Patrick Henry College – Page 4 – Homeschoolers Anonymous

Better Late Than Never — The Senior Testimony I Never Gave: Adina’s Story

July 31, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team7 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Adina” is a pseudonym.

I never gave a senior testimony at Patrick Henry College — not because I was an introvert or hated public speaking (I was a government major and I love an audience), but because I was afraid of what I could and could not say.

Now that I’ve had time to look back on my experiences at PHC let this be my senior testimony.

I started at PHC way back when there was still a “strong” distance learning program so I was physically on campus for only my Junior and Senior years of college. I fought fiercely against the stay-at-home-daughters movement all through highschool to be able to attend PHC at all, and my first two years of college I studied at home through DL for several reasons. First, it was significantly less expensive than moving to Virginia, and second, I would be able to spend more time with my family (read: remain under my father’s direct authority and command) for an extra two years.

Those two years spent in DL were hardly much more than an extension of my homeschooling. I’d in my living room reading and being intensely antisocial, though the latter was not entirely my own choice. I was one of two girls at my church at that time to actually *gasp* attend college. I loved my classes, read all of the assigned reading, and couldn’t get enough of what I was learning — but there was no real change in my life. My story here will therefore only be about the last two years of my undergrad career.

I arrived on campus a starry-eyed, twenty-one year old, insecure junior, thrilled to finally be “on my own” at my dream college trying to conceal as best I could that I was one of those uncool homeschoolers who’d been raised wearing skirts, surrounded by ATI and stay at home daughters, and was currently mired in a dreadful pseudo courtship situation.

I honestly don’t know what I was expecting when I came to PHC, but I got something very different. My insecurity and self doubt made it extremely difficult for me to make meaningful friends for quite a while and I was too embarrassed and jealous of those around me to really confide in anyone or let myself get close to anyone. I spend the majority of my first semester hiding in the stairwells to study and avoid people. I even took to sleeping under a table in the dorm study room to be away from my roommates.

From hundreds of miles away my dad tried to control my relationship with my boyfriend and I foolishly let him. He would talk with my boyfriend for hours on end about intensely personal things about which no one has a right to ask anyone but perhaps their closest friend. My boyfriend would come away emotionally drained and exhausted, telling me he didn’t think he could endure any more. Our relationship wasn’t worth these cross examinations and detailed regulations from thousands of miles away, he said. Though I hated it, I never thought to question my assumption that courtship was how every godly relationship was supposed to happen, and hearing him say he wanted to give up tore my heart apart. What little confidence I had plummeted. I’d lived twenty-one years learning to shut down emotionally when my dad started talking and this man I loved couldn’t seem to endure it for event a few months. If I could deal with it for a lifetime without gaining anything, why couldn’t he pull through a few months to get me? I felt trapped and worthless.

What I had thought was a vibrant relationship with God deteriorated to nothing as everything came crashing down around me and my dream college became a nightmare. I hardly slept and I felt so depressed I cried every morning when my alarm went off. I got sick almost immediately after moving to campus and remained sick for three months. First a normal cold, then bronchitis, then the flu, then strep throat — but I think I only missed four or five classes total. Unless I was completely knocked out sick, I would still struggle to class and chapel, and then huddle with my blankets and soup until the early morning trying to keep on top of all my classes.

I made few friends my first year because I’d trained myself to keep people at arms length, and the friends I did make seemed incessantly needy. I was drained from dealing with my struggling relationship, the nearly constant venting and advice-giving my friends seemed to want, my work and school schedule, my health, and my lack of sleep. I felt invisible, angry, confused, alone, and by the end of my first year I was completely disillusioned with PHC. I’d expected a place of release, freedom, encouragement, and happiness, but instead I’d only found depression and intense insecurity.

The summer between my junior and senior year was both heaven and hell for me. Heaven, because I stayed in Virginia to work and lived with one of the few close friends I’d made, and hell because my boyfriend and I broke up. We got back together less than a week later, but the breakup deeply affected both of us. In a way though the breakup was a turning point for me. It was the lowest point of my existence, and from there I was able to build.

When we got back together I finally realized that the way my parents had been handling my relationship with my boyfriend was abusive, inappropriate, and damaging. While the breakup had been partly my fault, it had also been theirs because I’d allowed them a level of control in my life that was horribly harmful and they’d ran with it. And so for the first time in my life I stood up for myself. I told my parents that my boyfriend was my future and that our relationship deserved respect. I told them that I would make my own decisions for myself as an autonomous human being – and then I ended the conversation.

I cried and shook like a frightened puppy after that conversation. At twenty-two, a senior in college, I was terrified that somehow God would send fire from heaven to strike me dead for my “defiance.” But nothing happened.

My senior year I moved off campus into an apartment with my best friend, worked part time, held down an internship in DC, went to class part time, and finally began to enjoy my life. My boyfriend and I rebuilt our relationship, I consciously let people into my life and took others out, reached out for help when I needed it, established boundaries in my relationship with my parents, and began attending church regularly again. I timidly told my story when my friends returned for the fall semester and I heard nothing but encouragement, congratulations, and support. Where I’d expected smirks or confused back-pats of pity, I instead found nods of agreement and understanding. I suddenly realized all that I had in common with those around me. Many of us were stumbling through the first stages of independence, struggling against being suffocated by controlling parents, and reeling from the revelation that God was not who we’d been taught he was.

I was still very unsure of myself at times, but I began to learn things I’d never known before. Respect is a two way street, relationships must have boundaries, disagreement isn’t dishonoring, and respect doesn’t mean obedience. For the first time in my life I also realized that my relationship with my boyfriend was exclusively our responsibility. My parents had no right to try to control it, and I was hurting myself by letting them have that power. It’s still hard at times — almost paralyzing — to look at myself and see that I am learning these things so late in life.Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been forever screwed over.

When my class began giving senior testimonies I didn’t know what to say. As I looked back over my previous two years all I saw was pain and disillusionment. Really that is an unfair characterization since I did have incredibly bright, happy spots as I would later see, but my life was so tumultuous at the time I couldn’t see any pattern of progress or goodness. I saw the wonderful friends I’d made there — both among the student body and the faculty — but I couldn’t get past the fact that my life had fallen apart while I was there and I felt like I was left trying to put it back together alone.

Now having put some distance between myself and my time at PHC I can see what was really going on. If you’d asked me what I thought of my time at PHC while I was there I would have most likely said it was all awful and nothing could make me ever willingly repeat it. Now I can see that the destruction PHC brought on my life was a God-send. It’s true, I did fall apart at and because of PHC, but it was the painful falling apart that I needed.

I’m reminded of the section in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader chapter 7 where Eustice loses his dragon skin. He peeled off layers himself and thought he was free each time, but until he was deeply torn by something else — someone else — he was not truly free. My dragon skin was the buildup of twenty one years of legalistic religion that completely obscured God’s true nature, and PHC was my Aslan — painfully and agonizingly tearing away what I’d been confined in to reveal who I was truly made to be.

I will be the first to say that PHC isn’t for everyone. There are people who have gone there and had terrible experiences and I don’t pretend those don’t exist. I’ve seen students be cruel, heartless, inconsiderate, and downright wrong in their treatment of people, and I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me and think that I’m saying anyone who comes away with a bad taste in their mouth after coming to PHC is lying. I’ve known people who got incredibly annoyed with the level of immaturity displayed by some of the students there, and I’ve seen it too — I won’t deny it. Sadly I was probably that cruel, heartless, inconsiderate, immature, downright wrong student at times. It took two years at PHC to change me.

What I will deny is that PHC is furthering the abuse that has taken place within certain extremely conservative homeschooling circles. You see, it was at PHC that I was first treated as an equal. I was respected at PHC. I was there that I was told that I could be whatever I sent my mind to. At PHC I learned to have a voice for myself, and together with some of my closest friends we took those first baby steps towards understanding who we were and that we deserved respect and should have the final say in our own decisions. It was first at PHC where my mind was more important than my gender. This is my experience.

I can’t finish here without bring up PHC and patriarchy (I hate even typing that word). PHC is associated with patriarchy, I won’t deny it. But the association is a good one, not a bad one (let me explain before you fry me – I hate patriarchy. It is an evil, cruel, disgusting manglement of Christianity that disgusts me). PHC is associated with patriarchy because it is one of the only colleges that the broken children of patriarchy are allowed to go.

When I came to PHC, the dust of patriarchy clung to my clothes, despite the fact that I thought I’d already shaken it off. It was PHC that helped me truly clean the scum of patriarchy and legalism from my life. It was my professors and my classmates that made that long hard journey with me. PHC’s proximity to those caught up in the patriarchy movement give it the ability to understand and meet the needs of those who come from that background. Had I gone off to a different school that wasn’t so close to the homeschooling community there would have been no one to understand my background and sympathetically help me along my journey out of that type of upbringing.

PHC played a very important role for me and for many of my friends as well. It looks conservative enough on paper that controlling homeschool parents will “allow” their children to attend there when they wouldn’t ever dream of letting them go to any other college (that was my experience — PHC was hard enough, I know my parents would never have let me go anywhere else, and I wasn’t in a place in my life to do something without my parents’ “blessing”). Once at PHC, those students who come from that type of background are able to unlearn everything wrong they’ve been taught and re-learn who God really is and what Christianity means in a setting of mostly sympathetic, understanding fellow students and professors.

PHC is a safe place for these homeschoolers to venture out of their background in a world of otherwise understandably confused people who wouldn’t know how to help. The skirt-wearing courtship-enduring freshman me wouldn’t have survived very long anywhere but at PHC.

As imperfect as PHC can be, in my mind it will always be the “halfway house” between my upbringing and where I am today. It was painful and agonizing, but ultimately the best thing that ever happened in my life and I thank God every day for the destruction I underwent at PHC. It saved me and I would be a mess if I hadn’t have gone. It is for this reason that I want PHC to continue on strong: so it can continue to save the broken children of homeschooling.

Now you’ll have to excuse me because I have a date with my fiance.

The Reluctant Rebel: Gemma’s Story, Part Three

July 31, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team4 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Gemma” is a pseudonym specifically chosen by the author.

< Part Two

Part Three: Sophomore Year

I had apparently made enough “progress” by the following fall semester, my sophomore year, that I was allowed to return to a wing with my friends and my old RA. However, it wasn’t long before I came to the definitive conclusion that Dean Wilson was an evil man by watching how he “counseled” one of my roommates who was dealing with a serious personal issue. He engaged in some of the most blatant, disgusting, misogynistic victim-blaming I have ever heard come out of a man’s mouth, and left my roommate even more grief-stricken and overwhelmed than she had been before.

Somehow it was easier to see the evil clearly when it was being inflicted on someone else.

That year, my RA and another popular student wrote a petition to the administration for the loosening of some of the more restrictive rules, especially regarding the interaction of male and female students. This petition was actually relatively successful, and in the aftermath it seemed like people could breathe again. I remember going to an off-campus basketball game shortly after this and seeing girls and guys in the bleachers, rubbing shoulders and leaning back against each other’s knees—just like normal college kids would do. It made me happy—my friends and I acted like this in high school. It seemed normal and familiar.

I also remember, in the time between the delivery of the petition and the administration’s positive response, my RA hiding—literally hiding—in her dorm room, ducking from the view of the window, or sitting in the hallway trying to breathe and slow her rapid heart beat. She had done the right thing, but she was terrified of Dean Wilson, and of the nameless atmosphere of fear we were all drowning in. She laughed at the absurdity of her “hiding,” but the feeling was real and we all knew it.

Academically, the school was living up to its reputation. In fact, I think one of the reasons the student life issues were so important to everyone is that we had so little chance to socialize as it was. Most of our time was spent studying, trying to conquer the unconquerable mountain of work we were assigned. My classes were extremely difficult, but very rewarding. Most of the professors seemed genuinely to enjoy their students. Some would routinely hold court in the dining hall between and after classes, answering questions, doling out advice, mostly just joking around or facilitating lighthearted debates.

But there was a growing split between the administration and the Office of Student Life, on the one hand, and the academic side of the school, on the other. We started to articulate it even then to outsiders who asked: the education here is great, but the culture is oppressive. Dean Wilson took it personally that the professors—and let’s face it, many of the students—were smarter than he was. He and his favored students started ruminating on the pride of intellectualism, the vanity of worldly philosophy, and the greater goodness of purity of heart and devotion to Scripture. It was spoken of as an either/or dilemma—smart, prideful, sinful people vs. lowly, humble, pure people.

It was around this time that several friends and I had started a campus group called the Alexis de Tocqueville Society. We semi-regularly published a journal of academic writing, book, music, and movie reviews, and opinion pieces. We also hosted guest lecturers on a variety of topics, from international relations to medieval literature to film criticism. Our stated mission was to further intellectual dialogue on campus. It was definitely an intellectually-focused club, but our mission was to serve the campus as a whole, not to show off. But ATS attracted the “wrong” kind of students, and it wasn’t long before “ATS” became a byword for “troublemakers.” We embodied that “intellectual elitism” Dean Wilson hated so much, and the administration began to view us with suspicion.

I now recognize this anti-intellectualism and many other of Dean Wilson’s teachings in what has been written recently about Bill Gothard and other authoritarian homeschool leaders.

For instance, Dean Wilson repeatedly admonished us not to take up another person’s offense—a teaching so bizarre and idiosyncratic I recognized it immediately when it appeared recently on the Recovering Grace website. Another example is this page from the ATI Basic Seminar textbook. Again, I discovered this only recently, but was shocked to see how neatly it summed up so much of what the students branded as “rebels” endured from our fellow students and from Student Life and the administration:

I know these teachings seem commonplace to those who grew up in systems like these. You have to imagine how bewildering and alienating these judgmental attitudes seemed to those of us who literally had no context to understand how we were being perceived, or why. I didn’t go into college wanting to be a rebel. I was a good, homeschooled, Christian girl. I memorized Scripture by the chapter, volunteered at AWANA, and played praise songs on the piano. I’d never even had a boyfriend before college. But at PHC, just by living my (good) life and being myself, I was branded a “rebel.” It was like there was this invisible line I was constantly crossing, which everyone could see except me. The only people who made sense to me were the other “rebels.” After a while, it just got psychologically demoralizing. I don’t even know what you people want from me, so fine, I’m a “rebel.”

Dean Wilson was a strong adherent of Doug Wilson and the Pearls. In our weekly small-group wing chapels, we were given writings from Wilson and the Pearls to study and discuss.

Here, for example, is the actual handout we studied in one wing chapel, probably during the 2003-2004 school year. The name and book title are mysteriously missing, but anyone familiar with the material can recognize it as a page straight out of Debi Pearl’s Created To Be His Help Meet.

From what I’ve heard, the men were indoctrinated with these materials even more than the women. It wasn’t like everyone on campus necessarily accepted these things at face value—in my wing of relatively fashion-forward women, I remember us all kind of giggling at one piece of Doug Wilson’s that condemned high heels. But even if everyone didn’t accept them, the presence of these writings and teachings added to the overall atmosphere. Now, it entered the minds of everyone that girls who wore high heels were sluttier than girls who didn’t. Now, wearing heels meant something it hadn’t meant before.

Mike Farris has recently distanced himself from people like Gothard, Phillips, Wilson, and other extremists and has claimed that he rejects their teachings. I think it is true that he, personally, does not hold to many of their more extreme beliefs.

But he allowed these extreme views to circulate on his campus with a stamp of official approval.

He allowed his hand-picked Dean of Student Life and this dean’s favorite, very conservative students to dominate the campus culture with their extremism. He should have known this was going on. If he knew, he never said anything.

And Mike Farris had no qualms about saying something when he thought something needed to be said! Once, a student wrote an article for the student newspaper with the Slate-esque headline of “Why Bono Is A Better Christian Than You.” This piece prompted Farris to respond with an entire chapel sermon on why cursing is bad and demonstrates that one is not a true Christian. Afterward, he spoke jovially with the author of the article, slapping him on the back in a “no harm, no foul” kind of way. But not surprisingly, this response had a chilling effect on the further publication of controversial pieces in campus newspapers.

Another time, Farris got wind that some students had been dabbling in libertarianism. This prompted another chapel sermon, a fiery one in which he denounced libertarians as no better than child molesters.

So it’s not like he ever hesitated to address campus trends that bothered him, publicly and personally.

My best guess is that Mike Farris and Paul Wilson personally benefitted from a campus culture of total submission to authority. Many ultra-conservative students came from backgrounds that said parents, pastors, and government must be obeyed without question and respected without complaint. Questions and complaints were no better than defiance, and defiance of authority was an unforgivable sin. It was very easy for these students to add “college administrators” to that list of unquestionable authorities.

Knowing what I know now, I can see where that mindset comes from. At the time, I thought I was surrounded by a bizarre species of human who spoke some kind of foreign code. At least, I never could seem to get through to them with normal English words, or logic, or questions like Where in the Bible does it say it is evil to question a college administrator? And many of them—especially the young men—didn’t even seem capable of looking me in the face when I talked, or acknowledging anything I had to say. I think Farris tacitly (and Wilson explicitly) approved of this state of affairs, because it gave them power and control over the student body.

That, or he just didn’t know that his students were being forced to study patriarchalist writers and imbibe cultic teachings under the guise of not only administrative, but religious authority—but he really, really should have known.

One final example of the split between the academic and student-life cultures on campus came towards the end of my sophomore year. A reporter from the New York Times, David Kirkpatrick, came to visit the campus for a story he was writing. Reporters were on campus all the time. PHC was huge media bait during its first few years in existence, and the administration was only too happy to show us off to the world. At first, it was kind of fun to interact with reporters, but after a while, you just feel like a specimen being examined. I guess it never occurred to the administrators that it’s actually really hard to pay attention in class when there’s a massive camera in your face. The students joked about campus being a “fishbowl,” a double reference to the utter lack of privacy within and the constant prying eyes from without.

At any rate, when David Kirkpatrick arrived, he came to visit my class. I was taking a course called “Modernity, Post-modernity, and Society,” a political theory elective intentionally modeled on a graduate-level, seminar-style course. We were reading and discussing Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition on the day Mr. Kirkpatrick sat in on our class. At the end of the class, he complimented the students and the professor on the level of engagement with text we had displayed. He himself had read The Human Condition—in graduate school—and he noted that we had handled the text as well as any of his graduate classmates had.

I was, of course, pleased with the compliment—but even more pleased that this reporter from the New York Times had seen the good side of PHC, the academic side, before encountering whatever weirdness he was sure to find if he hung around long enough.

And it didn’t take long at all. By the time I got to lunch, he was in the dining hall, surrounded by a table full of girls in long prairie skirts. The article led with a photo of students walking on campus, noting that students “may show affection publicly only by holding hands while walking”—one of the more arcane rules from the rulebook.

There was no mention of Arendt or graduate-style seminar courses.

Part Four >

Soy Makes Kids Gay and Babies Masturbate!

July 30, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team25 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

On Monday, one of the stories we received for our “Homeschoolers U” series about Patrick Henry College experiences mentioned a curious anecdote. The anecdote involved a PHC freshman who believed soy products make people gay. Here’s the story according to Lillia Munsell:

Midway through my first semester, a fellow freshman insisted that soy milk turned people gay. Trying not to choke on the ridiculously expensive dining hall food, I asked what he meant. “It’s the estrogen,” he explained to me with all the confidence that came from studying high school biology at the kitchen table. “It turns people gay. How else do you explain California?” I don’t know how to explain California, but this did explain the rumors about my lactose-intolerant Cuban friend who poured soy milk over his cereal and said deviant phrases like “what the hell.”

While this story might just provoke laughter and ridicule towards a freshman who would believe such asinine pseudoscience, it might be better to direct that laughter and ridicule towards the source: the so-called educated adults from which that student learned the pseudoscience. And honestly, you don’t have to look far to find them.

This student was a homeschool kid attending Patrick Henry College. The man who created PHC, Michael Farris, is a self-declared “buddy” of Joseph Farah, the editor of WorldNetDaily, a website that pretends to do legitimate journalism. (In fact, one of Farah’s own kids has attended PHC.) Farris has featured Farah on HSLDA’s radio program, Home School HeartBeat. That program is where Farris mentions Farah is “my buddy”. Farah has returned the sentiment, making Farris an exclusive WND columnist in 2006.

You know what else happened in 2006?

WND published a series entitled “SOY IS MAKING KIDS ‘GAY.'”

Yes, WND ran a six-part series by James “Jim” Rutz, a dominionist who wrote a book called Megashift that teaches you how to “prepare yourself to take part in a total makeover of Planet Earth.”Rutz’s soy series is full of ridiculous pseudoscience about soy. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s a slow poison out there that’s severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture…

The dangerous food I’m speaking of is soy. Soybean products are feminizing, and they’re all over the place. You can hardly escape them anymore…

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality.

But Rutz is not alone in fearing the evil power of the soy bean. Nor is he the first. In 2001, half a decade before Rutz wrote “SOY IS MAKING KIDS ‘GAY,'” Debi Pearl — yes, homeschool guru Debi Pearl from No Greater Joy Ministries — wrote an article entitled, “Soy Alert.” Pearl, unfortunately, was entirely blind in 2001 as to how soy makes kids gay. But she was fortunately enlightened enough to realize another danger of soy:

Soy makes babies masturbate!

Yes, you read that right. I’ll let Pearl try to explain:

We regularly get letters from parents that are shocked and horrified to have discovered that their babies, as young as 18 months, are, without doubt, masturbating. It is a shocking but growing phenomenon. Some of the problems are associated with small children clutching vibrating toys, but not in all cases. Yet, there must be a predisposing prompted by hormones. Could it be caused by the hormone element in soy formula?

Pearl never answered the question. Which is convenient for her. But she also insinuated that marriage problems could be related to soy:

If your husband lacks leadership and male dominance, but you seem to have a strong assertive drive, then stop eating soy and do some research.

All of the “evidence” she found led her to a rather gloom conclusion:

Soy is a drug, like many herbs. It is too powerful of a drug to use freely as a food.

But fear not. Pearl discovered a biblically-based solution:

When men try to improve on what God gave, it should be questioned. Cereal should be grains; milk should be the way it was in the Promised Land; meat should be as it was when Jesus fed the multitude, or when Abraham fed the angels of God.

With homeschool “leaders” like Debi Pearl and “news” sources like WND teaching these myths, it’s no wonder a homeschooled college freshman at PHC thought they were real. Hopefully he has learned real science since then.

Hopefully, too, homeschoolers will start demanding real science from their leaders and news sources.

***** UPDATE: It seems the source of these myths might very well be the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF). WAPF is a lobbying organization that is immensely popular in homeschooling circles (just take a look at the comments on this popular homeschool blogger’s post). Homeschool curriculum company Sonlight sells the Foundation’s foundational textbook, the cookbook Nourishing Traditions. (It’s hard to exaggerate the adoration some homeschool families have for the book. It’s right up there next to the Bible.) According to WAPF itself, “The most prominent group warning about the dangers of modern soy consumption would be the Weston A. Price Foundation.” And what would that warning be? Again, according to WAPF: “The fact that soy can feminize males and masculinize females is evidence of soy targeting the brain.” WAPF’s president, Sally Fallon, first gained notoriety for attacking soy in 2000, a year before Debi Pearl’s 2001 “Soy Alert.” In 2000, Fallon called soy “the next Asbestos” and claimed it caused sexual problems for kids. It seems reasonable to assume this was source for Pearl in 2001, considering the Pearl family uses WAPF material.

Depth of Love, Diversity of People: Simeon Tomaszewski’s Story

July 30, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team3 Comments

Simeon Tomaszewski is in the Patrick Henry College Class of 2015.

No human institution is perfect; I can attest that Patrick Henry College is no exception to that rule. That said, coming from the conservative, homeschooled, Christian background that I did, the depth of love and diversity of people that I discovered at Patrick Henry College surprised me. My first reaction to some people very different from me was sometimes, “The Admissions let [person X] into the college?!?” But over time, I grew to appreciate them.

Some students, not just on campus as a whole, but in my wing and close circle of friends, listen to classical music, others to rap. Some students spend the bulk of their free time video gaming, others biking, some socializing. And as often as I have tried to shove people into boxes, they manage to surprise me. The guy who spends hours playing video games is a deep philosophical thinker. The girl who seems to have no end of time to spend encouraging others actually does very well academically, too. The jock is studying Music and learning to conduct an orchestra. College faculty and staff are the same way.

I have been very blessed by my time at PHC and grown in many ways. Not least among these is a broadening of the mind, a newfound hesitance to dismiss out of hand ideas with which I disagree or even people who don’t “fit” in my social sphere.

I cannot speak for other students, but my PHC experience has been nearly unqualifiedly a good one.

The Reluctant Rebel: Gemma’s Story, Part Two

July 30, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team7 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Gemma” is a pseudonym specifically chosen by the author.

< Part One

Part Two: Freshman Year

My problems started the first semester of my freshman year.

I remember my first few weeks at PHC being happy ones. It was nice to start over with a clean slate and a new group of friends. I felt like I could “be myself” in a way I hadn’t ever been before, now that I was so far away from parents and home. It was still warm in northern Virginia, and the weight of the semester’s work hadn’t set in yet. A favorite evening pastime was swing dancing—we would clear out the furniture in the dining hall or the large lecture hall where chapel was held, and someone would put on a CD of swing music. (This was 2002 and swing dancing was really popular then.) On cooler evenings, we would dance out on the back porch of the main administration building.

The rulebook said nothing about dancing.

But a few weeks into the semester, the administration sent out an email saying that dancing was no longer allowed on campus.

They were not officially saying that dancing was wrong, but some people—donors, board members, it wasn’t clear—might believe it was, and out of deference to these people’s opinions, the college had decided to disallow it on campus. We could dance off campus if we wanted to.

That was easier said than done. Some people would go into the city on weekends and dance at community dance halls like Glen Echo, but that was a long drive. The fun, informal evenings were effectively squashed. Lots of rule changes happened this way—arbitrarily, without warning, and with no chance to appeal. A frequent rationale for changes was that the campus culture needed to respect the sensitivities of the more conservative students, parents, and donors.

The dorm wing I lived in was packed with freshmen girls. Our bubbly, outgoing RA wanted to help us make friends, so she coordinated with the RA of one of the male wings to organize some group outings. One month, our “brother wing” took us all out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The next month, we invited them to go roller skating at a divey local rink. It was fun.

But then the Dean of Student Life, Paul Wilson, found out about these outings. Dean Wilson was a swarthy, charismatic former wrestling coach, hand-picked by Mike Farris for the job of shepherding his students. Most students seemed to like him. He certainly seemed jocular, smiling, energetic, easygoing, and approachable. Just like a coach should be.

But he believed that men and women were simply incapable of true platonic friendship. This was a belief he had stated repeatedly in chapel and to individuals in private. Relationships between men and women were always potentially volatile; it was best to stick to your own kind.

At the time, in order to promote a “courtship” culture on campus, the college had taken upon itself the burden of monitoring student relationships.

When it seemed like a man and a woman were getting pretty close, Dean Wilson would inquire about the nature of their relationship. He would then ask the man to call the woman’s parents to inform them of his intentions and receive their permission to pursue a relationship with their daughter. In these early days, there were less than 200 students on campus, so it was somewhat feasible for the college to play this role. (They have since modified the extent of their involvement in romantic relationships.)

Even though there was nothing romantic going on in our brother/sister wing outings, Dean Wilson used this rule to put an end to them. He discovered that our two RA’s had gone out for coffee a couple of times to plan the wing outings (and for no other purpose). He called them both to his office and told them they were forbidden from spending any more time alone together, unless the male RA was willing to call the female RA’s parents and get their permission to go to coffee with their daughter. Since there was nothing romantic in the least about their planning sessions over coffee, they were unwilling to take this step. It was clear, anyway, that Dean Wilson had more of a problem with our group outings than he did with the two of them talking over coffee. So they gave in, and we had no more brother/sister wing outings.

And again, what had seemed like a bright new beginning, full of friends and new opportunities, became a little duller, and a little smaller, a little more stifling. I started to wonder if maybe I had been lied to about this campus culture.

Later that first semester, I went to the city one weekend evening with a bunch of friends to see the monuments. Curfew was an hour later on weekends, and we made the most of our time, enjoying the monuments by night. But we took a wrong turn coming out of the metro station lot on the way home and got lost. As a result, we broke curfew by a few minutes. This was a rule violation for sure, but a fairly common one, and we had a reasonable excuse.

Weeks went by and no one said anything about it. I was starting to think our violation had simply been overlooked.

I had a friend, a troubled young man a year or two older than me, who had decided to withdraw that semester. He sold his books and told everyone he’d bought a plane ticket for a particular day. He was just living on campus until that day arrived, when he would go home. On the appointed day, however, he woke up early, stole his roommate’s bicycle, and left. Just disappeared.

As the rumors spread across campus, people became very concerned. What had happened to him? Did he kill himself? It was well known that he had a dislike for particular people on campus. He’d gotten into arguments with other students, and made a note of which people seemed sad to see him go and which people asked him things like “why are you still here?” Maybe he was planning something. Maybe he would come back and kill us! The rumors grew in intensity—he had penned some kind of manifesto to be sent as an all-student email, but the administration had caught it and deleted it before it went out. His parents flew in—apparently, they had no idea he’d even withdrawn from school. Students were huddled in dorm lounges, crying and praying.

We were afraid, and no one would tell us anything.

On this particular afternoon, in the midst of this crisis, I was summoned to Dean Wilson’s office. I went quickly—I assumed he wanted to talk to me about my missing friend.

He didn’t. He wanted to talk to me about being late for curfew a couple weeks before. I was blindsided. I didn’t even know how to respond—everyone was preoccupied by this massive crisis, and he wants to talk about this?

He wanted to know if I was “sorry” for breaking curfew. I was confused: we got lost, it took time to get un-lost, by the time we got home we were late—what part of that was supposed to make me “sorry”? I didn’t deny it, but I didn’t see what there was to be sorry about. It was a mistake, it just happened. I would accept punishment for having broken a rule, but it wasn’t some kind of moral offense that I needed to be “sorry” about.

This made Dean Wilson angry. My refusal to be “sorry” demonstrated a defiant attitude on my part. This disappointed him more than the rule violation itself. Furthermore, he was very concerned about the people I had been out with when the rule was broken. What did I think it said about me, that I was willing to be seen out in a car with these people, after curfew?

I was confused. “These people” were my friends. I liked them. I didn’t see anything wrong with them, and I didn’t see why I should care what anyone else thought either.

He continued to press me—was I sure there was nothing wrong with my friends? What could I tell him about their character? Did I think they had good character? Really? What did hanging out with them communicate to others about my character?

I was confused. I had no idea how to answer these questions. He badgered me into admitting a few character flaws on their part. I still didn’t see what difference that made. Everyone has flaws. If I couldn’t be friends with flawed people, I wouldn’t have any friends.

Dean Wilson was very disappointed in me. He had this remarkably effective way of acting “hurt” to make you feel guilty for things you didn’t need to feel guilty about. I had hurt him, disappointed him, and I should really feel bad for that. He concluded our meeting saying he would have to take some time to think about just how to punish me for this rule violation.

I left feeling scared, bewildered, guilty—on top of the other stress of the day. I spoke to another girl who had been in the car with me, a dorm-mate and good friend. She’d had a similar meeting with him. We were both left not knowing how we were to be punished, but with the threat of eventual punishment hanging over our heads.

Each student, at the beginning of the semester, was given 10 one-hour curfew “extensions,” which could be used at will throughout the semester, but only one-at-a-time (i.e., you couldn’t stack 6 together and stay out all night, you could only use one per night). A common punishment for curfew violation was the confiscation of some curfew extensions.

We assumed this would be our punishment, but we didn’t know how many he would take.

I clearly remember, a few weeks later, the first snow of the winter began late one evening. It was snowing heavily, with enough accumulation that many students went outside and started playing in it, throwing snowballs and building snowmen. Since it was after curfew, these students were all technically using their extensions to leave their dorms. My friend and I watched wistfully from a dorm window while all of our friends frolicked in the snow. We asked our RA if we couldn’t be excused to go out and join them? After all, we wouldn’t be leaving campus, just our dorm. She sympathized, but told us no—until Dean Wilson decided how he was going to punish us, we had to assume we had no extensions left and stay inside the dorm after curfew.

We stood, by ourselves, in the lobby of our dorm, watching all of our friends play in the snow. It was such a silly thing, but it left us feeling demeaned, like naughty children.

He did eventually make up his mind about our arbitrary punishment, but at a point so late in the semester that it didn’t matter anymore.

Several of my new friends dropped out after that semester.

The next semester, a new dorm that had been under construction the previous year was finally finished. The opening of this dorm relieved the massive overcrowding of the previous semester. There had been 7 freshman girls in my one-bathroom suite that first semester, and not surprisingly, we all hadn’t gotten along so well in such tight quarters. Now, there were entire wings of dorms that went unused. Everyone spread out.

Dean Wilson was in charge of assigning people to their rooms. He gave me a room by myself, in a wing full of mostly older, fairly conservative girls I did not know well. He sold this to me as being in my best interests and something I should be grateful for: “You seem like the kind of person who would enjoy living alone.” In retrospect, I can see that he was clearly trying to isolate me from my friends and put me in a place where I would be monitored.

I almost immediately got in trouble for re-arranging the furniture in my room. The room had 3 beds. I didn’t need 3 beds, so I took one apart and stored it in one of the two closets to make more space for myself. Again, according to Dean Wilson, it wasn’t so much the offense that was the problem as my attitude toward it—I didn’t think I had done anything wrong. I wasn’t “sorry” enough. I was “entitled” and “defiant of authority.” I also discovered during this encounter that my new RA would repeat to Dean Wilson, verbatim, anything I said to her.

I shut up after that.

The girls on my new wing made a habit of walking into my room whenever they felt like it, to try to “counsel” me. They made it clear that gossip was not only not condemned, but actually encouraged—it was a tool they would use to make people behave the way they wanted them to.

I still saw my friends at class and went to visit them in their dorm rooms (the female ones, anyway), but I felt increasingly isolated, watched, and fearful. I began to have nightmares, including a recurring one in which I was being strangled to death by demons. I had trouble sleeping and developed odd habits like sleeping with the lights on. Like a child, I literally became afraid of the dark.

It is hard to explain, in retrospect, the level of pressure, fear, and isolation I felt. I was so confused about what I had done to deserve this. I couldn’t even talk to my parents about it; I couldn’t seem to make them understand what I was going through. It was like they had turned into different people—cold, angry, and judgmental. I found out, years later, that Dean Wilson had been calling them and talking to them about me, behind my back, since the previous semester. I don’t know what he was telling them, but he made it sound like I was in so much trouble they nearly withdrew me from the school involuntarily. But he reassured them that he was watching over me and doing his best to fix my problems, so of course they tried to help him in his project.

He took advantage of normal parental concerns to manipulate my well-intentioned parents and turn them against me, and used them to manipulate me, break my will, and bring me over to his side.

Part Three >

The Reluctant Rebel: Gemma’s Story, Part One

July 29, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team1 Comment

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Gemma” is a pseudonym specifically chosen by the author.

Part 1: Why I Went

People often ask me why I chose to attend Patrick Henry.

I think a lot of people are incredulous that anyone would ever go to such a place. The truth is that students enrolled at PHC for a lot of reasons. Most were there because they believed in the stated mission of the school: to train students to lead the nation and shape the culture by way of a highly rigorous, Christian, classical liberal arts education. Others were there because PHC was the only college that their parents believed was safe enough to send their kids to. Some of these students wanted to be there too, but many did not.

I went to PHC because I believed in the mission, as it was presented to me.

I wanted to be there. I had looked around at other Christian colleges, and found them academically lightweight. I had looked at secular state universities, but they seemed vapid, and I never felt like I belonged. I was ambitious and idealistic—a typical overachieving firstborn—and the idea of being part of a grand new experiment like PHC was exciting to me. I had never read The Joshua Generation and was mostly unaware of Farris’ long-term agenda described therein. As far as I knew, the mission of Patrick Henry College was to be the most academically-excellent Christian college in the country. This is why I went; this is why my parents sent me.

I did have some reservations. I was homeschooled, but never as part of a homeschool cult like ATI or Vision Forum. (In fact, I’d never even heard of ATI until I got to college, and didn’t know anything about Vision Forum beyond the fact that they sold books and curricula.) My family was relatively normal as evangelical homeschoolers go. My siblings and I wore clothes from Express and American Eagle, listened to pop rock on the radio, and went to youth group. We and our homeschooled friends openly mocked the stereotypical “denim-jumper” homeschoolers and felt embarrassed by them. My friends laughed at me for applying to PHC, the “homeschool college.” They were all going off to big state universities or more established Christian colleges. I was convinced my choice was the right one, but I was worried that a “homeschool college” would be dominated by the weird denim-jumper types.

I went to a college recruiting event during my senior year of high school and pointedly asked the recruiter from PHC about the culture of the school. She reassured me that I had nothing to worry about. Sure, there were a few sheltered, denim-clad students on campus, but they were not the norm. “Dr. Farris wouldn’t even allow any photographs of women in skirts to be used in the brochures,” she said, handing me an example. Sure enough, the women pictured all wore pants and looked normal. “He didn’t want to give the impression that this is a school for very conservative homeschoolers.”

She went on to tell me how the school self-consciously wanted to set itself apart from places like Bob Jones, Pensacola Christian, and even Liberty University. PHC had its sights set higher than that—its goal was to be a Christian Harvard. It was pursuing accreditation. It was the real deal.

And yes, there were some rules, but just common-sense stuff. Nothing too hard core. She assured me I would fit in just fine.

I let this reassure me. In retrospect, this was my first encounter with what was to become a recurring theme of my time at PHC: the administration was obsessed with reputation, appearances, impressions given to outsiders.

But the reality within was very different.

Part Two >

“To the Ladies of Patrick Henry College”: A 2006 Email from 2 Male PHC Students

July 29, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team18 Comments

HA note: The following was submitted by a PHC graduate who wishes to remain anonymous.

Trigger warning: slut-shaming, victim-blaming, and abuse apologisms.

If you need some extra content for your series, you might be interested in publishing this lovely piece of misogynistic bullcrap.

This email was sent to all PHC students by two male students on March 15, 2006. As you can see from the first paragraphs, this was not the first email of its kind. In fact, the all-student email function was routinely used for purposes of “exhorting” fellow students over various moral matters, although not usually to quite this length and degree.

*****

[Redacted 1] and [Redacted 2], to the Ladies of Patrick Henry College:

The purpose of this e-mail is to encourage and exhort you. This is something we as brothers in Christ should always be doing. We do not mean to judge or to condemn—that is not our place—but for some of you, this e-mail will also attempt to offer correction. That too is a good and appropriate thing, but it is easy for us to be judgmental or prideful, seeking to correct with the wrong spirit or from the wrong motives. We are very aware of the dangers, and of how far we ourselves fall short of the mark. Nevertheless, prayerfully, in brokenness and humility, we offer this e-mail for your edification in Christ Jesus.

The matter in question is Modesty.

Two years ago, [Redacted 2] sent out a long e-mail entitled “Love, Lust, License, and Liberty (Ball).” It addressed a lot of the questions we will speak of here. However, it was rambly, and although we don’t claim by any means to completely understand the subject now, we’re quite certain we understood it a good bit less then.

Further, there are three factors making this a particularly apropos time for such a discussion. First (as with [Redacted 2]’s epistle), there is a Liberty Ball coming, and the ladies are purchasing lovely dresses. Second, the weather is getting warmer, which tends to make modesty a much more immediate concern. Third—based partly on the first two reasons—several persons of both sexes have encouraged us to address the subject.

Thus, another e-mail.

The Nature of Modesty

Far too frequently, we talk about and make emphatic statements about “modesty” without defining what we’re talking about. So, first of all, a definition. Although he has since taken it in other directions, this definition was originally formulated by Dr. Hake.

Gentleness as a masculine virtue may be defined as “Perfect Strength under Perfect Control.” In a complementary way, Modesty as a feminine virtue is defined here as “Perfect Beauty under Perfect Control.”

Perfect Beauty

Some definitions of modesty seem to be opposed to beauty categorically, suggesting that prettiness and modesty are somehow at opposite poles, and you must choose one, or else try to balance precariously somewhere between the two. This is a wicked and damnable lie. In truth, a right understanding of modesty is rooted first and foremost in the fact that you as women are—and are meant to be—perfectly beautiful. Any really useful discussion of modesty should begin with a radical affirmation of that fact. God created you to be beautiful; and He has done a pretty stupendous job. In spite of early mornings and caffeine and all the things which the self-centering mirror and lying culture claim make you unlovely, you are deeply and truly beautiful in God’s sight—and in ours, too, when we see clearly.

Further, it is good and right that this deep, internal beauty should be adorned, and that it should be enjoyed by others (more on that later). God Himself is beautiful, and He reveals His beauty in His Creation. It was revealed in a particularly wondrous way in the last act of Creation, the first woman, Eve—and all other women share in her gift, the effects of the Fall notwithstanding. We should rejoice in this fact, and give Him thanks. But there are also many false ideas about the nature of beauty, and many women (including Christian women) believe them.

An elderly woman from [Redacted 1]’s church back home died two weeks ago. She had experienced the usual results of aging: graying hair, crooked teeth, wrinkled skin, thinness, bentness, and often-debilitating illness. And she was very beautiful.

It is eminently clichéd to say that beauty comes from within. It also happens to be true. This lady deeply loved God. She was a faithful believer, a servant of God, a saint if ever there was one. She prayed earnestly for others. She gave of herself wherever she could. She loved people from her heart; and it shone from her face.

“Your adornment must not be merely external—braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses; but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God. For in this way in former times the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves.” (I Peter 3:3-5)

The apostle moves on to offer the example of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Scripture informs us that she was an extremely physically attractive woman (at ninety, no less). That is, Biblically, a good and commendable thing. (If you think God dislikes physical beauty and don’t want to be disabused of your belief, stay away from Song of Solomon). But it was not her physical beauty that was the central thing; it was her inner holiness. Everything about her, body and soul, was radiant with the presence of the Holy Spirit.

We have both known women who, while by no means unpleasant-looking, just didn’t strike us as particularly attractive. However, as we came to know them, and noticed how they lived their lives in service to God, we realized the depth of their devotion to Him… and found ourselves increasingly appreciating their physical beauty as well. Honest truth, ladies—a woman who really loves and serves God with all her heart and soul and mind and strength becomes more physically attractive as well; not because her physical beauty changes, but because the deeper beauty becomes apparent through it and infuses it with life. On the other hand, we have known women who were extremely beautiful in a merely physical sense—some of them professing Christians—and yet because we did not perceive the same depth of Christian character, the physical beauty, real though it was, simply failed to inspire any deeper attraction.

True beauty begins on the inside, with the “gentle and quiet spirit,” with devotion to God and a constant focus on love and service. But that is only the proper beginning. Beauty also has a proper end.

The Purpose of Beauty

Beauty attracts. This is fundamental to what beauty is, and an essential part of its purpose, its end, its telos. Further, it is good that beauty should attract. God made it that way.

But if attraction is central to the purpose of beauty, what is the proper end or purpose of attraction? We would suggest that the proper end of attraction is enjoyment.

If we see a beautiful sunset, or mountain, or small child, we want to look at and admire it. If we smell a beautiful flower, we want to breathe deeply of its fragrance. If we taste—allowing the phrase—a “beautiful taste,” we want to partake of that delicious food or drink. This is the natural human response to beauty. We want to participate, to delight in, to enjoy.

So it is with the beauty of women. And here is where matters become difficult. There are some aspects of beauty which not everyone may rightly enjoy. A woman has a lovely face—well and good. We all may look upon and appreciate the beauty of her face. She has lovely long hair. “It is a glory to her,” and to everyone who beholds it. She has graceful and pleasing curves, she is a fragrant garden of delights—now we run up against complications. “The king is captivated by your tresses” is one thing (Song of Solomon 7:5). The following few verses are another. (No, we’re not quoting them. Read ’em yourself.) And yet the two are related, and we cannot deny the reality of that relationship. A man who spends significant amounts of time admiring a woman’s captivating tresses, her eyes like doves, her neck like ivory, etc., is likely to make the very natural progression to Solomon’s next subject.

One man, and one only, is allowed to follow this progression to its consummation. This does not mean, however, that others cannot enjoy the woman in some sense. Many people benefit from a woman’s spiritual gift of hospitality, or kindness, or encouragement. A few can rightly enjoy the emotional comforts of her presence and care: an elderly father, a younger brother, a close friend. But the full physical enjoyment of a woman’s beauty is limited strictly to her husband and no other.

There are different kinds of love—admiration, desire to serve, desire to possess, etc.—and they are appropriate for different things or persons, at different times and in different ways. The moon may be admired; no one but a lunatic would try to possess it. A cat may be admired, served, and possessed. All women may be legitimately admired (if they deserve it) and served (whether they deserve it or not), but there is only one of which any man may truly say “this is mine.”

The difficulty arises because all the kinds of love, and all the kinds of beauty and attraction, are intimately intermingled. Men under the influence of attraction are rather poor at keeping simple admiration separate from a desire to possess (and we’re always rather poor at cultivating a desire to serve). And, it must be said, women are frequently just as bad at keeping all these things separate, and at encouraging right kinds of attraction while discouraging wrong kinds. Again, the problem is not the desires, but the sinful human propensity to try to satisfy them at the wrong time, or in the wrong way, or to an excessive degree. Women desire—rightly!—to attract; they have been given beauty for this very purpose. But they often do it for reasons or via methods that are frankly wicked.

Desire Gone Wrong

We rejoice to say that the women at Patrick Henry are, overall, some of the most conscientiously-dressed ladies it has ever been our joy to meet. And we have seen a number of our sisters here grow in this area over the past few years. However, we must in honesty say that there are many who could do better. We do not believe that there is a general wicked desire to “cause a brother to stumble”—quite the contrary. You all show great love and care for us. But many Christian women, probably a large majority, simply do not understand the depth and extent of the foul perversity of the male mind. (If you’re a man and some part of this doesn’t apply to you personally, just assume we’re only talking about ourselves at that point.)

We have a duty as brothers in Christ to guard the purity and holiness of our sisters, which means restraining how bluntly we speak. On the other hand, part of that duty is to help you understand the problem. To avoid causing offense for our own sake, all the most explicit bits are taken directly from Scripture. Anyone who finds God’s authoritative written revelation inappropriate is advised to skip this section.

You’ve heard this before, but we’ll say it again: men are visually wired. A man notices a pretty female walking by. His eyes lock on, his brain clicks in (we mostly tend toward one-track minds). He is attracted to her. Attraction, when left undirected, leads naturally to desire.

If she’s his wife, all is well. In itself this visual attraction is a good thing. A man is supposed to look upon his wife and be drawn to her beauty. Please, please, ladies, don’t confuse the abuse of the thing with its good and proper and holy purpose in God’s plan. Husbands are not merely allowed but commanded to take pleasure and fulfillment in their wives’ physical beauty: “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love” (Proverbs 5:18-19). This intoxication is a blessed fact and should be a cause for great rejoicing. As C. S. Lewis says in a very similar context, “God likes it. He made it.”

But there is a great deal of abuse. If the attractive female wandering by is not the man’s wife (and mathematically, the odds tend that way), then there’s a nifty Biblical phrase for desiring her: “lusting after her in your heart.” We’ll leave out the details; you don’t want to know. Suffice it to say that he wants to be intoxicated and filled with delight too. As Solomon says in that passage we declined to quote from earlier: “I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.” It’s all right for Solomon, he’s talking about his wife, but many of us are not married. Of course most men—here at least—are decent enough not to actually do anything much; but that’s beside the point. The man has spoken these words to himself. He has made the act of volition.

He has once again committed adultery in his heart, and the woman is once again a victim of visual rape.

No, not always. There are plenty of occasions where a man is not tempted to lust. There are some men who are tempted rather less than others. But then, by the same logic, there are some who are tempted more than others.

And yes, it’s more complicated than that. The man’s physical desires are almost certainly confused with all sorts of other desires, emotional and intellectual and spiritual. Some of them are commendable desires, like the longing to care for a woman, to make her feel loved and appreciated, to encourage her—or simply to have a stimulating intellectual conversation. It can be very difficult to sort all this out and be certain what results from righteousness and what from sin. But sometimes a lot of it is sin.

And no, the woman is not guilty of the man’s sin, if he does give in. If a man sins, it is his fault. He is utterly without excuse. Adam tried his line “the woman made me do it!” and God was not convinced. This is important. I am not trying to blame anyone else for what I do; I nailed Christ to the cross, and have no room to point fingers. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

And yes, there is grace. There is much grace. God gives us the strength to manfully oppose temptation, and commands us to do it. We must die to the flesh, and live according to the Spirit. We have died, and our life is hidden with Christ in God.

But temptation still happens. There is a war going on here. Some of your brothers are achieving mighty victories, by the power of God. Some—more than you would think—are losing blood and beginning to grow faint, and are in grave danger of being overcome. And many of us are warring and winning more often than not, but expending so much spiritual energy in doing so that we are left tired and worn down, weakened for the next confrontation. God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness; but sometimes we forget.

Now, again (before some men get offended at me), there are Godly men who face less temptation, and there are those who face a great deal but have obtained great victory. However, there are many—and among them some of the most dedicated and true-hearted believers we know—who feel many days as if they’re struggling for their very soul (as, in a sense, they are). For the sake of these men, please at least consider the things we’ve said.

We are not trying to blame you for our sin. Rather, as a warrior with many wounds, on behalf of ourselves and these our brothers, we are asking for allies. This is a cry for reinforcements, lest the battle go to the enemy. We are sorely pressed on every side. This is no exaggeration: we need all the help we can get. We don’t need to be struck down from behind by friendly fire.

Remember, Adam’s sin was Adam’s, but that doesn’t mean God held Eve guiltless in the affair.

Eve tempted her husband, and God cursed her for it.

If we give in to temptation, we are judged; but if you deliberately tempt us, you are judged, whether we give in or not—even whether we notice or not. The sin is not in successfully tempting a brother, but in trying to do so. The immodest swimsuit is still immodest and sinful even if there happen to be no guys on the beach that day—if you decided to wear it because you hoped there would be. Deliberately choosing the barely-too-tight top is still immodest and sinful, even if the RA catches you before you make it out the door.

Perfect Control

We have been told how difficult it is to find apparel that is both beautiful and modest. We believe it. Many of you do an amazing job—and for those who do understand what’s at stake, or who without understanding have simply been trained and have very right instincts on these matters, blessings upon you to the fourth and fifth generation. You are all wonderful, and we pray God will bring you every good thing, all your lives long.

For those who are sincere, but perhaps were not trained quite so well or do not altogether understand quite yet—we pray that He will continue to work in you, so that you can better carry out the good desires of your heart. We deeply appreciate you too. Do not become complacent; continue to grow in purity and holiness. There are women who not only avoid causing temptation, but actually provide positive assistance, making it easy for men not to lust after them—and yet modestly display the beauty God has given them. More than noncombatants, they are valuable allies. Seek out such ladies and ask them for advice in all humility.

But let us also offer a warning. Although women almost never completely realize the extent to which (or the ways in which) they can affect men, most women are aware on some level that certain things attract men. And women like to feel attractive. This is natural; we have already said that you are created to be beautiful. But we have also said that the purpose of attraction is enjoyment.

Please be careful of this desire to attract. It is a good thing; but it is easy to misuse. Many females drive us to ask some pretty unpleasant questions.

If a woman does not want to be the subject of wicked imagining, why does she provide so much scope for the imagination? If she does not intend to be suggestive, why does she tantalize with hints, peeks, glimpses, suggestions?

The answer is that wrongful desire also has a feminine side. The third-century apologist Tertullian links the “lust of the eyes” to corresponding sins in both men and women: “Such [male] eyes will wish that a virgin be seen as [those of] the virgin who shall wish to be seen. The same kinds of eyes reciprocally crave after each other. Seeing and being seen belong to the self-same lust.” But only the husband is meant to see fully, and to enjoy completely. “Should your springs overflow in the streets, streams of water in the public squares?”

To attract where there can be no completion, to encourage desire which must not be fulfilled in enjoyment—let us put it bluntly. This is sin. C. S. Lewis quotes an unnamed source in That Hideous Strength (he may have made it up): “To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve.” The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti also speaks of Lilith, fascinated entirely with her own beauty, “subtly of herself contemplative,” who snares a man and leaves “round his heart one strangling golden hair.”

All flowers attract insects with the promise of nectar. All are beautiful, adorned with bright colors or beautiful perfumes or landing patterns painted in the ultraviolet. Most of these flowers give up their nectar and satisfy the desire of the bee or the moth, who in return helps to pollinate the flower. But there are also certain flowers in the world which promise but do not fulfill: they are called “carnivorous.” They want to be desired, but not enjoyed—what they really want is to greedily fulfill their own desires, at the cost of a continuous stream of lives.

This lust for desire, which withholds physical fulfillment, is exactly the inverse of the rampant male sin of promising emotional intimacy (which girls want with the same intensity that men want physical intimacy), without the fulfillment of real commitment.

The lustful woman craves attention, and by her attitudes and actions she promises physical rewards that she cannot legitimately deliver.

The lustful man implies a promise of emotional rewards that he is either unable or unwilling to deliver, in return for the physical rewards that the lustful woman has rashly promised. It’s a ghastly mockery of a waltz; it’s two serpents circling forever, endlessly trying to devour the other’s tail; it is Tantalus squared.

This grim fact is why immodesty can, of course, also be practiced by males, though it usually happens in forms that are less visual and more verbal/emotional. (Still, guys, give up the public displays of the muscle shirts—they really aren’t a blessing to your sisters). But if this is how and why immodesty occurs, it follows that modesty is not primarily or fundamentally a physical thing. As with beauty itself, the soul of modesty does not lie in the outward appearance, but in the heart. It is the intent, the desire, that drives everything. It impacts what is worn, of course; but far more significantly, it impacts the reason it is worn, and the way it is worn (and when, and in what company). This is why we have deliberately avoided making comments on particulars of dress—that misses the point. Some articles of clothing are just irredeemably scandalous (in the Greek sense of “causing to stumble”), but many others may be immodest on one woman and perfectly modest on another, and not simply because of physical differences. (Just be careful of the “Well, it could be immodest, but I’m not wearing it like that” argument.) Any woman can be immodest “by accident,” but she is far less likely to do so if she has sisterly love in mind as a deliberate daily goal. “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Modesty flows from a heart devoted to the service of God.

“Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to Godliness.” (I Timothy 2:9-10)

Beauty Perfected

This brings us full circle. This is why Godliness is so much more important than the physical radiance that will eventually grow from it. It is this beauty, this inner beauty of a “gentle and quiet spirit,” which not only does but should attract everyone, because it may be rightly delighted in by everyone.

We have put a great deal of emphasis on the extremity of the situation, the severity of the battle, the desperate need for help, and thus the importance of modesty. It really is this important. But this is stating the issue in a negative way. Immodesty is a sin of omission. The contrary is inexpressibly more important, for it is not mere restraint, but a positive and difficult action, a firm belief, a way of life:

You are created to be gloriously, radiantly, superabundantly beautiful.

This beauty is a beauty of the soul, of the heart, and to some degree of the mind. It does not allow slovenly appearance, but neither does it allow an overemphasis on or too-great concern for the physical. It is revealed in the face, but it is not a beauty of the face. It is, rather, a filling of the inside of the cup with clean and living water—and then the outside is clean as well. It is the scrap of carbon thread being turned into a flaming incandescence by the electrifying power of the Spirit of Holy God. It is the flowering of the crocus bulb that has lain unnoticed in the ground all winter, persevering through cold and comfortless nights, drinking deep of the graceful rain, and waiting for the Father—in His time—to clothe it more beautifully than Solomon in splendor. It is the transformation of the heart, the “renewing of your mind,” which God is bringing about to make you like His Son—to infuse you and overwhelm you with His own glory and beauty, so that He may be the more infinitely glorified in you, and in all who behold your countenance and see His face reflected there.

Ladies, you are beautiful. God has declared you so, and “not one word has failed of all His good promise.” In the same way in which He made you holy, and is continuing to sanctify you, so also He has beautified you, and is continuing to make you beautiful; and “He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Believe it. Live it. Grow in beauty. Bring glory to God.

Under the Mercy,

[Redacted 1] and [Redacted 2]

PHC Students Display Unrivaled Maturity and Spiritual Prowess: Dante Alighieri’s Story

July 29, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team1 Comment

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Dante Alighieri” is a pseudonym chosen specifically by the author.

Patrick Henry College is an interesting pressure cooker that gets quite a bit of flack for being dogmatic or overly conservative. From my experience, here are the pros and the cons.

This disclaimer must go before my analysis however, as I am speaking from personal experience. Small schools are not for everyone. No one school is for everyone – so to say that PHC is for everyone or no one is a complete fallacy. Thus trying to discredit PHC entirely is unproductive and as much a waste of time as trying to prove it is the best school in the world. Subjectively however – I think that PHC is the best school in the world for me.

So let’s get the cons out of the way. Patrick Henry is first and foremost a rumor mill. Too few students can keep their mouth shut. Major kudos to those mature students I know, who can exercise self control in this area. That said, things that are private get around pretty dang fast. This is a problem for a few reasons:

1) Just like at any college, we live together as a student body, so interactions that sometimes take a week in the real world, take a day at PHC.

2) The difference is that PHC students are taught to communicate well, and deal with conflict, so it speeds up the normal process. However this one con does make life at PHC problematic and sometimes frustrating.

There are several other things that PHC struggles with, but all of those are comparatively very very small when other colleges/universities are brought to light. The above problem is what I saw as a unique PHC problem. I am sure others will add to the cons of PHC. I’ll address issues and advantages of the the school administration in the pros.

Ok – now onto the good stuff – which I believe is much more interesting.

Bar none, PHC students (I would contend) are best equipped to succeed and live godly lives when compared to contemporary and even secular colleges. The student body displays unrivaled maturity in dealing with conflict, both small and large. Even issues such as the piano, that came up earlier this year, was taken care of with marginal Facebook fighting. I had the opportunity to visit and see multiple colleges ( Liberty, Hillsdale, Masters, Point Loma, Azusa, Yale, and a few others.)

At all the colleges, Masters aside, I saw a student body that was inferior to PHC based on maturity and spiritual prowess.

Again, this is just my viewpoint, but I was able to interact with the student body with all of the aforementioned colleges. I may not have been able to tell how the student body was truly by only one visit to the colleges I mentioned, but I received a superior vibe from PHC with only one visit.

The next pro is the extremely challenging education. I would argue (believe it or not) that the rigor of academics at PHC is equivalent to the graduate school of any Ivy League colleges. Anyone who has taken a Spinney class can testify to this. If you have not taken a Spinney class, then talk to someone who has. And it is not limited to Dr. Spinney either. There are a few of my friends who attend Ivy League schools (and who were homeschoolers with 3.8 or 4.0 gpa’s), and their comment is that the undergrad [of their school] is about as hard as a state school or university.

This is all the evidence I have to prove this point, and again this is just my own deduction.

I could go on for much longer but I think I am more effective when I am succinct. Thank you for allowing the opportunity for people to give both sides. That is much appreciated!

Apostate: Lillia Munsell’s Story

July 28, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team6 Comments

My first year at college involved no drinking, a lot of prayer circles, and five hour exams. This is not an experience I recommend to others.

I paid dearly for the privilege of a year at Patrick Henry College, the conservative Christian school frequently called God’s Harvard. PHC was founded in 2000 by Moral Majority darling Michael Farris, a constitutional lawyer who also began the Home School Legal Defense Association. Homeschooling is both an educational model and a lifestyle, growing from 800,000 in 1999 to over 2 million in 2012. As a homeschooler born at the end of an era of legal oppression, I owed a debt to Mr. Farris. I was taught I must continue his work by challenging the liberals and conquering the culture for Christ. At homeschooling conventions, young men in suits extolled the virtues of PHC, calling it a haven for homeschoolers, a place that would understand my lack of a GED and provide me with the Ivy League experience without the East Coast liberalism. My mother was immediately sold and began pushing for PHC in 2002, while the first class were still sophomores. Ten years later, I was in a Subaru Outback crammed between a printer and a mattress protector, making the drive to my shiny new fundamentalist future.

There are 1,318 miles between my childhood home and my gender-segregated PHC dorm, and I cried for at least 600 of them, but for all the wrong reasons. I should have been questioning the wisdom of leaving behind family, friends, and a newly acquired boyfriend for a school that isn’t accredited. I wish I could blame my mother for this decision—parents are the best scapegoats. But it was me who decided to embrace my childhood religion and sign a statement of faith that promised I would never have premarital sex and always deny the lie of evolution.

Depending how you count, there are five to eight passages in the Bible that refer to homosexuality, and Patrick Henry College made sure I knew each one. Midway through my first semester, a fellow freshman insisted that soy milk turned people gay. Trying not to choke on the ridiculously expensive dining hall food, I asked what he meant. “It’s the estrogen,” he explained to me with all the confidence that came from studying high school biology at the kitchen table. “It turns people gay. How else do you explain California?” I don’t know how to explain California, but this did explain the rumors about my lactose-intolerant Cuban friend who poured soy milk over his cereal and said deviant phrases like “what the hell.”

Another student refused to say the word “naked” because it was too profane. She carried around a stuffed bunny and sang opera at all hours and locations.

To many, PHC is an idyllic sanctuary of innocence nestled in the green Virginia farmland. Set back from Highway 7 on the edge of Purcellville, a small town with southern charm, terrible restaurants, and undertones of racism, the college was close enough to DC to funnel interns to work under the Bush Administration and far enough away to shield us from the liberal rallies. When Loudon County suggested extending the metro line out towards Purcellville, Mr. Farris objected because too much secularism could travel over the metal rails. The 24 hour Harris Teeter grocery store across the street was the most fun PHC students had, especially before they banned kick scooters in the isles.

To drum up numbers, free Chick-fil-a was offered to students who attended an anti-abortion rally. These were the pictures that appeared on my classmates’ instagrams with hashtag phrases like “God is good,” “protect the innocent,” and “Aslan is on the move.”

Student clubs littered stairwell bulletin boards with posters advertising their platforms. I was asked to join the Wilberforce society, a group devoted to moral reform, especially a local government ban on porn. To the best of my knowledge, they pursued this goal by picketing the one adult store near town and drafting legislation proposing a parental control that could be placed on all Loudon county internet.

“How can you tell these stories with a straight face?” My incredulous (and public schooled) friend asked me one night after I mentioned how a senior professor used the term “honey-trap” when referring to a vagina. “Because they’re true,” I shrugged. Later that year, the same professor was the keynote speaker on Faith and Reason Day, the most important event of the semester. Three hundred and fifty students sat in rapt attention as this doctor argued that divorce is a state conspiracy to destroy the family by emasculating the father. He claimed campus rape was over-reported and not a real problem, but rather a feminist ploy of crying “wolf!” and destroying godly young men. Although I heard from faculty members and students who insisted he didn’t speak for the whole school, the speech was edited and approved by the administration.

Of course, this is the same administration that interrogated journalism students, accused them of slander, and threatened to expel them after they circulated an independent article that criticised a professor.*** This is the same administration that ignored accusations that one of their blonde PHC poster boys had blackmailed and sexually abused two female students.

He was later elected class president and his sins conveniently swept under the rug.

One of the most disturbing things about an insulated community is the echo-chamber effect. I’ve met a lot of Christians who don’t believe in Reaganomics or distinct gender roles, but at PHC, they were considered the suspicious fringe believers. In US History, I heard arguments defending the Trail of Tears. In Economics, students leaped to condemn workplace safety laws. To be fair, many of the professors walked the narrow line of challenging these views without telling the students they were wrong. One female professor confided in me that plagiarism was an epidemic in her class, but she feared that if she reported it, the administration would fire her for being a woman and stirring up trouble.

Detachment became a coping mechanism. I realized I was in a nest of crazy, and there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to skip the mandatory daily chapel hour, but my RA caught on and confronted me, so I began sitting in the back and sneaking homework between the pages of my Bible. The cafeteria was a hive of debates about free will vs. predestination and whether slavery had anything to do with the civil war, so I never sat down to eat. The library, built in a basement and stocked with a few rows of carefully selected books, was functionally useless. With only two academic buildings and five dorms—two of which I couldn’t go in, because they were men-only—PHC lacked hiding spots. I holed up in my room and found solstice in the internet, especially when I purchased a virtual private network that shielded me from the nanny software that sent every url I visited to my RD and blocked me from buying a new bra because the product pictures were deemed “pornographic.”

I was raised to believe the Bible is completely inerrant. Although I had struggled with my faith growing up, I always came back to this idea because I thought it gave me a solid, consistent worldview. Worldview is a term fundamentalists love, thanks largely to the work of 20^th century theologian Francis Schaeffer, who famously wrote, “Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true.” I know this quote by heart because I used it over and over in academic papers. PHC made me reconsider my worldview by showing me its conclusion. I entered the school hopeful and convinced I was not a racist and maybe even a feminist, and I fled disillusioned with my own prejudice but also with a better knowledge of ancient Greek.

After two semesters, I left my friends and religion behind. I wrote a letter trying to explain the former, but I resisted publicly admitting the latter. To admit a lack of faith is to lose the soapbox. I will become secular, a honey-trap, a feminazi, a wolf in sheep’s clothing—a homeschool apostate, to use the term recently coined to describe the kids who have grown up and aged out of dogma. When I moved to Austin, one of the few liberal areas of Texas, one student proclaimed “that explains it,” and refused to elaborate.

I wish I could explain things that easily, but a year spent living in black and white opened my eyes to the shades in between.

*** UPDATE 2 pm Pacific, 07/28/14: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that (1) journalism students were threatened with expulsion for writing a critical piece about a professor and (2) the professor whom the critical piece was about was the same aforementioned professor who gave the Faith and Reason Day presentation.

I Hope That No One Will Send You Lies About Our School: Adriel’s Story

July 28, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team7 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Adriel” is a pseudonym.

I’m a current student at PHC (about to start my junior year) and I happened across your call for stories. I’m very interested in sharing my experience thus far! I’ve shared your call to a few other PHC students as well. Hopefully many of them will e-mail you. (I also hope that many of them will think to e-mail you from their student e-mail accounts. That serves to prove that this e-mail is actually coming from a PHC student.)

While I know that some people have had a negative experience at PHC, mine has been mostly positive, although there has been a bit of both. I’ll provide you with a sampling of events from my time at PHC, in the hopes that some of them will prove informative.

My school experience.

Like many PHC students, I was homeschooled through high school. Like quite a few PHC students, I also spent a year at a local community college before attending PHC.

Homeschooling, while an overall positive experience, left me very socially awkward (part of that was simply my introverted personality) and sheltered. Community college, while also an overall positive experience, left me independent in a way that was more like isolation.

When I arrived at PHC, I was distant from others, depressed for my future, and angry at God. I was nervous and unable to make decisions on my own. If PHC were the hyper-conservative ‘Homeschoolers University’ that it is made out to be, all of those problems would be exacerbated, with more besides. Rather, PHC has repaired me. I am strong, confident, capable. While still occasionally angry at God, I am learning to trust. I have friends, and I love people. I have hope.

PHC is not a perfect school. No school is a perfect school. But PHC has been good for me.

I rather like my school and my fellow students.

If I had only read about PHC online, and not actually been there, I might have a negative opinion of the school. But, having been here, I see a beauty and life in the school that I hadn’t seen anywhere else.

I do not agree with everything that has been said by my fellow students. I do not agree with everything that has been said from the podium. I do not agree with everything that has been said from the podium and agreed with by the student body. (Those two sentences are very distinct, PHC is good about bringing in challenging speakers.) But I love my fellow students, respect the professors, and have grown significantly as a person in my time at PHC.

We grow at PHC.

A lot of PHC students, in my experience, enter PHC with a lot of growing up left to do. We’re sheltered in our understanding of the world, awkward in our interactions with others, and untempered in our views. Occasionally students will say or do things that reflect badly on the school. But that’s because we’re all growing, and PHC is a major part of that growth. PHC was a very healthy place for me at a time when I needed it, and it continues to be so. I’ve mellowed out, normalized. I’ve become more confident. I’ve decided that I disagree with my parents and PHC on some issues. I don’t feel ‘immodest’ in form-fitting clothing. Thanks to classes, readings, RAs, fellow students, work, professors, and many other aspects of life here, I’ve grown for the better.

I’ll give you an example of what this looks like on a larger scale: When the freshman classes come in, for the first several days, they seem to, of their own volition, sit at gender-segregated tables. Boys at this table, girls at that table. Sophomores and upperclassmen disapprove of this behavior. My class apparently desegregated quite quickly, and the upperclassmen were proud of us, as we are proud of the now-sophomore class for desegregating as quickly as they did.

I remember reading about the allegations of the mishandling of the sexual assault cases.

It sounded like it was about a completely different school. There was no moment in my readings about the allegations that made me say, “Yep, that’s my school.” For such an idiosyncratic place, I found it strange that that didn’t happen.

For example, the first thing that stood out to me was the depiction of Dean Corbitt.*** I could not reconcile the woman in those articles with the woman who spoke kindly and understandingly to me and ~4 other girls on why it is okay not to be perfect. I see her on campus frequently, and she is a real person, not the monster that the articles made her seem to be.

Regarding those cases, I trust my personal experience more than the writings of someone on the internet. I strongly doubt that the case was handled in the way that it was portrayed.

A note on PHC before my time there.

PHC has changed. The structure of rules for the students to follow has changed. In the past, there were some crazy rules, I’ve heard. But the current system is one I highly respect. We put virtue before legalism.

One specific example that I know about: There used to be a rule that students could not watch R-rated movies on campus. So, students would sit across the street from campus and watch whatever movies they chose. Now, we are simply told to exercise good judgement. If we believe that an R-rated movie would be edifying, we are free to watch it. If we think that a more mildly-rated movie would not be a good movie to watch, we can exercise our own judgement. It’s up to us to decide what we will watch, and we are encouraged to learn the skill of deciding for ourselves what is and is not beneficial.

Other rules have changed along similar lines. So if you hear, “PHC has a rule that the students can’t…” be aware that that statement may no longer be true.

We respond healthily to criticism.

There was a student in my class who left after freshman year. She was unique and interesting, and I respected her. She helped me pull a prank on another student and it was hilarious. After leaving, she posted her reasons on Facebook, and many of us read them. While some of what she’d seen at PHC took me by surprise, much of it rang true and pointed out flaws in the student body and the way we interacted.

At the beginning of sophomore year, my class held a student-organized prayer time in front of Founder’s Hall. We prayed for our class and for the incoming freshmen. One of the students delivered a brief prepared ‘sermon’. He quoted directly from that FB post, with his point being that we need to be more careful not to be the sort of people that she felt that we were.

A student criticized our school, and we read the criticism aloud with a determination not to be what she saw in us. I was proud of my fellow students for doing that.

In conclusion…

I hope that this e-mail has been helpful, and that the e-mails that you receive will help you to better understand PHC.

I hope that the article which you write will be accurate to the stories that you have been told, as well as accurate to the reality of PHC.

I hope that you will tell others things that they may not expect to hear; that there is a healthy place full of homeschoolers who are growing and learning together.

I hope that you will tell us PHCers things that we didn’t expect to hear, that the anonymous format will allow my fellow students to deliver timely and accurate criticism, like that of the student I mentioned earlier.

I hope that no one will send you lies about our school. (Of course, knowing the internet, that is certain to happen.)

*** UPDATE 2 pm Pacific, 07/28/14: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the dean’s name as Thornhill.