Since 2000, America’s most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small Christian school that has earned the nickname “God’s Harvard.” Most of these students are homeschoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. The school grooms them to become the Christian elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science to wage the battle to take back a godless nation.

Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half following these students from campus to Congress, conservative think tanks, Hollywood, and other centers of influence. Her account captures a nerve center of the evangelical movement at a moment of maximum influence and also crisis, as it struggles to remake the modern world in its own image.