God's Next Army


Abstract:
Is full of nuts.

Body:
I've watched all but the last few minutes of God's Next Army, a documentary on the Discovery Times channel. It focuses on Patrick Henry College, a new college in Virginia about one hour from the capital. PHC's mission is to produce, much in the way Ivy League universities do, graduates who are highly competitive in law and politics, but who also take their inspiration from Christianity. That may sound innocuous enough until you actually hear the students, teachers, and administrators at PHC talk. The students and teachers sound like cult members, and the administrators like cult leaders. And all of them plan on turning the United States towards Christendom.

Here's a small taste of what the interviewees said. The biology teacher only teaches creationism and believes that geology can be explained by the Flood. She gives no real credit to scientific methods and allows Biblical evidence to trump. The students are taught to rely on the Bible and that anything contradicting it can be rationalized away as either scientific misinterpretation or Satan's hand. Similarly, all of the students express that they personally follow the Bible literally and violators are shunned from the community. Meanwhile, the administrators twist their "literal" interpretations to support Republican financial supporter's interests (e.g. God says that all land belongs to him, so the government should abandon property and estate taxes, but not private property, apparently) and use the students as free political labor (you can feel their lack of choice to "volunteer"). Further examples abound in the program.

In all, I'm scared. There are very few students at PCH, but all of them are getting world-class cult training in manipulating the law and politics. And that makes them very dangerous because, unlike their disenfranchised Islamic brothers, these fundamentalists are trained to quietly turn the nation towards theocracy.

Posted: Fri - May 12, 2006 at 04:26 PM         |    

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