Last night I watched God’s Next Army a Channel 4 programme about Patrick Henry College. PHC is a christian evangelist college which takes largely home-schooled teenagers from religious communities and turns them into people who they believe will be at the forefront of the fight to “re-christianise” the USA.
It was all very worrying. These students had obviously been brought up to believe that the modern world is their enemy and that they should do everything in their power to return the US to an earlier, simpler and more superstitious time. And the scariest thing was that they were getting there. These kids are apparently very popular as aides for Republican polititians working in Washington. For example, one sequence showed a group of students lobbying congress members about an inheritance tax because its terms seemed to go against the bible.
The US has one major advantage over the UK in that its constitution guarantees the separation of church and state. The teachers and students of PHC are doing all they can to ensure that that has as little effect as possible.
and, lest we forget, the President. He is, after all, supporting the constitutional ammendment to “protect the sanctity of marriage” by defining it to be between a man and a woman.As John Stewart would say, smell the separation.
Actually, the whole story was incredibly overblown. Much of the stuff shown was done so exactly to get the reaction it generated in you. Don’t be afraid, I’ve debunked much of the show over at my blog.