Last week guest speaker Jona Frank presented her work from Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League. It was a fascinating examination of Patrick Henry College that Amazon.com describes as "...the higher education institution of choice among politically far-right young people aspiring to enter the conservative power elite. The explicit mission of PHC is to cultivate leaders to take American politics and culture back to God through careers in politics and entertainment. Acclaimed photographer Jona Frank presents an honest intimate and eye-opening portrait of the school and its students. Frank's photos eschew cultural politicking of the left or the right allowing readers to draw their own conclusions about a school and a youth movement with the potential to produce many of tomorrow's leaders."
NPR's review states, " The ferociously conservative Christian right may be an unfashionable bunch this political season, but when it comes to the notion of a need for change, there are no truer or more fervently motivated believers. In fact, the recently founded Patrick Henry College is churning out these family-values crusaders in force.
Inspired by journalist Hanna Rosin's 2005 New Yorker article about Purcellville, Va.'s so-called "Harvard For Homeschoolers" (subsequently expanded in the book God's Harvard), photographer Jona Frank put aside her own lefty leanings and set out — with Right: Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League — to find the shared heartbeat of Patrick Henry College's student body, a group of kids for whom the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog is the work of sinners and a game of sloppy beer pong immoral.
It would have been easy for Frank to frame her young subjects — many of them acne-riddled, most of them attired in bad suits or ankle-length skirts, all of them painfully clean-cut — as proselytizing geeks and rabid, would-be game-changers. Indeed, the school's founder, Michael Farris, has aspirations for his Christian charges that go way beyond living right and influence-peddling. He greets each class of freshmen with a dream: One day, he tells them, "an Academy Award winner will walk down the aisle. He'll get a cell phone call congratulating him. It happens to be the president of the United States — his old roommate from Patrick Henry College."
Photographer Frank's intentionally neutral approach carries much less of a chill and allows unflinching expressions, erect postures, small sartorial details and the students' own words to tell a story. Jeremiah, a recent PHC grad who lists Harriet Tubman and disgraced evangelical pastor Ted Haggard among his heroes, is photographed like a young Sam Waterston on the set of Law & Order, his preternatural sense of empowerment eerily convincing. James, 19, in a midnight black blazer, looks burningly at the horizon and recalls with fondness "being treated to pizza and ice-cream sundaes at John Ashcroft's house" on one of his class's quite unique school trips. In a section titled "Interns," Rebekah, 23, kicks back on the set of Fox News, while Craig, 24, looks positively snappish in the office of Republican Congressman Donald Manzullo, both students the beneficiaries of PHC's aggressive placement programs.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
