Christian Nation

by Frederic C. Rich

  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.”

  Dozens of red states quickly followed suit, and by summer hundreds of thousands of men (there were no women) were spending every weekend marching, drilling, training, displaying their weapons, and preparing to defend the Christian Nation and The Blessing from gays, abortion doctors, communists, Muslims, liberals, immigrants, and elites. The militia exercises usually started with a loud pledge to the “Christian flag,” which first became popular after Dan Quayle was reported to have recited it in 1994: “I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands. One savior, crucified, risen and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.”

  Rallying in Oklahoma City with a ragtag collection of secularists, humanists, lawyers, and other opponents of The Blessing, we asked the media to focus on the fact that “liberty” and “freedom” had been dropped from the names of these militias and all these armed men were now simply “Christians,” sworn not to protect our liberty or even the Constitution but now sworn officially to “defend the Christian Nation and the covenants of The Blessing” and, unofficially, to “eradicate evil.” We asked everyone to listen closely to the pledge to the Christian flag, which substitutes “life and liberty for all who believe” for the traditional “liberty and justice for all.” Could it be more clear, we asked, that Jordan and his supporters had now turned their backs on the Constitution they long claimed to venerate? Could it be more clear that they were betraying the conservative and American values of personal freedom and limited government? Could not everyone see the sort of hypocrisy foreshadowed by the Terri Schiavo affair, with the proper scope and role of government depending entirely on who controlled it and on the ends for which it was being deployed? Limited government was all well and good when liberal elites were in control and pursuing a liberal agenda; but look at how quickly the federal government ceased to be a target for disdain once it was firmly in fundamentalist control and dedicated to the implementation of their theocratic vision.

  We asked every American of good faith to consider the implications of having an armed national militia outside the control of our professional military and law enforcement, a militia dedicated to ending the freedoms of conscience, worship, speech, and privacy for all who did not embrace their fundamentalist views. Where, we asked, would this be stopped and how and by whom? There was only one answer, we argued. It could be stopped only if each and every American of good will rose up and proclaimed that intolerance would not be tolerated, and defended our constitutional democracy with the same vigor that they would defend their families from physical assault. And yes, if you want to know if by “vigor” we meant necessary violence, yes. This was a large and difficult step for Sanjay, who by nature was entirely nonviolent.

  When Sanjay and I returned to New York with the TW team, we received a vivid reminder that martial law was still in effect. All the Oklahoma-based organizers of the rally at which we spoke were arrested by federal troops the next day, without explanation to their families except that they were being detained under martial law powers and that military tribunals would hear their cases. This was a first. During the second Palin administration, the federal military was slow to employ its martial law powers. Initially, troops made some high-profile detentions of illegal immigrants, who were generally deported without hearings or other legal nicety. Then Muslims, including US citizens, began to be arrested on grounds of “national security” and detained in special Guantanamo-like facilities established for domestic terrorism suspects in Alabama and Wyoming. Shamefully, the legacy of 7/22 was such that there was little public outcry against this practice. But, to our knowledge, neither administration had before used its martial law powers against political opponents or outspoken critics of the Christian Nation. And now, when Sanjay and I were safely home in New York, all the dissidents whom we had put in the national spotlight were arrested and, effectively, “disappeared.” Sanjay held another press conference denouncing the arrests, as did the governors of a dozen other states and every remaining independent member of Congress. But these protests had no impact. Shortly after we returned to New York, I said to Sanjay, for the first time, that I feared that the situation might be irreversible. Tonight I remembered exactly what he said in reply.

  “Just remember, G, there are battles and there are wars. And even nations that win wars do not stay on top forever. Nothing is irreversible.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Secession

  2017

  The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

  —Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  IT WAS A SHORT AND PLEASANT WALK from TW’s offices near the World Trade Center, up Broadway and through City Hall Park to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse on Pearl Street. The sky was that spectacularly clear September blue that New Yorkers who were there in 2001 will forever associate with 9/11. In addition to the sky, what I most remember about our walk is the superficial impression of profound normality. Wall Streeters queued at their favorite coffee carts, and bike messengers weaved in and out of traffic. Female bankers in expensive shoes climbed the steps from the subway with young Indian software engineers and Jamaican secretaries. We watched an angry Russian limo driver scream profanities at a Sikh cabby while the Russian’s passenger sat in the backseat reading the Times, unperturbed. Normal. And yet there we were, on our way to hear a federal judge deliver the first decision arising out of our many challenges to a statute whose existence—only ten years before—would have been unimaginable. This unimaginable thing had happened, and yet everyone was acting normally.

  Of course, I remember thinking, the unimaginable happens. I in particular knew that. I was a person with two parents and a sister and, suddenly, I was an orphan without siblings. Unimaginable. I thought of those who had walked up this stretch of Broadway before me. Could the Native Americans whose ancestors reaped the riches of Mannahatta for forty generations have imagined the smelly, disease-ridden white men who sailed into the harbor on great floating birds with white wings and put an end to their civilization? Could the Dutch citizens of this island have imagined that overnight, without a shot fired, the burghers of New Amsterdam would become subjects of the British crown? Could the crowd watching George Washington’s inauguration as the republic’s first president have imagined that in a little more than a century, the ragtag collection of colonies would surpass the great historic global empires of England, France, and Spain as the world’s new superpower? Could the commuters in Lower Manhattan on the morning of September 10, 2001, have possibly imagined that a day later the Twin Towers would be gone, three thousand of their neighbors dead, Lower Manhattan in flames, not a plane in the sky, and the world again changed forever? Nothing seems more inevitable than the status quo, and yet nothing is more certain than that it will—eventually—end suddenly and that we will need to make our lives in a new, unfamiliar and unexpected landscape.

  HEADING TO COURT that morning, we were both exasperated and comforted by the relentless, reckless normality all around us on the street.

  “You worried?” I asked Sanjay.

  “Not unless you are,” he replied. “You told me that this was one we really could not lose. You told me that Denny Chin was the right judge. You told me that we were fantastically lucky that the first challenge on the merits was Blessing One. So no, I am not worried.”

  I was worried. It was true that the best lawyers in the country were responsible for the tsunami of litigation that we had unleashed in the federal and state courts. And we were relieved that most courts pro
mptly issued a “stay”—an order preventing the challenged legislation from coming into effect pending resolution of the challenge on its merits. But the real test would come when the courts addressed the substantive question of whether or not the law should be invalidated due to its conflict with the Constitution, or some other deficiency.

  We were on our way that morning to hear the first of those substantive decisions on the “merits.” The case dealt with the first Blessing: “As the fate of the nation depends entirely on unbending obedience to the will of God, it shall be treasonous to deny the existence of God, to question the Word of God, or to advocate disobedience to the will of God.” This first Blessing was, from a constitutional and legal perspective, particularly egregious. Of course making it treasonous to deny the existence of God violated the separation clause, the Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, and a raft of other constitutional protections. The Supreme Court’s elimination of the right of privacy in its Gonzales decision made the constitutional challenge more complicated but still easy to establish. In addition, as a federal statute, its form was deficient in almost every respect in which a law could be deficient. Although evangelicals believed that the Word of God and will of God were somehow objectively ascertainable, presumably through reference to the Bible, as the basis for criminal treason, the concepts were fatally vague and uncertain. Moreover—putting aside the issues of whether God is a real or an imaginary being, and which “God” is being referred to—a crime consisting of “questioning” God’s “Word” and “advocating disobedience” to His “will” would be impossible to apply and adjudicate consistently and equitably. The US solicitor general obviously had struggled with his defense of the legislation. The government’s brief, among other things, had argued that The Blessing did not specify which “God” was being referred to and therefore could not be viewed as establishing any particular religion.