Christian Nation (24 page)

I watched Steve Jordan’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention from the TW office with Sanjay and most of the rest of the staff. After a few minutes we relaxed a bit, as Jordan largely followed the stump speech from his primary campaign and stuck to safe subjects like defeating terrorism, small government, deficit reduction, and no tax increases.

“Thank God,” said one of the TW political strategists, “I was right. He knew he needed to tack to the center to get elected. The Teavangelicals won’t like it, but they’ll still vote for him.”

But then Jordan paused dramatically, took a deep breath, and looked right at the camera, seemingly ignoring the nineteen thousand delegates and others packed into the Tampa Bay Times Forum.

“While I talk about saving, yes literally saving, this country by returning it to its moral foundation, my critics talk about civil rights. But I ask you—the law, the so-called rights of man, even our beloved Constitution—what are they compared to the word of the eternal and almighty God?”

The crowd went silent.

“They are nothing. Bubbles in the river of time, real only for a moment, then forgotten. Brief illusions born of man’s imagination, without real power or substance. I promise you—I promise you as my most solemn duty as a man, my most solemn duty as a Christian—I promise you that as a candidate and as president I am going to talk to this country about something real. Something important. Indeed, the only real and important thing there is—the word of God our Father, the message of His son and our redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the truth of His revelation.”

The crowd erupted in a visceral roar. Old ladies clasped their hands in prayer. Young men wept. A sea of attractive blond women raised their arms in ecstatic prayer, eyes closed, shouting. The cheering continued for fifteen minutes.

Later that night Sanjay made the rounds of the network television booths cantilevered over the convention floor. He appeared on every network other than F3. Most of the interviews followed approximately the same course.

“Mr. Sharma, you run an organization called Theocracy Watch. What does that mean? Please explain to our viewers what a theocracy is.”

“Well, Jane, it just means a country where those who govern claim to act with divine authority and where law and policy are based on the sacred texts of a single religion. The easiest thing for your listeners to think about is Iran under the Islamic Revolution or Afghanistan under the Taliban. They were both theocracies, countries where the requirements of a single religion—in those cases Islam—trumped democracy or law. So, for example, if the religious text said that the penalty for theft was cutting off the right hand, then the people, the legislators, and the ordinary judges were powerless to decide that the penalty should be something else. The whole society is based on an ancient religious text. And because God is not available to tell us how these texts should be applied to contemporary problems, the law is based on those texts as interpreted by the religious leaders who have assumed civil authority. Needless to say, this gives the religious leaders a great deal of power—very nearly the absolute power of a dictator.”

“Mr. Sharma, you keep talking about theocracy, but Steve Jordan, and indeed all the major evangelical leaders around the country, deny it. They say it is a total overreaction and misunderstanding of what they want—that true theocrats are only a tiny minority within the evangelical movement.”

“You know, Jane, I am so glad you asked that, because in one sense they are right. Many of our fellow Americans who are evangelical or Christian conservatives really believe that what they want is not a theocracy. But here’s the thing: When they talk about democracy, they focus on the part of democracy that is about rule by the majority. If the majority of Americans are Christians, they say, then it can be a Christian Nation. If the majority thinks homosexuality is evil, they say, then it should not be allowed. That, they say,
is
democracy, not theocracy. But Jane, that is not
constitutional democracy
. Our democracy here in America protects the rights of
minorities
. It does not matter how many people are offended by what you are saying, the Bill of Rights guarantees your right of free speech. It does not matter how many people think homosexuality is evil; as a homosexual citizen I am guaranteed equal rights under the law. The revolution Mr. Jordan is leading may ultimately be a majoritarian revolution. But just because he gets over half the vote, it does not mean he can do what he wants. And the proponents of a so-called Christian Nation have been absolutely clear what they want to do with power if they get it, which is nothing less than a total transformation of society at the cost of the freedom of non-Christians, including freedom of speech, privacy, and all sorts of other rights. This is a big change. In the old days, they wanted to save souls. Now they want to reinvent America as what they call a Godly Kingdom, and that’s exactly what they will do if Mr. Jordan wins this election, no matter what the Constitution says.”

“So you are saying, sir, that the system that Steve Jordan is advocating is a dictatorship?”

“I do not think Steve Jordan is being very honest about
what
his vision of a so-called Chrsitian Nation really means. But yes, what he wants
is
a type of dictatorship. An Iranian journalist who lived through the Islamic Republic in Iran was asked once what a theocrat was. He answered in a way that I think all of us can understand. He said ‘a theocrat is someone who wants to take full control of your lives, dictate every single move you make ’round the clock, and, if you dare resist, he will feel it his divine duty to kill you.’ That about sums it up. It does not sound very American to me, even though President Palin, Mr. Jordan, and their supporters try to wrap it up in the flag and the Constitution.”

Jordan’s dramatic admission that proselytizing for evangelical Christianity and establishing the legal primacy of God’s law would be the central goals for his presidency should have given an opening for the
Democratic candidate to put the theocratic question at the center of the
campaign. Sanjay and I, together with millions of others, understood that the election would be a fundamental turning point in American history, a choice between the republic that our founders had given us and an authoritarian Christian state where our core liberties would be redefined in theocratic terms. But the Democratic Party was deeply demoralized by sixteen years out of the White House and eight years of frustration and failure in opposing the Palin administration’s legislative program. Moreover, the Democrats were divided over the type of candidate to field against Jordan. The most progressive wing of the party, and many coastal and urban Democrats, felt an historic calling to field a candidate who would offer the clearest and most stark alternative to Jordan and his program, running on a commitment to strict separation of church and state, the unwinding of the Constitution Restoration Act and the rest of Palin’s legislative legacy, termination of martial law, and a fierce defense of the rights of gays and religious minorities. Their candidate was a smart, passionate, telegenic, and independently wealthy thirty-five-year-old man named Sam Newbridge. He had been the co-founder of a hugely successful technology company, a key advisor to the Obama campaign eight years before, and a strong and effective supporter of progressive causes ever since. He was one of TW’s main financial backers. He was also gay and married to a man.

The other wing of the party was supporting Hillary Clinton. Hillary had not run for national office since her 2008 primary contest against Barack Obama, but she served continuously as US senator from New York and, from that perch, maintained her powerful national network within the party. Her decision not to run in 2012 had proved lucky, as, following the terrorist attack on 7/22, Sarah Palin was unbeatable. So now, in 2016, at sixty-eight years of age, she finally had her chance. The case for Hillary was compelling. Her ex-president husband had died the year before, and the sympathy factor was strong. The political pros who ran the party believed that women would again be the swing demographic. And Hillary would play the role that Sam Newbridge could not: the centrist elder statesperson, a devoted moderate Christian and healer of the national divide. And besides, they whispered at first but finally said out loud, giving the people a married gay candidate would play right into Jordan’s hands. His base would truly see the election as an apocalyptic struggle, and even moderate conservatives might still have qualms about a gay president and a feeling of discomfort with one who was married.

Only historians, if we ever have serious historians again, will be able to speculate whether the party’s choice could have changed the outcome. After all, the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act had changed fundamentally the dynamics of American politics. The churches became the top sources—over political action committees, corporations, and individuals—of political advertising. Partisan endorsements from evangelical pulpits virtually guaranteed the votes of those congregations; there was little that any candidate could do to change the mind of a voter whose trusted pastor had informed him or her that one of the candidates was backed by God. And perhaps most importantly, the pastors ensured that their congregations would vote. There’s an old adage that to win an election, the first step is to have your supporters show up. For several decades, the
lowest
percentage of Americans polled describing themselves as “born again” or “evangelical” was 33 percent (and the high was 47 percent). That translated roughly to 70 to 100 million evangelicals of voting age. I remember one pollster estimating that election turnout in 2016 among the homeschooled, the graduates of Christian academies and colleges, and those self-describing as “born-again” or “evangelical” was over 85 percent. You can do the math—just remember that it took only 50 million popular votes to elect George Bush in 2000 (and I was one of them). So perhaps the choice of the Democratic candidate in 2016 would not have changed the result. But thinking about it all day, in a long walk around the lake, I’ll tell you how it looks to me. I believe the choice of Hillary Clinton was a catastrophic mistake.

The cumulative effect of the eight-year recession had been devastating to the average American family. Many had fallen from the middle class. Many were fearful about how they would survive pending retirements. It looked as if the American century may have ended with the millennium. China was the rising empire, and Americans felt inferior for the first time since the Civil War. They did not like the feeling. The dream—the American dream as their parents had understood it—seemed to be an illusion. Hard work and a mortgage had not proven to be the ticket to a good life. Many people struggled without the support networks of close-by family and community that had gotten the country through the 1930s.

When passion meets pragmatism, passion usually wins. Jordan had a vision and defended it with passion. His vision was a path to renewed national greatness, to honor, to community. He called on the idealism of the American people. And he packaged it all in a comforting fantasy that the people were ill equipped to resist. Hillary, in contrast, offered a defense of the traditional political and economic system. She tried to call on memories of happier days under the Clinton presidency. She offered legalistic arguments about the unconstitutionality of the Palin/Jordan program. She was sixty-eight years old in a country whose youth culture was then the most extreme in history. She was the establishment in a moment where anti-establishment sentiment was at a fever pitch.

CNN called the election at 8:00 p.m., not bothering to wait for the polls on the West Coast to close. The people had chosen Jordan as their forty-sixth president and given him a comfortable but close majority in the House of Representatives, and a Senate with sixty-nine Republicans—enough to defeat a filibuster by the opposing party and to carry votes with a constitutional requirement for two-thirds of the Senate.

I
HAD A
talk today with Adam about the memoir project.

“You’ve finished two hundred pages,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And … ?”

“And what?” I was annoyed by the question. It’s true that I was totally engaged in the project, rising every morning with eager anticipation to get to work. But I was not doing it for me. I was doing it for them. “So what more do you want? I’ve been here almost a month. Am I not doing what you asked? It’s all I do. I’m not thinking of the future, of what will happen when I return. I live each day in the past completely. As you asked.”

“I’m not here to complain. You are doing what we asked. I hope you also now know it’s the right thing to do.” He paused to give me a chance to reply, which I did not. He continued, “So here’s something I just came across that you may find interesting. When Hannah Arendt tried to understand the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia, she finished her book only four years after the end of the war. In 1967, looking back on the writing of her book, she said the following: ‘It was, at any rate, the first possible moment to articulate and elaborate the questions with which my generation had been forced to live for the better part of its adult life:
What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened
?’ Isn’t that interesting?”