There's a scene in Spielberg’s Schindler's List where two German soldiers take a break from clearing out a Jewish ghetto to sit at a displaced resident's piano and play some Beethoven (or Mozart or some such cultured thing). In Spielberg’s heavy handed fashion the scene was meant to juxtapose the stupid cruelty and the cultured intelligence of Nazi soldiers. To me, and the other 26 seniors who watched the scene in our European History class, it did the trick. Evil, it seems, is not perpetuated by stupidity.

I am often drawn by nostalgia or morbid curiosity to articles detailing the lives of Christian Evangelicals, so when Adam's New Yorker arrived with an article about Patrick Henry College I read it immediately. The college is packed full of home-schooled children, whom the author (Hanna Rosin) quite deftly describes as being able to appear older and younger at the same time, who are being trained to go into the GOP ranks immediately upon graduation. These home-schooled Dick and Jane's tend to have very high SAT scores, one main figure having scored a perfect. Their law debate team has routinely beaten the team from Oxford. Yet, at the same time the students are expected to sign a ten-part statement of faith which in part holds positions of a young earth and belief that hell, in addition to being real, is for all those who fall outside the love of Christ. A 1600 on the SAT signed this pact and not in some ironic hipster kind of way just as his khaki's and button up shirts are completely sincere. This kid is obviously smarter than me and yet he is part of a willful conspiracy to destroy all that is good in the world, being confused on what exactly the good is.

How exactly does one score a perfect on the SAT and have such disregard for science? Have these Evangelicals mastered the art of distance? They are able to distance themselves so much from the idea of the world, of conforming their vision to this world, that they can spout of the answers to questions they don't even believe in. Nietzsche was right; at the heart of Christianity and other perverse political bodies lay nihilism.

To close – Yes, I did compare the students of Patrick Henry College to Nazi soldiers; and no, I won't apologize. The point is not that Patrick Henry students may begin killing Jews in mass numbers or any other group (heaven knows they would rather increase funding for Israel) but that they share the way Nazi's were able to distance themselves from the obvious stupidity of their actions while retaining a superior intellect.