August 21, 2024 01:40 PM UTC

Gabe Evans Puts His Training at a Far-Right Christian College Into Action

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• by: Jason Salzman

(Worse than you thought — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

By Jason Salzman and Erik Maulbetsch, Colorado Times Recorder

On the campaign trail, congressional candidate Gabe Evans talks a lot about his experience in the military, police force, and Colorado Legislature.

But what you don’t hear him discuss in any detail – and what’s completely absent from his campaign website – is his formative training as a right-wing activist, embracing the core agenda of the Christian right, including a ban on abortion, opposition to gay marriage, the appointment of conservative Supreme Court Justices, and more

Evans, who’s running for Colorado’s most competitive congressional district, is a graduate of Patrick Henry College (PHC), which is known as one of the country’s most right-wing evangelical schools – where students are admitted only if they pledge to abide by a set of right-wing Christian “standards” spelled out in a “Student Handbook.”

Among the “Biblical” and “Community” standards are: “reserve all sexual contact for the sacred bonds of marriage between one man and one woman;” do not even advocate for gay marriage, gay rights of any kind, or extra-marital sex; refrain from “sexually suggestive dancing,” and do not gamble or possess alcohol, except “wine in Communion.”

The PHC Student Handbook not only condemns gay marriage but states that government has no “authority” to condone LGBTQ rights. “Since any sexual conduct outside the parameters of the faithful marriage of a man and a woman is sin, any government which creates legal structures to encourage or condone inappropriate sexual activity or lust, heterosexual or homosexual, or which creates special legal rights and protections based on sexual conduct, is acting immorally and without authority,” states the handbook.”

It mandates that faculty teach students that God created the universe in “six twenty-four-hour days” and that Creationism should be presented “as both biblically true and as the best fit to observed data.”

“Human life begins at conception; it is a gift from the Creator, sustained by His grace and to be taken only upon His authority,” states the Handbook’s Biblical Worldview, attested to by all students. “Abortion and euthanasia are sins and violations of the public good.”

Some governments, states the handbook, have no authority. If a government “commands disobedience to God,” then “it is the “right and duty of godly men and women” to “throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”

Patrick Henry distinguishes itself from other Christian colleges with its focus on training students to serve in government or in leadership positions where they can legislate or push their right-wing agenda on the wider community.

“Unlike other conservative Christian institutions of higher education like Oral Roberts University or Regent University, Patrick Henry College’s primary focus is to serve the government, hence its location just an hour outside of Washington,” wrote Mark Thomas-Patterson in a 2021 Foreign Policy article.

Patrick Henry states that its students “consistently are offered internships in the executive branch of government, U.S. Congress, an array of think tanks and non-profits, Washington Times, National Geographic, USA Today, NBC and Fox affiliates, Defense Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency, National Archives, published authors, private K-12 classical schools, and many others.” Graduates have been U.S. Supreme Court clerks, congressional press secretaries, and White House staff, according to the PHC website.

“The school has its sights on Washington, DC,” wrote Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, in an email to the Colorado Times Recorder. “They have a robust program to place their students into internships in Washington, especially Capitol Hill.”

The college curriculum — which includes an emphasis on internships — is intended both to instill a right-wing ideology in students and empower them to translate it into government policy and across society.

Rev. Dr. Rodney W. Kennedy, who has written several books on the influence of religion on politics, argues that for American evangelicals, taking control of government is the goal, which is why they created Patrick Henry College and others like it in the first place.

“Evangelical students come to a school like Patrick Henry to become good Americans,” writes Kennedy. “Yet their graduates would be hard-pressed to say whether their loyalty is to the American flag or the Cross. Allegiance to the flag is as natural as breathing to students trained in America as the Church. It comes with the territory. The primary vision of these schools is that their graduates can be the invading troops that take America for the evangelical cause.”

Even within the Patrick Henry community, Evans’ “Strategic Intelligence” major is notable for its focus on preparing students for future work in politics. The Strategic Intelligence Program describes itself as “a one-of-a-kind program that equips students to be intelligent and biblically-faithful leaders in the field of Strategic Intelligence in National Security. … Graduates of the program transition easily into U.S. National Security agencies, community service organizations, and leadership roles, ready to shape the culture for Christ and for Liberty.”

Author Hanna Rosin discusses Evans’ major in her book, God’s Harvard, about Patrick Henry College:

“In the hierarchy of campus cool, SI majors considered themselves on top; to guard their secrecy, they’re not allowed to be quoted in the student paper or even to tell fellow students their major, a warning they take very, very seriously,” writes Rosin.

Rosin’s book was published in 2007, PHC was built in 1999, and Evans graduated in 2009. A comparison of PHC’s website today, Rosin’s book, and later analyses of PHC reveal that the instituion’s political stances, including its extreme positions against LGBTQ rights and abortion and central aim of churning out graduates to have the world reflect Patrick Henry College, have remained consistent.

Evans Carries Patrick Henry’s Torch

Evans, who wants to unseat Democratic incumbent Congresswoman Yadira Caraveo in November’s election, has been in the Colorado Legislature for only two years, but it appears — both in his work at the Capitol and elsewhere — that he’s marching forth exactly how Patrick Henry College taught him.

He has not denounced his alma mater for clinging to archaic bigotry and intolerance, including its extreme anti-gay and anti-abortion stances that he signed onto, or that are demanded of all who work and study there.

In fact, Evans told Patrick Henry College’s Kathryn Eiler that he felt prepared to be a Colorado lawmaker thanks to his training in politics at PHC.

“Because of PHC’s rigorous training in both intelligence and in politics, Evans said he feels prepared to undertake this new journey,” states a 2022 news release from Patrick Henry College announcing Evans’ run for the Colorado Legislature, during which Evans’ called himself a “conservative Christian.”

As he geared up to run for the congressional seat north of Denver, Evans revealed, albeit without saying so directly, his ongoing connection to PHC, announcing in December that he received the endorsement of Michael Farris, the co-founder of Patrick Henry College.

But in the Facebook endorsement, neither Evans nor Farris mentioned Farris’ connection to PHC.

Instead, Farris identified himself as the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association and the former CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). ADF has worked in the courts to legislate some of the socially conservative policies promoted at Patrick Henry College. Under Farris, ADF played a key role in overturning Roe v. Wade, and Farris himself tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. ADF and Partick Henry College are on the advisory board of Project 2025, which Farris acknowledged with pride in 2022, saying, “As a member of the Project 2025 Advisory Board, ADF will work tirelessly to reverse the dangerous course this administration has set and get America back on track to building freedom’s future.” In 2006, Farris told NPR that “tolerance cannot co-exist with liberty.”

In his endorsement of Evans, Farris wrote: “If you are a conservative and want to support candidates who will make a difference and not just pay lip service to our cause, join me in supporting Gabe Evans for Congress!”

Evans welcomed the nod by Farris, responding on Facebook that he was “particularly proud” of the endorsement because of Farris’ work for the home school movement.

Farris has said that he co-founded Patrick Henry College to attract conservative home-schooling parents who were uncomfortable sending their kids to college – which is likely why Evans’ parents sent him there.

“Patrick Henry College was founded explicitly as a place where home-schooling parents could send their children to college and feel reasonably assured that they would never encounter ideas that the parents would disapprove,” wrote Balmer, adding that while he was at Patrick Henry College writing a chapter of his book Thy Kingdom Come, Farris told him the “one thing he heard most often from parents was that they wanted their child to be on the Supreme Court someday.”

Evans himself was home-schooled, and he talks about it proudly on the campaign trail using some of the same language that Patrick Henry College uses to describe its curriculum on its website. “I was homeschooled all 12 years in the state because my parents wanted to make sure that I learned how to think, not what to think,” said Evans in an April radio interview. The college states on its website, “PHC’s philosophy of education is not just a sequence of courses, but a conceptual framework and methodology that teaches students how to think, not what to think.”

Evans takes a dig at public education more broadly when he says that his homeschooling saved him from being served a “politically correct agenda,” which he also sees as dragging down the U.S. military.

On the campaign trail in Colorado’s 8th Congressional District, Evans’ rare references to PHC are brief but positive, painting it as a conservative oasis in a society that’s run amok — and praising it for not taking government money.

“I went to a conservative Christian college that takes zero government money because, again, they wanted to do that so I could learn how to think, not what to think,” he said at another GOP forum.

Federal funding, such as Pell Grants and student loans, comes with requirements for colleges to track and report on their spending of public money, report sexual assault on campus, and to comply with non-discrimination policies to protect students based on follow federal regulations governing how to respond to sexual assault and banning discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, sex or pregnancy outside marriage, or having an abortion.

Evans has not said whether he would send his own children to Patrick Henry College. His campaign did not respond to an email asking whether he would do so — or why he hasn’t denounced PHC or at least aspects of it. Neither did he respond to requests for comments on topics addressed in this article, such as whether he would again attend PHC if he had a choice.

Farris isn’t the only right-wing Christian leader, promoting Partick Henry College’s ideology, whose endorsement Evans has welcomed. This month, Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson, a proponent of a national abortion ban and other socially conservative policies, headlined a fundraiser for Evans.

Other evidence showing that Evans will try to enact into law the religious extremism that surrounded him at Patrick Henry College is seen in his overarching position on abortion, expressed in a now-deleted Family Voter Guide candidate questionnaire: he opposes abortion even for women who were raped by a family member.

Evans has also said he opposes Roe v. Wade and he wants abortion laws to be decided on a state-by-state basis, but he’s not revealed what law Colorado should have on the books. A total ban? A ban after six weeks? The current law, which establishes the right to abortion?

With respect to same-sex marriage and basic LGBTQ rights, unequivocally opposed at PHC, Evans was absent this year when the state House voted on a measure to add an amendment on the November ballot asking voters if they want to remove a ban on gay marriage from the Colorado Constitution. Evans, who represents the Ft. Lupton area, wasn’t asked how he would have voted or what his stance is on same-sex marriage.

In a gap year before he attended PHC, Evans worked for one of the most virulently anti-gay lawmakers in Colorado, state Rep. Ted Harvey of Colorado Springs, who co-sponsored a resolution at the time that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. More recently Evans stated that he’s a member of the Christian Home Educators of Colorado (CHEC), which promotes anti-LGBTQ extremism.

Patrick Henry College leaves no doubt where it stands on LGBTQ rights. Farris has written that the “only way that we can stop same-sex marriage from infecting every state is to amend the U.S. Constitution.”

And the PCH website articulates its “Biblical Worldview” as follows: “Therefore, marriage is a sacred God-made union between a man and a woman, which is to be separated by no man. It is to model the reverence, love, sacrifice, and respect exemplified by Christ for His bride. Husbands are the head of their wives just as Christ is the head of the church, and are to love their wives just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. Human sexuality is a great blessing created by God to be enjoyed within the context of a monogamous marriage between a man and a woman; any sexual conduct outside the parameters of marriage is sin.”

This statement alone leaves no doubt that Patrick Henry College is on the far-right fringe of American politics — as does a perusal of its website.

“The school’s Christian fundamentalist orientation is evident on its website,” said Christopher Douglas, a professor in the English Department at the University of Victoria, in an email to the Colorado Times Recorder.

“The mission statement suggests that the college is strongly committed to Christian fundamentalism and Christian nationalism,” said Douglas, who’s the author of If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right. “The fundamentalism is indicated by its emphasis on the Bible as ‘the inspired word of God, inerrant in its original manuscripts,’ which is a position that critical contemporary Bible scholarship does not hold. It’s complementarian, meaning that wives must be subservient to husbands in proper heterosexual marriages emphasizing the bearing of children. They have a very long section on ‘Civil Government,’ which makes clear their Christian nationalist commitments. American government is authorized by God, except when the government strays from the conservative Christian theology the college promotes.”

The question is, just how deeply would Evans’ votes in Congress reflect the Christian fundamentalism of Patrick Henry College? His favorable comments about PCH, his silence on the college’s extreme stances on abortion and LGBTQ rights, his embrace of its founder and other Christian-right leaders, and his stance (or lack of one) on key issues suggest that if Evans were elected to Congress in November – a first for a PHC graduate – he would be a foot soldier for right-wing causes he was trained to embrace during his formative years.

“In terms of policy, I’d expect that Mr. Evans would follow the Religious Right playbook pretty closely — opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion, support for school vouchers, Ten Commandments posted in public places and the like,” wrote Balmer, being careful to add that he knows PHC but not Evans. “All of this falls under the rubric of Christian nationalism these days (although there’s nothing ‘Christian’ about it).”