Christian Nation

by Frederic C. Rich

  The very next day I walked into the office of the partner who had been my longtime mentor, who had become a friend, and who had been instrumental, I was sure, in having me elected as a partner. I sat down and decided to dispense with the pleasantries.

  “John, I think you know how much I appreciate all you’ve done for me. I couldn’t have imagined that I would ever do something to let you down.”

  He interrupted.

  “Greg, if you’ve screwed up in some way, we can work through it. We’ve all made mistakes.”

  “No, it’s not that. I’m resigning from the firm and going to work with Sanjay at Theocracy Watch. Given what’s happened, I feel I have no choice.”

  He stared at the papers on his desk, and then he looked up.

  “You always have a choice.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. To be more precise, I have made a choice. Not because I don’t owe everything to you and the firm. Not because I’m unhappy in my work. Not because I don’t think I’m a damn fine lawyer. I have chosen something … well, something more important.”

  “Sanctimonious doesn’t become you, Greg. And you know better. You sell your judgment to the brightest people in the country for thousands of dollars an hour. You know that it makes no sense to throw away your career to help people who … well, who don’t know the world as it really is and don’t know how to make things happen. They have no standing. No power. People like you, people like us, Greg, if we want to save the world, we do it from the inside.”

  “I don’t want to save the world. John, think of World War II. What did the partners here do? Did they say the war was for others and their place was with their clients? No, they jumped, and jumped first. Think of Roger Leman.”

  He was an RCD&S partner who was the first American killed in action in World War II when he was helping evacuate the British army at Dunkirk. I knew that John admired him.

  “Where’s the war, Greg?”

  “It’s here, John. It’s all around you. They call it a war, why shouldn’t we? What do you think will happen to RCD&S in a Christian fundamentalist state?”

  “I find it all as distasteful as you do. But I find most politicians distasteful. You think I don’t cringe having to listen to that idiot night after night on TV? But you have to learn not to overreact. The economy goes on. Companies get bought and sold. Capital needs to flow. RCD&S will be fine.”

  “Is that all that matters?” I asked, instantly regretting it.

  “Don’t be insulting. If I thought there was any possibility that fascism was around the corner or that a real religious authoritarianism could take root in this country, then of course I’d be with you. But it can’t happen here.”

  I wondered if he’d read Sinclair Lewis, but I decided not to go there.

  “I hope you’re right, John. I will do everything possible so that the firm is not embarrassed.”

  “Do you understand what you’re leaving behind?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  His face was passive, revealing neither annoyance nor sympathy.

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  And that, after eight and a half years of striving and sacrifice, was that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Not So Bad

  2015

  For true blissed-out and vacant servitude … you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught at all.

  —Christopher Hitchens,

  “Why Americans Are Not Taught History,”

  Harper’s magazine, June 1999

  I hope I live to see the day, when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again, and Christians will be running them.

  —Jerry Falwell,

  America Can Be Saved (1979)

  FOR THE ENTIRETY OF MY WORKING LIFE, I had only one job. For almost nine years I entered the same lobby, rode the same elevators, and passed through the same double mahogany doors into the offices of RCD&S. I had focused relentlessly on the single goal of becoming a partner, and I had achieved it. And then, one Monday morning, I pulled on jeans, took the subway to Chambers Street, and arrived at the third-floor loft space that housed the staff of Theocracy Watch.

  They say humans are creatures of habit, but for me the habits of those nine years were set aside in a day. Within only a week or so, the years I spent at the firm had assumed a dreamlike quality. In contrast, other memories were fresh, harsh, and hurtful. At some level I must have known that my decision to leave the law was a decision to end things with Emilie. But although we had been together for eight years, I did not consult with her about my decision or even tell her what I intended to do.

  The night after my meeting with John, Emilie was there when I arrived home. I looked her in the eye and told her that I had resigned from the firm and was going to help Sanjay at TW. For a moment she held her breath. Then, slowly, she started gulping air with sharp hiccup-like inhalations. Her arms reached across her chest, and she embraced herself. I remember watching the bare skin on her upper arm turning white from the strength of her grip. Within moments, her staccato exhales evolved into loud sobs. She sat on the couch, rocking back and forth. I stood perfectly still. Her crying continued wordlessly for what seemed to me to be a long time. When it abated, she raised her head and showed a face contorted with a mixture of humiliation and rage.

  “Out. Get … out. Now.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Now,” she screamed.

  I turned and left and have not seen her since.

  As I write this, I again feel a dull tightness in my gut, as I have every single time during the past fourteen years that this scene has replayed itself in my mind. I make no excuses. It is one of the two things in my life about which I still feel a deep sense of shame. Looking out at the lake, I see that it is perfectly still, a featureless mirror. There is no current, no ripple connecting one point with another.

  In an effort to distract myself from the disaster of my personal life, I threw myself into work at TW. Sanjay had surrounded himself with young people who were bright and motivated, but none had my ability to get things done. Of the $400 million from the sale of You and I, little had been spent on the organization. Sanjay wasn’t cheap; he certainly wasn’t spending it on himself, nor did he have any desire to grow or even maintain his wealth. Instead, he believed that TW’s credibility depended on a wide base of support, and he was determined that its successes should not be perceived as having been “bought” by his fortune.

  I managed to persuade him that now was the time to let a bit of his money do some good. We hired a recently retired reporter, Walter Evans, who had spent his career at the Wall Street Journal and resented enormously the loss of that paper’s independence as under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership it eventually became yet another vehicle for the F3 movement. Walt was tough, well connected, and mad as hell. We had our new communications director. I also realized that our online footprint needed to be reinvented from the ground up. I hired a tech entrepreneur from California on the rebound from founding a clever but failed shopping co-op online social network. He understood middle America and was gay, horrified by the direction of the country, highly motivated, wonderfully creative, and much more tuned in to the rising generation than either Sanjay or I.

  About a week later I found Sharon Heller, a middle-aged woman who had spent a career doing professional fund-raising for charities, most recently for the Topeka Symphony. That orchestra had been disbanded when the Kansas state legislature suddenly withdrew all support for cultural institutions in the state, banned National Public Radio, and conditioned the state tax deduction for charitable giving on an annual certification that the charity was not involved in “the promotion of abortion, homosexuality, secularism, or other evil.” Within months, she said, the vibrant cultural scene in Topeka—once a bastion of enlightenment against the retrograde politics of Kansas—was lost. Thousands of artists, musicians, writers, and liberal
academics left the state. She too was motivated and really knew how to raise money. My final hire was a director of security. We had kept it quiet, but a few months before, someone had fired a shot through TW’s third-floor windows. The bullet lodged harmlessly in the ceiling, but I did not believe it to be an accident. We catalogued dozens of threats against Sanjay’s life on social networks and blogs, and—despite his disregard for his own security—I convinced him he owed it to me and all his other employees to take security more seriously.

  Two weeks after I arrived, Walter Evans came to my desk.

  “So, Greg, guess what I got. It’s too brilliant. Nah, you’ll never guess.”

  “Well then, I won’t. Tell me.”

  “Stewart. Jon Stewart. The Daily Show. Where our target demo gets their news and laughs. Average of one and a half million of them every day. He’s in love with Sanjay. Bloodly hopeless love. Thinks he’s a prophet. Wants to help. I mean really. Not take cheap shots. Really help.”

  And so Sanjay had his first appearance on The Daily Show, and it was brilliant. The extroverted wisecracking Stewart had met his match and didn’t mind one bit. Like everyone else, he could not avoid Sanjay’s penetrating gaze. And many of Stewart’s fans listened to what Sanjay had to say simply because they were captivated by the way he looked. After our first appearance on the show, our daily website hits went from about twenty thousand to eight hundred thousand. We had truly gone national, and proven there was an audience for Sanjay’s message.

  Shortly thereafter, President Palin made her first comment about Sanjay. She had delivered her prepared remarks at the morning service at the giant New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the epicenter of mega-church evangelism, and was taking questions afterward from the audience, her polished face looming on jumbo video screens all around the twelve thousand parishioners.

  “Madam President,” asked a stout woman with big hair, “there are some people saying that you do not believe in democracy. People actually complaining that we want to have a God-centered country. What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that democracy? Isn’t that exactly what we want? Isn’t it what Jesus came for?”

  “God bless you,” the president responded. “You got it exactly. You’re right, and some people are more determined than ever to stop it. I mean, if you want to stop God, which is everything good, then doesn’t that have to mean also that you’re, well, the opposite of good, which is evil? I’m no genius, but it seems right to me. I mean, also, have you heard this new guy, this foreign guy who is organizing a movement against our Lord? Theology Watch, I think it’s called. Well, have you seen him?”

  She turned to the pastor standing next to her. “What does the Bible say about the Antichrist, Reverend? That you shall know him as a young man with a handsome face and the tongue of a serpent. Something like that? And, from what I hear, a … you know … well, a grievous sinner. Well, have you seen him? The Bible warns us that just when the Kingdom is closest, an Antichrist will come to try to reclaim America for the devil. As usual, if it’s in the Holy Book, it happens. So yes, there are dark forces gathering. But really, my friends. Also, really, this is really, you know, a cause for joy. Because it means we are close. Really close. Thank God. Thank you, Jesus.”

  That night, the service, including this exchange, was seen by millions of evangelical Americans on CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network. Palin’s remarks about Sanjay were picked up by CNN and eventually the networks other than F3.

  The next day, arriving back in Washington, the reporters shouted questions: “Madam President, are you saying that Sanjay Sharma is the Antichrist?” “Madam President, do you know what the word ‘theocracy’ means; do you know the difference between ‘theology’ and ‘theocracy’?” “Do you think he’s cute?” “Do you know that Mr. Sharma is an American citizen?” “Do you think all Americans of Indian descent are foreigners?”

  Her aides, once again in control, ushered her along, and the questions were answered only with a small-mouthed “God bless you.”

  Walt and I were delighted by this unexpected development, but Sanjay was not so sure.

  “It’s not supposed to be about me,” he said.

  But it was. Sanjay’s picture hit all the papers, tabloids, and news magazines. Suddenly his face was ubiquitous. “The face of evil?” was the caption on the cover of Time. Christian blogs and websites overflowed with biblical analysis mostly pointing to overwhelming evidence that he was indeed the Antichrist (replacing Prince William and Barack Obama as previous Internet favorites). Ironically, one of the factors most often cited was Sanjay’s obvious gentleness and goodness. Many evangelical pastors cited a well-known early church sermon on the subject:

  … while a youth, the crafty dragon appears under the appearance of righteousness, before he takes the Kingdom. Because he will be craftily gentle to all people, not receiving gifts, not placed before another person, loving to all people, quiet to everyone, not desiring gifts, appearing friendly among close friends, so that men may bless him, saying—he is a just man, not knowing that a wolf lies concealed under the appearance of a lamb, and that a greedy man is inside under the skin of a sheep.

  At press conferences, reporters from the Christian media tried to connect Sanjay with biblical prophecy regarding the Antichrist, asking, for example, whether he would support a seven-year treaty guaranteeing peace with Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, a socialist “New World Order,” or one-world religion (all signs of the end times familiar to the millions of devotees of the Left Behind series of books and films). He was even asked if he had ever visited Babylon, to which he replied in a typically light but respectful way, “If you mean the location of the ancient Mesopotamian city, the ruins of which are currently located in modern Iraq, the answer is no. If you mean the town on Long Island, yes, I confess I attended a friend’s wedding there. A Christian wedding.”

  F3’s attack against Sanjay was more sophisticated and began with a multipart “exposé” of TW, focusing not on the biblical case for belief in Sanjay as the Antichrist but making an astonishing array of spurious allegations about Sanjay and the staff, board, and funders of TW, all based on “informed sources” and not a single one backed by any evidence. These included accusations that TW was funded by radical Islamic groups, that new staff members underwent bizarre homosexual induction rituals, that I had been fired from RCD&S for embezzlement that was then covered up so as not to embarrass the firm, and that Sanjay subscribed to an obscure Hindu pagan yoga cult whose rituals required aborted fetuses. It would have been farcical had most of the enormous F3 audience not simply accepted it all as true.

  The liberal and mainstream press again fell into the trap of ridiculing the president’s ignorance and superstition as opposed to taking her words at face value. But at least Sanjay and TW now had a platform. When we held a press conference, all the media showed up. When Sanjay traveled and lectured, he was treated as a celebrity.

  After the burst of legislation in the first months of Palin’s second term, the considerable drama of Justice Steven’s death, the Supreme Court’s dramatic reversal of a century of constitutional jurisprudence, and the resulting tsunami of social legislation in the red state capitals, the second year of the Palin administration was relatively quiet, and the East and West Coasts of the country seemed to draw a collective sigh of relief. But Sanjay knew that the pacing was deliberate. Jordan and the other evangelical leaders allowed the fear to abate and the non-evangelical population to adjust to the new reality. After a year, the prevailing view, expressed both by pundits and the man on the street, was “It’s not so bad.”

  While things became relatively quiet in the Congress, the administration was busy imposing its agenda on the executive branch of the federal government. In early 2014 President Palin appointed Michael Farris as the new secretary of education. Farris was the founder and chancellor of Patrick Henry College, a four-year Christian college founded in 2000 whose motto is “For Christ and for Liberty.” But F
arris was no ordinary Christian educator. A lawyer, Farris in 1983 founded the Home School Legal Defense Association and was the leading force persuading evangelicals to remove their children from the public schools and all the distractions of a modern education. Instead, he promoted a curriculum of Christ-centered homeschooling texts to ensure that the children emerged into adulthood with a wholly fundamentalist Christian worldview and prepared, as Generation Joshua, to assume their places in the battle to retake America for Jesus. He was remarkably successful. And these evangelical homeschoolers—estimated to number somewhere between one and two million—were in addition to the 15 percent of all private school students in the country who were enrolled in conservative Christian academies.

  All faculty and students at Patrick Henry were required to sign a Statement of Faith, and all teaching was strictly required to adhere to the literal truth of the Bible as its core principle. The college had been denied accreditation in the normal way due to its exclusive teaching of creation science, although it did receive an alternative accreditation from something called the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. In a widely aired radio interview, Farris had explained his contempt for the concepts of religious and social toleration. No other religion could be tolerated, he explained, because it was “error.” His comment that “tolerance cannot coexist with liberty” had been widely reported. This was the core theocratic principle: True liberty meant the liberty of the Christian to exist in a Christian Nation free of competing faiths or tolerance of practices at odds with his fundamentalist theology. As a result, in a perversion of ordinary meaning and common sense, the pursuit of liberty became the pursuit of a society in which there was no freedom to believe or live in any way that was at odds with the evangelical faith.