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Remaking America in Falwell’s Image

The Washington Post has a long profile of Liberty University students going all out to help John McCain win Virginia and how the volunteering for the campaign is preparing many for their own eventual entries into politics:  

Besides taking a full load of classes, [Claire] Ayendi has been putting in 40-hour weeks on behalf of McCain. She makes phone calls, canvasses, operates a database of student volunteers, uses Facebook as her bully pulpit and will talk to anyone about how she thinks that Obama's promise to redistribute wealth is an affront to the Constitution. The campaign has galvanized her friends and served as an excellent primer on what lies ahead in their adult lives.

Ayendi and [Meghan] Allen playfully dog one of their Liberty friends for wanting to go into the seminary.

"If you want to get anything changed around here, you have to go through the courts," Ayendi says. "You gotta be a lawyer."

Totally, Allen agrees. "My goal is not to make laws Christian but to make government as small as possible so you can be as biblically Christian as you so choose," she says.

Both plan on spring internships abroad and then law school. But an Obama victory would not send these them into the wilderness. To the contrary, the fight would begin anew.

I don’t even know what it means to create a country where people are free to be as “biblically Christian” as they choose, but when students from Falwell’s university say that is their ultimate goal for America, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like whatever it is they have in mind.