Christian Nation

by Frederic C. Rich

  In any other period of American history, Farris’s appointment to any position in the cabinet would have been unthinkable, but in the second year of President Palin’s second term, it hardly seemed surprising that such a man would assume a high position. The second Bush administration provided over $1 billion in federal funding to subsidize fundamentalist Christian homeschooling texts, so it was hard to argue that Farris’s obsession with homeschooling was something new to government. But the rigor and purity of his evangelical beliefs would be a potent force at the highest levels of the administration.

  At the Farris confirmation hearing, Senator Charles Schumer from New York read one of the Patrick Henry “credos”—professions of belief that were required of all students and faculty:

  “Satan exists as a personal malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.”

  The senator then asked, “So, Mr. Farris, in your capacity as a future secretary of education, does this mean that every child in America should be taught to believe that every Hindu or Muslim in India, every Buddhist or Confucian or atheist in China, every Jew, every Roman Catholic, every person everywhere in the world who has the bad luck to be born to parents who are not born-again evangelical or Pentecostal Christians, that every one of those other people, when he or she dies, faces conscious torment for eternity—that this is the fate chosen for all these people by their creator? Do I have that right?”

  “Yes, Senator,” Farris replied, “that is what the Bible says, but only if they die outside of Christ, without having accepted Christ as their redeemer, which of course is their choice. With respect, sir, you may think it strange, but who are you to question the wisdom of God? I don’t second-guess my creator.”

  F3, by now the principal source of news and views for almost half the population, hyped the purported achievements of Patrick Henry students and Farris’s own academic and legal credentials, and the appointment was approved by the Senate over the vociferous objections of the minority Democrats.

  Only a few weeks after the Farris confirmation, Walt conceived of a platform for Sanjay that proved remarkably effective. The National Prayer Breakfast was an event that had been held in Washington every February since 1953. The breakfast itself was safely anodyne, and the US president, together with three thousand other politicians and movers and shakers from around the world, could usually attend the event at the DC Hilton Hotel without fear of embarrassment. Walt’s idea was that Sanjay should use his new celebrity status to shine a spotlight on the more sinister aspect of the gathering. Sanjay called a press conference on the street outside the Hilton and, while the breakfast was proceeding in the ballroom inside, opened with a short statement:

  I am sure most Americans think that having our president—and members of Congress, judges, diplomats, and other leaders—come together for an annual moment of spiritual reflection and prayer, a moment of unity, is not a bad thing—indeed, that it should be commended. I agree completely. But since 1953 those same good Americans have been deceived by the people inside this building. Yes, that is right. Deceived. They have been deceived because this break fast is sponsored by, and is one of the rare public manifestations of, a long-standing secret political movement that calls itself The Family. This organization, led by the man—Doug Coe—whom our national leaders are inside applauding as I speak, has only a single purpose: to recruit politically powerful people to the cause of dominionist theology—that is, rule by God’s law, or theocracy. There can be no confusion; The Family exists to acquire power. Doug Coe has said, in a perversion of everything I know about Jesus Christ, that Jesus “prefers power to piety.”

  Once you realize what its goals are, then it should be no surprise that The Family operates on the basis of strict secrecy. They describe themselves as “an invisible organization,” and they want to hide their methods and goals from the American people. They deliberately emulate the structures and practices of the old Communist Party, organizing themselves as a system of “cells” without traditional hierarchies and with few if any members having sight of the whole organization. Did you know, my friends, that these cells, sometimes simply referred to as “prayer groups,” have existed for years within the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Pentagon—in virtually every department of our federal government? Did you know that The Family tries to impose its fundamentalist policies on impoverished foreign countries, like Uganda, where they prevented our country from supporting programs promoting condom use, causing a doubling of AIDS infections, which was followed by The Family’s urging that the country adopt the death penalty for homosexuality? It is true.

  So I ask the media and the American people to ask themselves, and to ask President Palin and the representatives and senators who attend this event every year, whether they are members of The Family and support its goals. Please ask them if they believe that biblical law and not the Constitution should be the ultimate rule in this nation. If so, please ask them why are they not honest with you about this. Please ask them when they come out of this building whether they are members of a prayer group that meets in government offices. Please ask them why they hold those meetings in secret. And please, please ask them whether or not they are committed to tolerating the beliefs of their fellow Americans who are not born-again evangelical Christians.

  It was a brilliant move. The press did just that. For the first time ever, the politicians leaving the National Prayer Breakfast were accosted by reporters and asked most of the awkward questions suggested by Sanjay. Many admitted with pride to participating in long-standing Family-sponsored prayer groups, and said they had never hidden their conviction that God’s law was supreme. Others denied any knowledge of something called The Family. All stumbled over the question of tolerance. In an act of breathtaking double-speak, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, whose husband had called gays “barbarians” and ran a Christian counseling clinic that advised youngsters to “pray away the gay,” answered, “Of course I’m not for intolerance, because it is against freedom and un-American. But let me be perfectly clear, I am against, and the Lord tells us we must take a stand against, evil in all its forms. That I cannot tolerate and will not tolerate. So if that’s what you mean by intolerance, well then, that’s something different. That’s what America is all about.”

  The Palin White House was not pleased, and F3, backed now by a perfectly coordinated Christian broadcasting industry, launched a strident campaign against the “coastal media elite.” I found a clipping in Adam’s file that was typical of the F3 editorial view:

  These Ivy League egghead intellectual so-called journalists are nothing but frustrated radical liberal professors mounting a rearguard action against the American people. The American people have spoken, but they do not hear. Instead, they take the public for idiots, repeating and spreading every lie and slander anyone can think up to embarrass President Palin, Steve Jordan, and religious people everywhere. They hate God—you can hear it in their voices. They hate ordinary Americans—they hate how we live, how we look, how we eat, how we raise our children, and they hate our religion. It is completely outrageous, and unacceptable, that these people—so out of touch, and with such an extreme agenda—command most of the airwaves and talk time and newspapers in this great country. We call on President Palin and the Congress to do something about it. The use of the airwaves and bandwidth in America is a public trust, and they have breached this trust. Do something, Madam President. We just cannot take it anymore.

  But it was not that easy. The Supreme Court was still functioning, the Constitution was still in effect, and Jordan knew that overt censorship would alienate the undecided Americans who still didn’t know whether to support the Christian Nation as an overdue restoration of traditional values or to fear it as an authoritarian movement fundamentally at odds with personal freedom. He knew that overt censorship would suggest the l
atter. Nor could they resort to the old mantra of “fair and balanced,” as F3 itself was universally understood to be a partisan advocate for the Christian Nation project. So the media initiative in the last year of President Palin’s administration was more nuanced, but still oddly misconceived and ultimately unsuccessful. Their first step was to have the Internal Revenue Service promulgate a regulation providing that no media company could deduct as a business expense the costs of a newspaper or news program that consistently demonstrated “extreme liberal bias.” This would have resulted in all related gross revenues being taxed as profit, making continuation of news programming by the targeted companies impossible on other than a not-for-profit basis. This was a rare stumble by Steve Jordan, as the clumsy regulation contravened a host of administrative law and constitutional principles and was widely opposed by the business community. A federal court overturned it within months of its adoption.

  The second initiative was equally unsuccessful. In retribution for Jim Lehrer’s PBS program, NewsHour, devoting an entire show to an interview with Jeff Sharlet, a journalist who years before had written a brilliant but underappreciated exposé of The Family, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (whose board had been highjacked by Palin/Jordan partisans) cut off all funding for the program. The next night, Lehrer was able to announce on the program that its various charitable foundation “underwriters” had agreed to step up and replace the funding pulled by the government. PBS responded by announcing that it was dropping NewsHour from the network’s schedule. After missing only a single night, the NewsHour crew reassembled at the CNN studios in New York and carried on as before—without commercial sponsorship and with increased visibility and stature as a fiercely independent and fiercely intelligent source for old-fashioned nonpartisan journalism.

  About a week later, everyone in the TW office was startled when the receptionist called across the room to Sanjay, “Sanjay, Steve Jordan is on the phone.” Sanjay raised an eyebrow, returned to his office, and closed the door. Only about a minute later, he emerged.

  “Steve Jordan has agreed to meet me. I sent a letter asking if he would. He asked if I would come down to DC next week. I said yes.”

  Sanjay took me to his only meeting with Steve Jordan. The meeting was at F3’s headquarters in Washington, not the White House. We were ushered into an ordinary corporate-looking conference room that smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Jordan did not behave as if he was meeting the Antichrist. He entered alone, greeted both of us cordially, and made Sanjay a cup of tea.

  “I thought,” said Sanjay, “that we should meet.”

  “I welcome the opportunity. What would you like to discuss?”

  “May I ask you a question?” Sanjay asked.

  “Sure,” Jordan replied, apparently completely relaxed.

  “The core message of your religion is love. So why do you hate me?”

  “I don’t. I hate your sin. You, Mr. Sharma, might still experience God’s love. All you need to do is to accept what He has offered, which is Jesus Christ as savior. Your sin can be redeemed.”

  “You believe that God created me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then how can it be a sin to be who I am? He made my skin brown. He made me a homosexual.”

  “You are mistaken. You have free will and your creator has told you clearly that homosexuality is a serious sin. It is no more a defense to say that God made you a homosexual than it would be for a murderer to say that murder is not a sin because God made him a murderer.”

  Sanjay looked thoughtful, then continued. “You say my creator has told me. With respect, my creator has not spoken to me. The Bible was written and assembled by men. I understand completely that, following prayer and meditation, an individual person may have insights that take the form of answers. But when you take these individual answers and give them a privileged and authoritative position, this is very dangerous. Claiming the authority of God can justify any ambition and absolve you of personal responsibility for any act. What about your murderer? What if he simply asserted that it was God’s will?”

  Jordan ignored the question. “May I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you believe that the essence of the human condition is ignorance? That the gift of reason properly tells us that most of what is important is not understood or understandable?”

  “Man is a deeply spiritual animal,” Sanjay replied, “aware of the great mysteries and questing always for answers.”

  “And doesn’t this imply the moral imperative of humility?” Jordan continued. “Humility, Mr. Sharma, is what allows us to submit to authority. And that is what you and every man must do, and in it you will find great joy. That is what God is: authority. God said sodomy is a sin. You don’t ask why; it is because He said so. God made the speed of light 186,000 miles per second. You don’t ask why, do you? It just is.”

  “I understand authority. I understand it in parents, bosses, and generals. All are given a type of authority by society that is not only limited but can be taken from them if they abuse it. And, with the exception of children before they are emancipated, we submit to that authority by choice. But your God gives us no choice and is not accountable. And the purported expression of His authority is an old, imperfect, and conflicting set of texts. As a practical matter, this means that the real authority is vested in those, like you Mr. Jordan, who boldly claim to speak for God.”

  “Then you just don’t understand faith. Faith is a type of knowledge, and it is the means by which we accept the authority of God and His word.”

  “I understand what faith is. I have no problem with faith; it is a very human thing and can be a good thing. But faith should never demand credence in the face of demonstrated contradiction. Faith maintained in the face of manifest contradiction is not a type of knowledge; it is a type of ignorance. There was a tribe in Papua New Guinea whose faith stipulated that the people of their tribe were the only people on earth. Then, after thousands of years, a bunch of Australians hiked over the mountain and presented a new fact. The tribe adjusted. The faith that you promote precludes the possibility of adjustment. It demands credence in the face of contradiction on matters ranging from evolution to whether people are born homosexual or choose it.”

  “You should understand, Mr. Sharma, that one of the reasons I believe you are a dangerous person is that you promote sin and disobedience and actually make possible sins by others, like abortion. It is one thing to engage in individual sinful behavior; it is another thing to lead a movement that opposes God. As Christians, we have a duty to deal with that very harshly.”

  “If that is what you think, Mr. Jordan,” Sanjay replied, “then I am glad we are having this meeting. I defy you to present one bit of evidence that I oppose God. I do not believe in the existence of a personal God in the same way as Muslims, Jews, and Christians do, but I do not oppose those who choose an omnipotent being as their model for the great mystery. As for what I promote, it is laws and a society in which every person’s freedom to do just that has our highest protection. Do you not see, sir, that by being so certain in the infallibility of your own beliefs, that it is you who oppose the God of others?”

  “You have, Mr. Sharma, fundamentally misunderstood what religion is. The essence of every religion is the exclusivity of its truth claim. Either Mohammed is God’s prophet or he is not. Either Jesus is the life and the way to eternal salvation or he is not. More than one religion cannot be true. Ecumenicalism is an impossible dream; the beliefs of the major religions are simply not consistent. Torture them into some sort of mush where one can live alongside the other, and they lose all their coherence.”

  “On that,” Sanjay said, “we may agree. But that doesn’t mean that human destiny is for all religions to war with one another until one triumphs. The other alternative is that no religion triumphs, that mankind as a whole recognizes that all religious stories are best understood as parables and properly celebrates and respects the w
isdom in all of them.”

  They continued in this fashion for two hours. Jordan ended the meeting saying, “Mr. Sharma, I’m glad you asked for this meeting. It’s been useful—extremely useful, actually—for me to understand you better.”

  As fascinated as I was by being present at this exchange, it simply confirmed my view that religious zealotry was ultimately tautological. Sanjay was deeply committed to discussion. To me, the meeting demonstrated that discussion would get us nowhere. Sanjay was abnormally quiet and thoughtful for the next couple of weeks. He did not want to talk about it.

  DURING THE FINAL part of President Palin’s second term, the administration went quiet. No new Christian Nation initiatives were announced, and Congress and the president focused on improving the economy in advance of the 2016 elections. But during this period Steve Jordan emerged from his self-imposed obscurity and gradually assumed the de facto role of a co-president. The president rarely appeared in public without him, and when she did, Jordan’s telegenic confidence, articulateness, and intelligence tended to overwhelm her own uncertainty and complete reliance on scripted statements and responses. In a strange way, the media and public were relieved that someone capable appeared to be with the president at the helm. In a process I believe to be unprecedented in American history, an unelected person—other than a presidential spouse—was accepted as performing many of the duties of the presidency and, by doing so, became an obvious and accepted candidate to replace the president he was assisting. President Palin took to referring to him as “our next president” and “my successor.” Not a single serious candidate emerged to challenge Jordan in the Republican primaries. As a result, all his political speeches during the primary campaign were aimed at the political center, designed to appeal to the non-evangelical electorate that needed to be convinced that Jordan should be welcomed and not feared. The God-centered rhetoric was suddenly gone, and Jordan’s speeches from those months could have been made by any conservative Republican primary candidate from ten years before. Showing again a tendency for wishful thinking that ultimately proved fatal, many Americans indulged the hope that this Christian Nation business had been taken as far as it would go and that this intelligent and competent man would stabilize things after the embarrassments and traumas of the Palin years.