Hanna Rosin, a journalist who has written for the Washington Post and the New Yorker sets out to learn more about Patrick Henry College, an evangelical school whose stated goal is to take back America for Christianity by grooming its students to become congressmen, senators, and even presidents as well as movie producers.

Rosin does all she can to remain objective, pretty tough to do for a Jewish woman whom the evangelicals consider one of the damned. She rotates between some of the students and some of the evangelical institutions such as home schooling.

We learn that home schooling was not just a reaction to sex education and the teaching of evolution in the public schools but also an attempt to give focus to young Christian housewives who were in danger of being consumed by the feminism movement.

Another section of Rosin's book deals with evangelical scientists who embrace the idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Kurt Wise, a Ph.D. in paleontology, studied with Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard. Biology teacher Jennifer Gruenke teaches her young charges that "light from distant galaxies is just a divine illusion" and that "men used to live to be nine hundred years old."

Founder Michael Farris, famous for his role in the legalization of home schooling, is the president of Patrick Henry. His greatest challenge was to create a balance between intellectual rigor and compatibility with the Bible. Eventually some of his professors rebelled. Farris's idea was basically "Know thy enemy," but some of the teachers were more interested in molding minds. Eventually Farris lost one third of the faculty.

The book really picks up speed when Rosin concentrates on some of the students. Derek Archer is involved in a political campaign. When his candidate loses and the conservatives are smoked during the 2006 election, he loses faith and decides to concentrate on local elections. Farahn Morgan is the most interesting girl. She's one of the rebels on campus who takes the side of the "radical" professors. Rosin is careful not to mislead the reader, however. She makes it abundantly clear that even the most rebellious of the Patrick Henry students is a fundamentalist fanatic by any liberal standard.