Portraits from the Evangelical Ivy League

A selection of images and text from the recent book by Jona Frank.

Jona Frank takes an in-depth look at Patrick Henry College, home to the country's brightest home schooled evangelical Christians. With a sharp, observational style of portraiture and accompanying interviews, Frank humanizes the school and the students.

Patrick Henry was founded in 2000 by Michael Farris, one of the leaders in the home schooling movement. As a constitutional lawyer, Farris had fought for the rights of Christian conservative families to teach their children at home. Public schools, with the sex-ed classes and gay student clubs were, "Godless monstrositites," he once wrote (an incendiary quote that has haunted him in his political career, which he instructs his press-savvy students never to repeat).

Now this first generation of home schooled children were coming of age and they needed someplace to go. Someplace ambitious, but without the usual liberal professors and co-ed dorms. So Farris founded what he calls the "Christian equivalent of the Ivy League," and the kids sometimes call "Harvard for the home schoolers." —Hanna Rosin