NINA EASTON “Political Fundamentals” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/books/review/Easton-t.html
Hanna Rosin GOD’S HARVARD: A Christian College on a Mission to Save Americaという本の書評。Washington Postの宗教記者である著者（イスラエル生まれのユダヤ人）が、Michael Farrisという元政治家が2000年にヴァージニア州（に設立した福音主義に基づく大学Patrick Henry Collegeを１年半に亙って取材したもの。
また、Easton氏は、
Patrick Henry College students, whose SAT scores put them a tier below an Ivy League freshman class, hit the campaign trail on behalf of Republican candidates and won prime internships on Capitol Hill and inside the White House. Back at their red-brick colonial campus 45 miles from Washington, they were taught that the Earth was literally created in seven days and that those who weren’t born again in Christ faced an afterlife of “conscious torment for eternity.” They studied subjects like Greek philosophy, but mostly as a form of “opposition research.”
とも指摘している。
The coverage of religious fundamentalists by mainstream journalists — and many have visited Patrick Henry since its opening — tends to take on the trappings of an anthropological exercise: outsiders arriving to study the rituals and mating habits of a strange native tribe. There is an “us and them” quality that is difficult to transcend. The question must be asked of any writer undertaking this enterprise: Are you trying to horrify your like-minded readers or enlighten them? Rosin clearly intended to enlighten. Her empathy for the students and families she interviews is apparent. But there are suggestions that this is a cultural divide she can’t quite cross (a reference to the “eerily independent and well-behaved” small children at a student event, descriptions of “goofy love songs to Jesus”) and a politics she spurns (George Bush’s “fixed” view of God’s will leads to arrogance; Barack Obama offers a “humbler” version of Christianity).
なお、皮肉なことに、Patrick Henry Collegeで最も人気のある教授はリベラルな歴史学者Robert Stacey氏であるという。彼は”refuses to propagate the myth that all the founding fathers were devoted Christians and offers lectures on Kant and Nietzsche, who questioned the existence of God.”
