The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, National Public Radio, BBC News, and the inimitable Martin Marty (Sightings, 5/22/06) all covered the story of Virginia’s tiny – 300-something students and 16 faculty if you count the five who just quit – Patrick Henry College.

That’s a lot of attention on a small subject. Whether that attention is warranted or not, it’s real enough to put Patrick Henry College on our screen.

The school is an unabashedly conservative Christian College with a political and social agenda that leans to the right the way rivers move to the sea – which is to say inexorably.

Patrick Henry College was founded in 2000 by attorney and Baptist minister Michael P. Farris with a view towards preparing Evangelical students for a life in the public arena. Mr. Farris told Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly:

In fact, kind of my pipe dream is that 15 years from now one of our students walks down the aisle at the Academy Awards to receive the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year, and gets a call from his college roommate who is President of the United States. And that’s the vision, and we don’t want to take second place. We want to raise winners, and people who know how to do what’s right and really lead the country.

Indeed, the unaccredited school has an extraordinary record of placing student interns in the offices of conservative think tanks, Republican legislators and the White House (in the last instance at a rate roughly equivalent to the larger, older, better-know Georgetown University). The college places a premium on proximity. “A whole lot of elected members of Congress started off as Hill staffers,” Mr. Farris told The New Yorker. “If you want to train a new generation of leaders, you have to get in on the ground floor.”

The college is not without its critics, including some who think the curriculum is structured in a far too narrow way; more likely to produce obedient political operatives than original thinkers. Some fear the school is part of a conservative conspiracy to stack the deck in the D.C. power game. George Mason University professor of public policy Mark Rozell, doesn’t buy it: "What Michael Farris is doing with Patrick Henry College is a perfectly legitimate part of the political landscape," he told BBC News. "If other people feel threatened by it, they’ve got to get out there and mobilise their folks to be welltrained, serving internships, getting to Washington and so forth."

Frankly, this is not the sort of story we usually follow at InsideWork. What gives us pause around our offices and outposts is that Patrick Henry College is in the news using language that sounds very much like the worldview language we use – but signifies something very different.

We don’t make a practice of defining InsideWork by what we’re not but today we’ll make an exception. Despite the use of similar-but-not-identical language, we are not in the Patrick Henry biblical worldview camp.

We’ve read their Statement of Biblical Worldview (you can too) and, though it references lots of Bible verses and passages, we don’t think it does much to advance a biblical worldview (or any kind of worldview) because the statement is a collection of propositions – some of them explicit in the biblical texts; some not – which the College thinks are non-negotiables for people who claim to know something about God.

That’s not a biblical worldview. It’s a list; perhaps a discount creed, prepared without the benefit of peer review. Their propositions about civil government (comprising about 40 percent of the statement) are particularly not derived from a biblical view of the world dominated by tribalism, city-states, kingdoms and despotic empires. Equally important is all that’s in the Bible that’s not in the Patrick Henry Statement of Biblical Worldview – the great sweep of God’s story that can be itemized only at the risk of making it seem more like a recipe than a feast.

My colleague Dan Wooldridge thinks part of what’s wrong here is that everything is reduced and set in concrete rather than expanded and set on fire to illuminate our understanding. "Jesus always did the latter," he says. "Jesus was always blowing open the tight boxes of our thinking. He was always saying ‘Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?’" He’s not suggesting we can’t have convictions – we do – only that our convictions shouldn’t be construed as a worldview.

We’ll have more to say about this in another post. Please stand by…