Patrick Henry College, or PHC, is only one of the Heritage Foundation’s recommended “green light” colleges which it calls a “strong choice for families prioritizing freedom, opportunity, and civil society.”
The list, as you can imagine, is heavy on evangelical Christian colleges, and some of them, like Ouachita Baptist University are more than 100 years old. But none have had the kind of influence on public life and politics that PHC seems to be having.
Patrick Henry College opened barely 25 years ago, and received accreditation from the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges seven years after that. In the time between then and now, PHC has inserted itself at the very pinnacle of political influence — even sitting on the advisory committee for Project 2025, the right-wing playbook that recommends eliminating DEI, cutting foodstamps and Medicaid, drilling on public land, and criminalizing abortion pills.
PHC’s founder, Michael Farris, is better known for leading Alliance Defending Freedom and the Home School Legal Defense Fund, a man the Washington Post credits with “masterfully import[ing] an extreme religious agenda into the heart of the nation’s politics through the seemingly unobjectionable language of parents’ rights.”
But this is about way more than just not having DEI admissions policies. Patrick Henry College is an intentional incubator of far-right advocates, future leaders who, as Farris wrote in his book, will “take the land.” The classes it teaches, the philosophy on which it is grounded, is extreme in every way. It was denied accreditation by the American Academy for Liberal Education in 2002 because creationism was part of the curriculum. (And no, it doesn’t teach creationism side by side with evolution — its tenets absolutely deny the idea of evolution or intelligent design.) Its tagline is “influencing the world through Christ” and its mission statement is to “prepare Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values. . .”
And it’s succeeding.
The proof is everywhere. There’s Gabe Evans — who won election as a US Congressman in Colorado’s 8th district and has waged a war on immigrants while ignoring the fact nearly a third of his constituents rely on Medicaid, which is set to be slashed dramatically under the budget bill he voted to approve.
But he’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Consider the White House. PHC’s alumni pages brag that at least 10 of their graduates have served in the White House. In the first Trump administration, Allyssa Farah was Director of Strategic Communications, Noelle Gardner served as a Digital Strategist, Ben Williamson was Senior Communications advisor. Nicholas Butterfield was deputy assistant to the president and deputy White House coordinator during Trump’s first term. No details are available about the current White House staffing figures, but the the college is already touting its foray into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Trump 2.0, as alum Micah Bock was tapped to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Communications.
And then there’s Congress. Katie Doherty was Executive Director of the “Values Action Team” in the US. House of Representatives from 2017-2022 — during which it was her sole mission to “advance pro-family, pro-life, and pro-faith initiatives in Congress.” She and others like Eve Gleason, Vicki Hartzler, Rebecca Hashiko and others all found their way to high-profile jobs with in Congress. Legistorm, the directory Capitol Hill Staff, doesn’t allow searching by college. But PHC’s LinkedIn page logs 141 alumni with the descriptor Government in their profile.
And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Supreme Court has not been immune to the PHC influence. Justices Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, Kavanaugh and Roberts have all had PHC alumni clerk for them. Thomas just selected another for next year.
On the state government level, a fresh-faced Simon Sefzik, became the youngest Washington state senator ever seated. At 22, he was appointed by the powers-that-be to the 42nd district, after the sitting Republican succumbed to COVID in 2021. Sefzik had previously been one of the ten PHC Alumni that served in the first Trump White House.
And, of course, graduates of Patrick Henry College have found a wide foothold in the media. Audrey Jones gives “conservative values a voice on local and national TV and radio” in her position as Assistant Director for Broadcast Services at the Heritage Foundation. Anna Allen is working at the Washington Free Beacon as a reporter, and Lisa Mattackal is reporting for the Reuters News Agency.
Many were taken by surprise when WORLD News appointed PHC journalism professor Dr. Leslie Sillars as their Editor-in-Chief in March. The Christian news agency hadn’t had a Chief since 2021, and Sillars wasn’t an obvious choice. Until you dig a little deeper and find out that Russ Pulliam, a columnist for the Indianapolis Star and Director of the Pulliam Fellowship, is both a trustee at PHC and a member of the WORLD News board of directors.
For a college that is, by all comparisons, in its infancy, PHC is making an outsized impact. The Washington Post called PHC “God’s Harvard” when it graduated its first class. Harvard, this country’s oldest university, has been educating students for 389 years. It currently has 24,596 students enrolled in its undergraduate and graduate programs and estimates that it has 400,000 alumni worldwide. You would expect there to be considerable influence.
By comparison, Patrick Henry College graduated its first class in May of 2002, fourteen students from primarily home-schooling backgrounds. This past May, PHC graduated their largest class yet, 116 students, 50% male, 50% female, with the average SAT score of 1304. They will be entering into a political climate that was custom made for their background: anti-DEI, Christian nationalists. They will already have connections in every level of the government and doors will undoubtedly open for them. And the pipeline will continue to be filled.
