Christian Nation

by Frederic C. Rich

  A few muffled “Amens” rose from the room.

  Three men in army uniforms—colonels, I believe—walked to the center of the stage.

  “Thank you, Reverend,” one of them opened. “The special military tribunal convened by order of the president to deal with domestic enemy combatants in the Holy War for the Union has reached a judgment in your case. Although Executive Order No. 424 gives the military tribunal exclusive jurisdiction, the president asked that our finding be reviewed by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which also sits as a special court to advise the federal judiciary on questions of biblical law. The commission has instructed us to come before you to read its decision.” He looked up and then continued.

  “In the matter of The People of the United States of America v. Enemy Combatants in the State of New York, this tribunal finds said enemy combatants guilty of sedition, treason, armed insurrection, and conversion of federal property. You are hereby sentenced to death.” He again paused to let this sink in. I heard only a few gasps and quiet groans in the large room.

  “However, the sentence of death is hereby suspended for three years, or until such earlier time as you indicate by your words or deeds that you have closed your heart to the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Each of you is ordered confined to the federal Faith & Freedom Rehabilitation Facility, Governors Island, until such time as you are born again in Christ’s love and you have demonstrated for six months thereafter the sincerity and total conviction with which you have accepted Jesus as your savior, following which time you shall be released and your death sentence commuted. May God bless you and forgive you for your sins.”

  The three colonels left the stage, and a murmur erupted among the men until the guards brusquely demanded silence.

  A blond man in his late thirties in civilian dress came to the front of the room. His large boyish face presented a picture of corn-fed innocence, but the head sat atop a body that exuded danger. It was a body that suggested vanity, pride, and obsession with physical prowess. Half of a crucifix tattoo peeked out from the arm of a T-shirt, the sleeves of which seemed to me to be unnecessarily tight. He moved with an awkward self-consciousness. His expression tended toward a sneer. This is a person, I imagined darkly, who likes watching others suffer.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to Camp Purity. I am Joe Jones, superintendent of the Faith & Freedom Rehabilitation Facility, Governors Island, better known among those who will be your … your … hosts here as Camp Purity. In case there was any doubt about your sentence, let me make it clear. You are criminals who have been convicted of multiple capital offenses and sentenced to death. That sentence has been temporarily suspended. You now have a choice. You will accept Jesus as your savior and be born again in Christ, or you will be executed. If you cease to work in good faith on your rehabilitation in Christ’s love, you will be executed. If you falsely claim to have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, a heinous sin and crime, you will be executed. If you are not born again within three years, you will be executed. Are you getting the picture?”

  He paused for dramatic effect, his gaze fixed on a large crucifix, with a Christ figure that was at least fifteen feet tall, mounted on the side wall of the large hall. His gaze drew mine and others. This was not the lanky Jesus mild of countless medieval and Renaissance depictions. This was Jesus the warrior, with the musculature of a marine and a fierce gaze that spoke of defiance to his torturers, not submission and suffering. His crucifixion was grotesque, with splayed skin and bone fragments hanging from the nail wounds in his ankles, and tendons and blood vessels spilling from a large tear in his right wrist. The dirty cloth that was supposed to maintain the modesty of the crucified Christ instead suggested his virility. As a sculptural object, the crucifix was literal, empty, and entirely without art. I could not imagine how it could inspire devotion.

  “On the other hand,” Superintendent Jones continued, “if you look honestly at your lives, if you are truly contrite for the terrible sins you have committed, if you open your hearts to Christ, if you study the Bible and pray, if you maintain your purity, and if you hand over your life to Jesus, then you will experience the most wonderful thing that can happen to a mortal man. Your old selves—your grasping, dark, sinful, satanic selves—will suddenly melt away. The lies of Satan will disappear in a moment when they’re exposed as the illusions they are, and you’ll be filled with the light of Christ and know that you have gained eternal life through his grace. For six months after this wonderful epiphany, you will stay here with your brothers so the strength and integrity of your second birth can be tested. When we know it to be real, you’ll be released to take your places as devout and useful citizens of our Christian Nation. Any questions?”

  As a lawyer, I had to admire the clever construction of our sentence. Our death sentences were suspended for three years (meaning we died if we had not converted in thirty-six months). But the suspension also lapsed (that is, we would be executed) before the three years were up if we indicated by our words or deeds that we have closed our heart “to the saving grace of Jesus Christ.” So, if at any time they thought we were not trying hard enough to be saved, then they had license to kill us at will. I could imagine President Jordan explaining to the people how his government had shown the mercy of Christ to the rebels on Manhattan, sparing our lives and giving us every chance to find the peace of the Lord and emerge as free men. No one would know that each of us stood under the sword of Damocles, hanging by a thread, facing death every minute of every day, if by word or deed or bad luck one of our captors decided that our heart was irredeemably closed to the light of the Lord.

  Having scanned the room, the superintendent suddenly looked more animated than he had at any other stage of the proceedings.

  “Now that you understand your sentence, and the gracious mercy of Christ that has been extended to you by your fellow citizens, I will turn to the next topic. This is masturbation.”

  I thought at first that I had not heard right and looked to the person to my right for affirmation. He arched an eyebrow. Seeing the confusion in the room, the superintendent repeated himself.

  “Yes, that’s right, masturbation.”

  For ten months they had laid siege to Manhattan. Tens of thousands of Americans all around the country had died in the Holy War. And now that victory was finally theirs, now that they had the most committed Secs within their control, theirs to reshape in accordance with their holy vision, now that their moment had come … I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. In my confusion, I remembered a comment Sanjay had made—that all authoritarian regimes, were they not so tragic, tended toward the farcical. Superintendent Jones continued.

  “Look within yourselves. Somewhere deep down you knew this day would come. From the first day you pleasured yourself you knew it was wrong. Ugly. Unclean. A perversion of the purpose of sex. An abomination in the sight of God.”

  He glanced dramatically at the crucifix.

  “A terrible violation of His temple, your body. Impurity—the corruption of your bodies—is what opened your souls to Satan. Impurity literally cracked open the door to evil, and evil flowed through that crack and filled up the work with corruption, like water flowing through the crack in a dam. So you see, impurity is what lies at the root of every social and political evil. And, what’s worse, you and your culture were blind to impurity; instead, you tolerated, even celebrated, the corruption. And this tolerance of impurity is what caused God to punish us on 9/11 and then again on 7/22.”

  We had heard this part before. The moment that President Palin publicly endorsed the idea that America’s disobedience to God caused both 9/11 and 7/22 is the moment that so many of us first awakened to the danger we faced. Many in the room shifted in their seats.

  “Do you understand? Everything, everything that was wrong with you and with the wicked culture you built was based on the black foundation of sexual violation. Thus, it is obvious that to create the conditions where you c
an enjoy the redemption of Christ’s love, we must pull down that foul foundation. The place to start on the road to your second births is simple. You will cease to masturbate. This is the first and most important rule of Camp Purity.” He gazed around the room as if looking for someone, then continued.

  “This is so much more than a rule. This is a covenant you will make with yourselves, with one another and with God. Knowing how to make and keep covenants is the first step to knowing God. When you get to your rooms, you will find a contract on each bunk. It’s a binding agreement among the six of you in the room. Your five roommates are your brothers. They are your new family. Their role is the same as your brothers in your first life—to love and support you, to keep you strong and pure. You will agree to do this for one another and for God, and you will sign this contract. If you break your word, you are betraying yourself and your brothers and God. If one of you fails, all fail.”

  Superintendent Jones continued with his hands on his hips, his right bicep flexing so that the tattooed cross on his arm distractingly emerged from below his sleeve.

  “You will be monitored at all times. If you attempt to masturbate, you and all your brothers will be punished … punished severely. If you observe someone else attempting to masturbate and you do not report it, you and all your brothers will be punished, severely. This is the nature of your covenant with one another—a sin by one is a sin by all. There is no such thing as punishment of one of you, for the failure by one is a failure by all.”

  He again paused for effect, but this time he kept his eyes on us.

  “And in case you continue to think we are idiots, I will tell you that you are being watched at all times. Privacy is a liberal conceit and an illusion. Do you seriously think that you can hide anything from God? Privacy is an invitation to corruption. Privacy is the refuge of the pervert and the criminal. There is no privacy at Camp Purity. Just because you don’t see a camera doesn’t mean that one is not there.”

  “But let me be clear,” he said in a brighter tone. “Submission to the will of God under threat of punishment is not what we’re after. Submission to the Lord and His law is a choice. And this decision happens first in the heart. If you don’t decide in your heart to submit to God and live a pure life, then you haven’t really submitted at all. It’s your decision—but with God’s grace all of you have the capacity to make the right decision. That is all. You are dismissed.”

  DURING THE COURSE of the first year, we came to understand this surprising start to our “rehabilitation.” After all, most religious texts encompassed sexual taboos, and the evangelical movement had been preoccupied with sex since its inception. From the 1990s on, the movement was almost defined by its insistence on abstinence with the Abstinence Clearinghouse, the Southern Baptists’ celibacy program called True Love Waits, and a blizzard of other initiatives aimed at youth of high school and college age. “Purity balls” and “abstinence teas” entered the lexicon of red state students. An evangelical speakers’ bureau of beautiful male and female “power virgins” spread the word on college campuses across the South and West. What most people didn’t realize at the time was that “abstinence” included not only abstaining from sexual intercourse but also abstaining from masturbation. I became aware of that only by accident when, sometime around 2011, I was walking through Atlanta airport with a colleague and noticed black plastic arm bracelets on a significant number of young men. I had assumed the bands represented a disease, as in pink for breast cancer. But the younger lawyer with whom I was traveling set me straight.

  “They’re masturbands,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Masturbands, as in masturbation.”

  “What? I mean, why? Like what—as if it’s a disease?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. It started about six years ago. You wear it as long as you’ve stayed pure. If you’re weak and you beat off, then you have to take it off. And everyone knows and won’t shake your hand. ”

  “But … why?”

  He had no answer. During our first months at GI, the theology behind the preoccupation with masturbation became clear. One of our purity courses at Governors Island included videotaped lectures from Christine O’Donnell, a protégé of Sarah Palin who was elected as US senator from Delaware in 2012 and was one of the few members of Congress who felt it was consistent with the dignity of that office to lecture publicly about the dangers of masturbation. Her explanation was at first difficult to decipher:

  It is not enough to be abstinent with other people, you have to be abstinent alone…. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery, so you can’t masturbate without lust. The reason that you don’t tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because, again, it is not addressing the issue …

  Although she couldn’t get it quite right, it was reasonably clear to me. The Bible says that to masturbate is to have lust in your heart; it says that to have lust in your heart is adultery; and it says that adultery is forbidden—ergo, masturbation is forbidden. Not only is all sex other than marital sex forbidden, but all sex, to be permitted, must be sacred. As one of our instructors put it, “The only acceptable sex is a threesome, between man, wife, and God. Without God in the picture, it’s just fucking, like animals.”

  So in the first days of our incarceration, when we expected interrogation, abuse, and even torture, we met our roommates and signed our no-masturbation contract with much ribald comment. After all, most of us were wounded, exhausted, devastated at our failure to defend the last outpost of tolerant democracy in the country, and still apprehensive that our lives could be taken at any moment. Moreover, we were living in a setting that did not offer much in the way of either sexual stimulation or privacy. Let’s just say that few of us found obeying the first commandment of Camp Purity to be much of a sacrifice.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Assembly

  2020–2022

  … Christocentrism is inevitably a religion of suffering, of agony and death. The emblem of Christ nailed to the Cross that is set up everywhere is a vision of horror … The story of Jesus is full of crying, weeping and sudden dramas….

  [In contrast] serenity, when it wears a human face—seems to me, in fact, to be the fundamental value of Eastern religion and philosophy.

  —Michel Tournier,

  Gemini

  OUR PROGRAM AT GI WAS BUILT around a four-step method to second birth that our captors called the Four Graces. The first step was to see that we were vile sinners, disgusting in the sight of God. The second was to understand that, nonetheless, God loved us. Third was accepting that God, out of his love for the sinner, sent us His son Jesus to redeem our sins. The final step was to accept Jesus as our savior and be born again. Each prisoner wore a colored name tag that included the number of his current phase in the Four Graces program. The badges of the born again were gold and in the shape of a five-pointed star.

  As cynics and, for the most part, atheists, most of us found it hard to take the Four Graces program seriously. We furtively referred to it as SLURS (sin, love, redemption, and second birth). A morning in SLURS class had the intellectual content of a late-night infomercial. Our instructors spoke in a language that bore little relation to the English we used in Manhattan. Their sentences were peppered with the clichés of game shows and reality television and leavened with the cadences of the southern preacher. The inventor of SLURS must have been an earnest student of a twelve-step addiction program or, more precisely, a dumbed-down Jenny Craig–like version of the twelve-step idea. Eternal salvation was mapped out in four easy steps, with much group encouragement and upbeat coaching along the way. Unlike Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers, however, the SLURS program came with the significant additional motivational tool of execution as the penalty for failure or inadequate effort. This tension between the farcical absurdity of our training in purity and religion and the realities of prison life, with i
ts incipient threat of violence, created a bizarre and unsettling atmosphere at the camp.

  During the first few months, as the horror of the invasion receded and our physical wounds healed, we adjusted to the rhythm of life at GI. The threat of violence remained an undercurrent that had not yet erupted, and many of us optimistically created a mental narrative in which we were to endure a sort of extended religious summer camp, go through the motions of being saved, and then return to our lives. We gathered in a large mess hall for breakfast and prayer. Morning Bible study was conducted in neat classrooms. Midday we did welcome physical labor and chores around the island. We were not in chains. SLURS training and Bible study again in the afternoon. After dinner, they rang a bell and we were required to sit quietly for two hours and read the Bible verses that were the subject of the next day’s class.

  Our growing sense of routine was also facilitated by the familiarity of our location. We were not in the American equivalent of Siberia. Our 172-acre island stood only a half mile from the tip of Manhattan. Each time we looked out, we took comfort from familiar landmarks: Brooklyn Heights; the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges; the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge off to the south; the Statue of Liberty, Battery Park, and the familiar skyline of Lower Manhattan. In the center of that skyline was the building in which I had worked for nearly nine years, close enough to see at night which of the office lights were on or off. Close enough to see the office that used to be mine. Close enough to be reminded, every day, that but for a single choice, the person at that desk—giving a thought, or not, to the Sec fighters imprisoned outside his window—would be me. I wondered who else has been imprisoned with a mirror in which he sees, every day, the alternative universe in which he is a free man? I could not decide whether it was a comfort or a cruelty.