In the last days before the 2004 Presidential election, Patrick Henry College, in Purcellville, Virginia, excused all its students from classes, because so many of them were working on campaigns or wanted to go to the swing states to get out the vote for George W. Bush. Elisa Muench, a junior, was interning in the White House’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, which is overseen by Karl Rove. On Election Day, she stood on the South Lawn with the rest of the White House staff to greet the President and Mrs. Bush as they returned from casting their votes in Texas. Muench cheered along with everyone else, but she was worried. Her office was “keeping up contact with Karl,” and she knew that the early exit polls were worse than expected. Through the night, she watched the results, as Bush’s electoral-vote total began to rise. The next morning, after Kerry conceded, she stood in the crowd at the Bush campaign’s victory party, in clothes she’d been wearing all night, and “cried and screamed and laughed, it was so overwhelming.”

I found Muench in the Patrick Henry cafeteria at lunchtime one day a few months later. She is twenty-one years old and has clear, bright hazel eyes and sandy-brown hair that she straightens and then curls with an iron. Patrick Henry is a Christian college, though it is not affiliated with any denomination, and it gives students guidelines on “glorifying God with their appearance.” During class hours, the college enforces a “business casual” dress code designed to prepare the students for office life—especially for offices in Washington, D.C., fifty miles to the east, where almost all the students have internships, with Republican politicians or in conservative think tanks. When I met Muench, she was wearing a cardigan and a navy skirt. The boys in the cafeteria all had neatly trimmed hair, and wore suits or khakis and button-down shirts; girls wore slacks or skirts just below the knee, and sweaters or blouses. Most said grace before eating, though they did it silently and discreetly, with a quick bow of the head.

Muench told me that she loved working for Rove—answering the phone and having a senator on the line, meeting Andrew Card, the chief of staff (“He’s a nice guy”), and Vice-President Dick Cheney (“He’s really funny”). She took a bus from Patrick Henry at six every morning to arrive at the White House by seven-thirty. Her work with Rove, she told me, affirmed her belief that he was a political genius.

In her sophomore year, Muench had become the first—and, so far, the only—woman at Patrick Henry to run for a student-government executive office, when she entered the race for vice-president. Campaigns are unusually intense at Patrick Henry; candidates hire pollsters and form slates. One of Muench’s friends, Matthew du Mée, was on an opposing slate, and the race caused a strain. (Both lost.) Muench’s internship with Rove has given her a reputation, much envied on campus, as someone worth knowing. The day we spoke, a sophomore leaned across the table and asked, “How much do you make, starting salary, working on the Hill?”

“I’m not sure,” Muench said.

“I heard one of the graduates working for Joe Pitts is making, like, thirty-two thousand dollars. That’s not that much.” (Pitts is a Republican congressman.)

“Well, it’s not too bad if you’re a single person,” Muench told him.

“Do you have any intentions of running for office?” the sophomore asked.

“Yes,” she said.

At that moment, Muench’s cell phone rang. It was Cheney’s office, calling to thank her for volunteering for the Vice-President’s Christmas party, and to ask if she would allow her name to be put on a list for future openings.

Muench, like eighty-five per cent of the students at Patrick Henry, was homeschooled, in her case in rural Idaho. Homeschoolers are not the most obvious raw material for a college whose main mission, since its founding, five years ago, has been to train a new generation of Christian politicians. Politics, after all, is the most social of professions, and many students arrive at Patrick Henry having never shared a classroom with anyone other than their siblings. In conservative circles, however, homeschoolers are considered something of an élite, rough around the edges but pure—in their focus, capacity for work, and ideological clarity—a view that helps explain why the Republican establishment has placed its support behind Patrick Henry, and why so many conservative politicians are hiring its graduates.

Patrick Henry’s president, Michael Farris, is a lawyer and minister who has worked for Christian causes for decades. He founded the school after getting requests from two constituencies: homeschooling parents and conservative congressmen. The parents would ask him where they could find a Christian college with a “courtship” atmosphere, meaning one where dating is regulated and subject to parental approval. The congressmen asked him where they could find homeschoolers as interns and staffers, “which I took to be shorthand for ‘someone who shares my values,’ ” Farris said. “And I knew they didn’t want a fourteen-year-old kid.” So he set out to build what he calls the Evangelical Ivy League, and what the students call Harvard for Homeschoolers.

Farris is fifty-three but seems younger, with thick brown hair and a slightly amused expression. He and his wife, Vickie, began to homeschool their children (they have ten) in 1982, and the next year he founded the Home School Legal Defense Association, to challenge state laws that made it difficult to homeschool children. In 1993, he ran, unsuccessfully, for lieutenant governor of Virginia. At the time, evangelicals had yet to emerge as a national political force; many preferred to keep their distance from secular culture, which is one reason that Patrick Henry parents educated their children at home. Since then, Rove has built an entire campaign around mobilizing Christian conservatives. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute after the 2000 election, he said that the President had lost the popular vote because fewer than expected “white, evangelical Protestants” had come to the polls. One of Rove’s principal strategies for victory in 2004 was working to increase this group’s numbers, and on Election Day four million more evangelicals voted than in 2000.

Farris’s manifesto for the school, “The Joshua Generation,” embraces the Rove principle: the “Moses generation,” he wrote, had “left Egypt,” and now it was time for their children to “take the land.” Farris is the author of nine nonfiction books and three novels, all with Christian themes, and in them he warns against “MTV, Internet porn, abortion, homosexuality, greed and accomplished selfishness”; he calls public schools “godless monstrosities.” But students are not expected to avoid the secular world entirely. Farris told them at chapel recently that one day “an Academy Award winner will walk down the aisle to accept his trophy. On his way, he’ll get a cell-phone call; it will be the President, who happens to be his old Patrick Henry roommate, calling to congratulate him.”

When the Farrises began homeschooling their kids, they were one of only a few thousand American families who did so. Now about a million and a half children, as many as two-thirds of whom are thought to be evangelicals, are taught at home. Farris bought the land for the Patrick Henry campus with four hundred thousand dollars from the Home School Legal Defense Association’s reserves; he raised the rest of the money for the college, nine million dollars, from parents and donors such as Tim LaHaye, the author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series. LaHaye’s portrait hangs in the main hall.

Farris was competing against established Christian schools such as Bob Jones University, which sells textbooks and videos for homeschoolers. Some families, though, believe that a traditionalist approach to Christian education is limiting, and Patrick Henry was designed to appeal both to the protectiveness of these parents and to their ambitions, promising an “authentic Christian environment” as well as preparation for “careers of influence” in politics.

Three times a year, the White House chooses a hundred students for a three-month internship. Patrick Henry, with only three hundred students, has taken between one and five of the spots in each of the past five years—roughly the same as Georgetown. Other Patrick Henry students volunteer in the White House. Tim Goeglein, the Administration’s liaison to the evangelical community, said that the numbers reflect the abilities of the Patrick Henry students, who “have learned a way to integrate faith and action.” For the White House, it is also a way to reach out to its base while building a network of young political operatives.

Of the school’s sixty-one graduates through the class of 2004, two have jobs in the White House; six are on the staffs of conservative members of Congress; eight are in federal agencies; and one helps Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, and his wife, Karen, homeschool their six children. Two are at the F.B.I., and another worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority, in Iraq. Last year, the college began offering a major in strategic intelligence; the students learn the history of covert operations and take internships that allow them to graduate with a security clearance.

All seniors do a directed research project that is designed, Farris told me, to mimic the work that an entry-level staffer would be assigned. “A whole lot of elected members of Congress started off as Hill staffers,” Farris said. “If you want to train a new generation of leaders, you have to get in on the ground floor.”

One afternoon in March, Matthew du Mée sat at a counsels’ table in the Virginia Supreme Court. Behind him was an audience of two hundred people, including many of Patrick Henry’s donors. Du Mée and another senior, Rayel Papke, were representing one side of a mock case against a team from Balliol College, at Oxford University. The details of the case, which involved an international treaty, were fictitious, but Farris had persuaded three of the court’s justices to preside. Papke had got up at 1 a.m. to prepare. Du Mée was calmer; as he waited for the debate to begin, he said, “The only help I need is the Lord’s.”

Du Mée is twenty-two years old but, like many homeschooled boys, can seem both younger and older. He is tall, with an angular face and ears that stick out a bit. His hair usually bears the fresh imprints of a comb, like a schoolboy’s or a senator’s. When the round began, he was both deliberate and aggressive, and he deployed legal jargon with ease: he reminded me of a youthful version of Theodore Olson, Bush’s former Solicitor General. Each team had to answer questions from the justices about dozens of legal precedents; du Mée seemed to have all the decisions memorized.

Last year, two Patrick Henry teams flew to Oxford for a mock trial that turned on the intricacies of British contract law. The Oxford kids hadn’t known much about Patrick Henry back then. When one of them noticed that Papke looked nervous, he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get drunk tonight.” Papke just smiled. Patrick Henry won; Oxford drank alone.

Faith Brobst, a former White House intern, and Christy Ross, du Mée’s fiancée, who was also the debate-team captain, were at the Virginia Supreme Court, helping out. Brobst was wearing a cherry-red suit, Ross a peacock-blue one, with stockings and pumps—the uniform of Washington wives in waiting. The Oxford boys seemed to blink when they saw them. “So bright, and they match,” one of them said, politely.

The judges announced that the Patrick Henry team had won, by a 3-0 decision. Don Hodel, the former president of Focus on the Family, a Christian advocacy group, who is a Patrick Henry supporter, came up and congratulated du Mée, and invited him and Ross to visit him at his home in Colorado.

At Patrick Henry, debate plays roughly the role that football does at Notre Dame. When I asked Farris why, he said, “No one ever asked George Bush or John Kerry to arm wrestle. They need these verbal-communications skills to defend their ideas. There’s no training like arguing against the best minds, and then beating them.” Referring to du Mée, he said, “Maybe one day he’ll be the one standing before the Supreme Court, arguing to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

When du Mée arrived at Patrick Henry, in 2001, after being homeschooled by his parents, in Phoenix, Arizona (his father was a computer analyst, and his mother stayed at home), the school issued a press release. He’d got a perfect 1600 on the S.A.T. but ignored solicitation letters from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, and the fact that he chose Patrick Henry was seen as a turning point for the school, which was then less than two years old. Du Mée told me, “I considered going to an Ivy League, where I could have been more of a Christian witness”—meaning an example to others who might not share his faith. But he decided that he wanted a school “more edifying to Christ.”

Du Mée’s transcript reads as though he had gone through a Beltway-staffer training camp. He took classes on the Presidency, on Congress, and on constitutional law. In his senior year, he volunteered at the White House one day a week, answering the telephone comment line, and he has interned twice with Representative Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican. Du Mée’s first directed research project was a thirty-page evaluation of a bill giving tax credits for donations to fund private-school scholarships, which Franks had introduced. He wrote another with Ross, on reforming the U.N., complete with policy briefs.

Ross is du Mée’s usual debate partner, and this year they won four of the six national tournaments they competed in. Some of the younger Patrick Henry teams make a point of taking explicitly Christian positions, such as arguing for teaching alternatives to evolution, but du Mée and Ross tend to be more subtle; they focus, instead, on issues like merit pay for teachers. They met during freshman orientation, and before they began spending “exclusive time” together, in junior year, du Mée called Ross’s father to tell him. Last year, du Mée asked if he could court her by writing her father an eighteen-page single-spaced letter that began “My name is Matthew du Mée and I was a good kid.”

When Ross was sixteen, she wrote in her journal, “I don’t want to spend my life having crushes on different guys.” She pledged to “love Christ with my whole heart and not fall in love with a guy for five years,” a period that she chose after hearing a lecture that compared committing to Christ to sticking to a long-term business plan. Du Mée’s courtship proposal came exactly five days before her pledge expired.