still her best friend. Under
that microscope, Derek glowed.
God’s voice was like the sound track to the movie of Derek’s
life, lending texture and meaning to every action. In return, Derek
thanked God for everything. He thanked Him when a seemingly
chance meeting led to a great internship at the local Republican
headquarters. “The Lord just dropped that one into my lap!” He
thanked Him for his mom sending his favorite granola bars, for his
sister passing her driving test, for the extra cheese on his turkey
sub. He thanked Him for his new used car, although it was dark
purple and the AC didn’t work and the windows seemed to be
glued shut. He thanked Him for his after-school job at Leach’s
Meats and Sweets down the road, where he worked in the chilly
back room hacking up raw chickens and grinding up beef to stuff
into their “famous” sausages while tolerating the boss’s son’s endless
tracks of AC/DC (“the worst band in the whole wide world”).
“It’s really been a blessing,” he told me one day as he wiped his
knife on an apron streaked with bloodstains.
In the year before he left for college, Derek had moved down
to the basement of his parents’ house in Barberton, six miles
south of Akron. In the evenings, his mom, Donna Archer, would
go down there to drop off his clean laundry “and see if he’s ready
to hit the hay, and I’d find him down on his knees praying. As a
Christian mom, nothing thrills me more. Nobody was watching
him; it’s the real thing. He doesn’t do it to please us. You can see
God’s spirit at work in him.”
“Because of that,” his mom added, “I’m not worried if he
heads into politics.”
For Patrick Henry College, Derek was a white sheep, the son
you were pretty sure wouldn’t roll his eyes at you the minute you
turned your head or sneak a cigarette outside his dorm window at
night. The school thought of itself as a training ground for political
missionaries; its founder, Michael Farris, traveled the country
recruiting conservative Christian kids like Derek who were
bright, politically minded, and itching to be near the president.
Farris was aware of the risks of launching them into the cutthroat
and dirty world of politics: He could unwittingly turn out to be
the agent of their corruption, involving them in what Derek
had once heard described by a pastor as “an innately wicked endeavor.”
So Derek was a particular gem, a boy who, as much as
anyone this side of heaven, seemed incorruptible.
“Okay. Here goes,” Derek said, as he spotted the Welcome Students
sign hanging in Founders Hall. Like most of the kids who
go to Patrick Henry, Derek was homeschooled by his parents all
the way through high school, so college could be a shock. But during
orientation week the campus still felt warm and familiar, like
a big homeschool family reunion. The central buildings and dorms
were packed with typically oversized homeschooling families-ten-year-old
girls pushing strollers, toddlers scrambling after their
pregnant moms like baby ducks. The little kids were eerily independent
and well behaved; they sat in circles on the grass or outside
the cafeteria, playing games or reading the campus maps for
fun. The incoming freshmen boys, meanwhile, looked like children
playing the role of adults in a high school play, with crisp
white polo shirts, new leather computer bags, and their last bits of
acne. The girls wore twin sets over their khakis or black slacks,
which surprised Derek’s mom. “Okay, this is going to be more casual
dress for the girls than I thought,” said Donna, whose daughter
goes to a Christian school where skirts are required. But, she
added, “I’m happy for the lack of tattoos and piercings.”
A handful of families looked like reenactors lost on their way
to Colonial Williamsburg: mothers in braids carrying babies in
bonnets, girls in their best Laura Ingalls Wilder white-collared
dresses taking a stroll around the lake-a tableau that made the
campus feel a century-not an hour-away from downtown
Washington, D.C. The parking lot was jammed with vans bearing
messages on their bumpers: TRUTH, or BUSH/CHENEY, or LIFE.
One license plate read MOMOF8.
Derek, who has blue eyes and sharply parted blond hair, already
had business casual down. He was wearing an oxford shirt
and khakis and sneakers that looked recently cleaned. Like many
homeschooled boys, Derek seemed both old and young for his
age. If he was in a good mood, he bounced more than walked and
whistled, like Dennis without the menace, or an old contented
preacher lost in happy thoughts. With his tall frame, gangly arms,
and big grin, he was built for stand-up comedy but he was more
often straining to seem more serious. He was polite and sometimes
absurdly formal, and when he was talking to an adult and
feeling nervous, he used constructions more appropriate for the
witness stand. (“Yes, ma’am, I have been to this campus on two
prior occasions.”)
The campus is tiny, less like an Ivy League college than like a
Hollywood set of an old Ivy League school, with one main building
and several dorms grouped around a lake, all in Federalist
style. The art in Founders Hall is designed to remind the students
that America was founded as a Christian nation-a gallery
of portraits of the Founding Fathers, all copies, leads up the staircase
to the picture of Patrick Henry at the second Virginia convention,
a shaft of light from Heaven guiding his speech. “Harvard
for Homeschoolers,” founder Michael Farris likes to call it, invoking
the Harvard of earlier days, whose laws instructed students
to “know God and Jesus Christ.”
The last time Derek was on campus, his assigned dorm hadn’t
been built yet, and when he saw it, he was impressed. “So stately,”
he said, noting the chandelier in the entranceway and the winding
staircase leading up to his room on the second floor. But the
first thing that struck me about the boys’ dorms was what was
missing. Even during moving week, there were no flip-flops and
shorts, because the dress code encourages “glorifying God with
your appearance.” There were no iPod speakers perched on
anyone’s windows, shuffling from Beyoncé to Coldplay, because
iTunes lists are monitored and headphones are encouraged. There
were no movie posters zeroing in on Scarlett Johansson’s cleavage,
and no live cleavage either, because girls are required to
cover their chests and, in any event, girls aren’t allowed in boys’
dorms. There was no impatient “Mom, aren’t you guys going
somewhere for dinner?” and no sneaking around to figure out
where the rush parties were because at Patrick Henry there are
hardly ever parties, and drinking and dancing are not allowed.
There were no heaps of clothes on the floor, or open bags of
Cheetos. The only thing left blocking the hallway for any amount
of time was an ironing board-an ironing board, in a boys’ dorm!
Throughout the year, school administrators conduct room
checks to monitor cleanliness, but Derek did not really need that
incentive. Without any prodding, he set up his room like a Republican
Felix Unger. Above his desk he hung a signed Bush/
Cheney poster (“To Mr. Archer, with deepest appreciation for
your support”), a promotional calendar from the Bush campaign,
and a postcard of Ronald Reagan (“If we ever forget that we are
one nation under God then we will be a nation gone under.”). He
unpacked his favorite authors-Joshua Harris, Rush Limbaugh,
John Owen-and his prize possession, a Bible bound in black
leather that he got when he was twelve, its front cover so worn
from use that you have to divine the once-gold monogram with
your finger, like the Shroud of Turin. Above his desk sat a woodblock
I’ve seen in many a Republican congressman’s office. It read:
TRUST ME.
Although Patrick Henry has rules about movie watching,
some students keep secret stashes of DVDs in their bottom drawers,
but Derek brought only one-Surf Ninjas, a martial arts spoof
about two surfer brothers who discover they are long-lost princes
from a South China Sea island kingdom and use their newly discovered
special powers to overthrow an evil madman dictator. (“I
enjoy the kind of humor it presents.”) He’d seen some movies in
theaters, but not very many. “You really have to be careful about
how much you consume,” he said. “Watch one movie now and
again with a bad message, and it will help you know what’s going
on in the culture. But if you have a constant diet of that, that’s
where it gets destructive.”
He brought only a handful of CDs by contemporary Christian
artists such as Steven Curtis Chapman and Mercy Me-the kind
of syrupy Christian ballads about which the AC/DC-loving boys
at Leach’s had given him endless grief.
“You don’t have to be careful when you listen to them,” said
Donna.
“Yes,” Derek added, “the gospel message is clear. Unlike some
secular songs, which leave you with an empty feeling.”
Derek indulged in excess in only one area, and this, too, he
could trace back to his mom. His closet was bulging with clothes-suit
pants and jackets and dress shirts and T-shirts and ties. But
this display was not exactly what it seemed. These were hand-me-downs,
collected from an aunt “with fashionable inklings” and
various church-run thrift stores. And while most teenage boys
might find it annoying to be sent to school with plaid vests and suit
jackets to “grow into” and dozens of shirts and ties collected from
church sales, Derek did not see it this way. To him, it was an embarrassment
of riches, so much so that he decided to bring it up
with his mom.
“I feel it’s a bit flashy, if you will,” he said. “I mean, you don’t
have to wear something different every single day,” he added, in a
tone that from him counted as defiance.
“Well, I’m glad you don’t have a lack,” she said. “It’s better
not to wear the same thing over and over. Girls notice that kind
of thing-that kind of lack of hygiene-more than guys.”
Outside, the kids were comparing schedules-something
new for homeschoolers used to learning at their family’s pace.
Over and over they recited the freshman routine-“Latin, History,
Logic, Lit”-a litany meant to calm them down. Derek had
been warned that students at Patrick Henry “study, like, fifteen
hours a day,” that they stay up all night or wake up at 4 A.M. and
are generally tightly wound and type A, much more so than he is.
He was pretty sure he could keep up, but some other freshmen
already seemed on the verge of snapping under the pressure.
“I’ve been planning my classes for the last year, and now the
schedule’s not going to work,” said one girl with a very tight
ponytail, emerging from a meeting with her adviser.
Homeschoolers are not the most obvious raw material for a
college whose main mission is to train a new generation of Christian
politicians. Politics, after all, is the most chaotic and 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 to be
something of an elite group-rough around the edges but pure in
their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity. The kids
at Patrick Henry were raised advocating for the rights of homeschoolers;
during orientation week, they shared stories of lobbying
congressmen sympathetic to their cause or volunteering for
campaigns. Most homeschoolers take field trips to the statehouse
the way public school kids visit the zoo or the pumpkin patch.
Their parents raised them tenderly, not with the intention of
sheltering them forever, but of grooming them for their ultimate
mission: to “shape the culture and take back the nation.” It’s a
phrase repeated in homeschooling circles like a prayer, or a chant,
or a company slogan. It shows up in homeschoolers’ textbooks
and essays and church youth groups; their parents whisper it in
their ears like a secret destiny: There’s a world out there, a lost and
fallen world, and you alone can rescue it. Derek said it to a reporter
who profiled him in the Akron Beacon Journal during his senior year
of high school. His father, Mark Archer, read Deuteronomy to
him and explained how Moses never got to enter the Promised
Land; it’s the young Joshua who would lead the way to salvation.
“If there’s any hope in this country, it’s from you kids,” his dad
told him. “Morally, there is so much bad going on in this country.
It will be you kids coming out of the homeschooling movement,
your generation, who will do it.”
“Homeschooling does give a hope,” his mother said, more
gently.
At school the upperclassmen echoed their parent’s voices:
“We’re the salt of the earth and it’s no good if the salt is kept in a
shaker,” said Matthew du Mee, one of the school’s star graduates.
“It’s like training knights,” said a junior. “We wear thick armor
to make the battle easier. We’re not saying we’re closer to
Heaven, but we go above and beyond the call of duty.”
The world out there, this enemy, was something the freshmen
had seen only in bits and pieces-at summer jobs at 7-Elevens,
playing sports at the local high school, or while changing channels.
Their parents might have told them horror stories of drugs
and date rape and gay-pride parades, but most of them could
hardly imagine what those things might look like. But the Patrick
Henry freshmen, like nerdy teenage boys everywhere, loved science
fiction and its cinematic equivalent-Star Wars and Star Trek
and Ender’s Game and Surf Ninjas-stories in which a race of morally
and intellectually superior boys must leave their childhood home
prematurely to go fight enemies who want to destroy an already-mostly-destroyed
nation. And the boys always won in the end.
Substitute Hillary Clinton for Darth Vader or the Klingons, and
their destiny suddenly made sense to them.
Campus in the first few days of orientation week felt like Jedi
Academy or Battle School in the Belt or Hogwarts School of
Witchcraft and Wizardry (if they’d been allowed to read Harry
Potter). The boys were suddenly faced with an army of other
Chosen Ones just like them, and they found it discomfiting.
They knew the adults around them were looking for the next
Napoleon, the next Alexander, or at the very least the next Antonin
Scalia, and they wanted to be It. At the endless series of
lunches and dinners under the big white tent, they sized each
other up, jockeying for position, and flexing their muscles in
crude and awkward ways. They bragged about their special
powers in ways that they would cringe to remember a couple of
months later.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from God’s Harvard
by Hanna Rosin
Copyright © 2007 by Hanna Rosin.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Harcourt, Inc.
Copyright © 2007
Hanna Rosin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-15-101262-6
