Christian Nation (29 page)

“This,” said President Jordan, with the customary cross over one shoulder and flag over the other, “will be a wholly modern presidency. I just cannot understand the fuss. What do they think—that religious people are stuck in the Middle Ages? God commands us to use all the tools at our disposal, and I have always been completely transparent about that. In 2008, when Ralph Reed and I were growing the Faith & Freedom Coalition, we were absolutely clear that we were not going to cede web-based organizing, web-based fund-raising, and techno-savvy political action to the liberals. You may remember that all of our original Faith & Freedom chapters were virtual. Ralph said then that the Internet’s first wave was e-mail, that the next wave was social networking, and that there was going to be a third wave. Well, that’s what we said in 2008, and that’s what we are doing today. We are figuring out that third wave—how to use technology to perfect our democracy, to ensure more perfect freedom, and to advance our country toward its destiny as Christ’s Kingdom on Earth.”

The F3 interviewer of course neglected to ask why the architects of Chinese web censorship and surveillance by the Saudi religious police were appropriate choices “to ensure more perfect freedom.” But Sanjay and I did ask. We asked loudly and persistently. We pointed out that as a result of 9/11 and 7/22, the federal government had access to an almost comprehensive video surveillance infrastructure. Without it having been announced, debated, or budgeted, fifteen years after 9/11 we found ourselves with web-linked cameras covering all our major city streets, factories, offices, schools, shopping centers, and virtually all other places of public assembly. Moreover, our traditional distaste as Americans for any kind of surveillance seemed to have evaporated. Reality television shows like
Big Brother
and
Survivor
had glamorized the idea of life under the unblinking eye of the camera.

Our campaign succeeded in causing vague disquiet among many people, but without more of an understanding of what the Purity Web was really all about, we were unable to use it as an effective tool against the administration. By the time Jordan went public with the Purity Web during the Holy War, it was of course too late. Jordan’s long-promised Internet third wave now seems so obvious and so inevitable that I find it difficult to understand how we failed to figure it out in 2016.

After a lull of about six weeks, with The Blessing still completely tied up in court, the administration announced the first of a series of “implementing regulations” under The Blessing, this one under Covenant V dealing with marriage. The regulation was titled “On Sexual Deviancy.” We understood later that, following extensive debate, the administration was persuaded not to refer publicly to the “homosexual problem” because of its deep and disturbing echoes of the use by the Nazis of the phrase “Jewish problem.” The “regulation,” which was promulgated as a presidential order without compliance with the public hearing and other procedures normally required for a federal regulation, was straightforward. All homosexuals would be required to register with the federal government within 90 days and, for their own protection, to be tested for AIDS: “a long-overdue public health measure for the good of those who choose the homosexual lifestyle,” explained President Jordan. Although The Blessing stated that “Homosexual behavior of any sort is a crime,” the “regulation” did not set forth the penalties for homosexual behavior, noting that determination of appropriate punishment would be up to each of the states. The Farris Commission, however, simultaneously promulgated a paper from biblical scholars stating that the second covenant, recognizing the higher authority of biblical law, ought to be read to require states to re-impose the death penalty for the crime of sodomy.

The balance of the “regulation” was remarkable for its insidious cruelty to the gay population. First, no benefits, such as pension rights or health benefits, could be extended by employers to the partners of homosexuals, even those purported to be married, and any such benefits already vested were forfeit. Second, all gay adoptions were summarily voided, with special panels of pastors and Christian doctors set up to review each situation, with a strong presumption that the children of single men and male couples must be returned to social services. There was an exemption for children over age five living with female couples
if
the family were living as Christians and willing to submit to the ongoing supervision of the panel. Finally, no will, contract, health care proxy, or power of attorney would be enforceable if it afforded one gay person rights or discretion in relation to another.

Although this regulation was also immediately challenged in the courts, gay people, especially those with children, were terrified. Gays with children felt they couldn’t risk even the coastal sanctuaries of San Francisco, Boston, and New York and began a gradual exodus to Canada and Europe, marking the beginning of the debates there about the granting of refugee status to gays fleeing America.

Gays without families had been steadily leaving the heartland since the raft of state anti-gay laws at the beginning of Palin’s second term, but after the Deviancy Regulation, the exodus of gays from middle America accelerated sharply. Many of those states were amazed to discover the number of gay households in their midst, and shocked that home prices fell sharply as large numbers of residences, sometimes up to 10 percent of the housing units in an area, flooded onto the market. Sanjay and I figured out what had happened. By requiring all homosexuals to register with the federal government, the option of remaining a closeted homosexual disappeared. The presumption that single people over a certain age must be gay, as well as wild rumors about tests that had been developed to determine sexual orientation, led many to conclude that they inevitably would be “outed” under the new regime. Men and women who had given no indication of homosexuality—some in heterosexual marriages and others masquerading as divorced or separated from heterosexual partners—feared for the first time that discretion would be no protection from the wave of anti-gay violence and persecution coming their way.

Again taking New York’s lead, eight state governors immediately affirmed their own state’s statutes permitting all that the federal Deviancy Regulation purportedly prohibited, and they promised to recognize and honor marriages, adoptions, health care proxies, wills, powers of attorney, and contracts entered into by gays under the laws of other states if brought to their states for enforcement. The US Chamber of Commerce tersely noted that for its members to deny employees vested benefits would expose them to litigation and liability and thus refused to do so until the legal situation was clarified.

The week after the Deviancy Regulation took effect, the country was shocked when an eighteen-year-old gay man, a quiet Buddhist monk who had come to America as a refugee from Myanmar, immolated himself on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. Or, to be more accurate, only that part of the country was shocked that had access to television, web, or newspapers not controlled by F3. The millions of Americans for whom F3-controlled media outlets were their sole or primary source of news never knew that it happened.

I
STOPPED WRITING
this afternoon, haunted by the image of the young monk who burned himself alive on a quiet summer day in the capital. Suddenly, I could see again the horrifying video clip. I remembered his beautiful name, Banya Vamsa. I remembered his story. He was a quiet and earnest young man, persecuted by the military regime in Myanmar for his politics, his religion, and his sexual orientation. His whole short life had revolved around a seemingly impossible dream, the dream of America, a place of sanctuary and freedom. And then, thanks to a small community of Buddhist nuns outside Atlanta, the impossible dream became real. I cried today, thinking of his anguish when the America of his dreams betrayed him. For a moment this afternoon, it seemed to me sadder than the collective anguish of the country in the decade that followed.

Remembering the young monk, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder what Sanjay had felt while all this was happening. I never asked him. Was
he
afraid? How could he not have been? I realize now that we never talked about it. What was he thinking when we were watching the video of the young man burning alive? No one in the country had less reason for guilt, but I imagine that Sanjay would have felt some sense of responsibility. I imagine him now, comparing himself to the young man and wondering whether the monk had more foresight, more courage, or more goodness than he did. I can easily see him having some inchoate sense that he, Sanjay, should have stood in the monk’s place. And what did I do or say? I remember the conversation.

“Awful,” I said. “Can we use it? How will it poll? San, what do you think, will it matter?”

“It has to matter,” he said. And that was all we said. I should have said more.

Although TW’s main hope was to stall the implementation of The Blessing through a massive onslaught of litigation, we never gave up trying to help all Americans to understand what was happening. One of our strategies during this year was to let the American people see themselves through the eyes of those outside the United States. Americans always have had enormous pride in their country and tend to become anxious and unhappy when the country is criticized or derided by others. During the two terms of Sarah Palin, the position of America in the eyes of the world had deteriorated steadily. As a result of the McCain corpse debacle during the first moments of her presidency, Palin had lost any claim to being taken seriously as a leader on the world stage. The leaders of our allies and foes alike were coldly proper when meeting the US president on international occasions, but she had been completely frozen out of those parts of meetings like the G8 and the G20, where the leaders hammered out economic and political deals. The president did not mind. On more than one occasion, usually mis-citing one of the Founding Fathers, she argued that her place was at home and that she was merely obeying George Washington’s famous injunction to avoid misguided foreign entanglements. She had, she said repeatedly, finally and firmly stopped our slow, steady slide toward a global currency and the maturation of the United Nations into a world government—strange claims that seemed to constitute the entirety of her administration’s foreign policy apart from its steadfast support of Israel, or, as she usually put it, “the necessity of a biblical Israel.” The leaders of Israel returned the favor but always looked a bit uncomfortable when the president let slip, as she often did, that the sole reason for America’s defense of Israel was to fulfill the biblical conditions for the rapture of the Christian church and the apocalypse to follow.

But America after Jordan’s New Freedom was viewed as something else altogether. The leaders of Europe, and of our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, were profoundly alarmed. The people of Europe had finally lost their long-standing cultural affinity with Americans, due primarily to religious differences. As early as 2011, when 60 percent of Americans said that God “played an important part in their lives,” only 20 percent of Europeans held this view. Could the United States under President Jordan really sustain its “special relationship” with Britain, where 45 percent of those polled positively denied the existence of a God? Fashionable books in Britain and the rest of Europe spoke now of the threat of religious fundamentalism in America in the same breath as the Islamofascism that was being embraced by so many of the Muslim minorities scattered throughout the continent. TW streamed these views into the US market, hoping that moderate Christians would be alarmed by the gradual isolation of the country from all its traditional friends and allies other than Israel. It didn’t seem to help.

Looking ahead to various possible outcomes of the fight over implementation of The Blessing, and concerned about the authoritarian flavor of the president’s still inchoate Purity Web project, Sanjay and I thought it was time to tackle the issue of violence and the potential use of violent force head-on. If we won in the courts, Jordan might well choose to deploy the Christian militias to foment chaos and violence, thus provoking an excuse to use martial law and do an end run around the ordinary judiciary. So on Labor Day weekend in 2017, Sanjay and I—this time with a large team from TW and a pool of reporters from the national press—visited Oklahoma, where, eight years before, Sanjay had been among the first to publicize the rise of a violent and aggressive strain of conservative Christianity. We thought that the holiday weekend would be an appropriate time to try to get the entire nation focused on the rapid development of a domestic army sworn to implement the theocratic vision. For years the militias in Oklahoma had failed to persuade the state legislature to formally recognize them as an “unorganized militia” under the Second Amendment. But in March of that year, the Oklahoma legislature finally acted. The state sanctioned something now called simply the Christian Militia (a change from only eight years before, when they were called Liberty Boys or Freedom Fighters). When asked what was the mission of the newly recognized “unorganized” militia, the sponsor of the Oklahoma bill replied, “to eradicate evil.”