Interior States

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  I met with Benek at a café across the street from his church in Fort Lauderdale. In my email to him, I’d presented my curiosity as journalistic, unable to admit—even to myself—what lay behind my desire to meet. My grandparents live not too far from his church, so it was easy to pass it off as a casual excursion while visiting family, rather than the point of the trip itself.

  He arrived in the same navy blazer he’d worn in The Daily Show interview and appeared just as nervous. Throughout the first half hour of our conversation, he seemed reluctant to divulge the full scope of his ideas, as though he was aware that he’d stumbled into an intellectual obsession that was bad for his career. The Daily Show had been a disaster, he told me. He had spoken with them for an hour about the finer points of his theology, but the interview had been cut down to his two-minute spiel on robots—something he insisted he wasn’t even interested in; it was just a thought experiment he’d been goaded into. “It’s not like I spend my days speculating on how to evangelize robots,” he said.

  The music in the café was not as loud as I would have liked. Several people nearby were flipping aimlessly at their phones in the manner of eavesdroppers trying to appear inconspicuous. I explained that I wanted to know whether transhumanist ideas were compatible with Christian eschatology. Was it possible that technology would be the avenue by which humanity achieved the resurrection and immortality?

  I worried that the question sounded a little deranged, but Benek appeared suddenly energized. It turned out he was writing a dissertation on precisely this subject. The title was “The Eschaton Is Technological.”

  “Technology has a role in the process of redemption,” he said. Christians today assume the prophecies about bodily perfection and eternal life are going to be realized in heaven. But the disciples understood those prophecies as referring to things that were going to take place here on Earth. Jesus had spoken of the Kingdom of God as a terrestrial domain, albeit one in which the imperfections of earthly existence were done away with. This idea, he assured me, was not unorthodox; it was just old.

  I asked Benek about humility. Wasn’t the gospel about the fallen nature of the flesh and our tragic limitations as humans?

  “Sure,” he said. He paused a moment, as though debating whether to say more. Finally, he leaned in and rested his elbows on the table, his demeanor markedly pastoral, and began speaking about the Transfiguration. This event, described in several of the Gospels, portrays Jesus climbing to the top of a mountain with three of his disciples. Suddenly, Moses and Elijah appear out of thin air, their bodies encircled with holy light. Then Jesus’s appearance is changed. His disciples notice that “He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light.” Theologians have identified this as a moment when the temporal and the eternal overlapped, with Christ standing as the bridge between heaven and Earth.

  It was a curious passage, Benek said. “Jesus is human, but he’s also something else.” Christ, he reminded me, was characterized by the hypostatic union: he was both fully human and fully God. What was interesting, he said, was that science had actually verified the potential for matter to have two distinct natures. Superposition, a principle in quantum theory, suggests that an object can be in two places at one time. A photon could be a particle, and it could also be a wave. It could have two natures. “When Jesus tells us that if we have faith nothing will be impossible for us, I think he means that literally.”

  By this point, I had stopped taking notes. It was late afternoon, and the café was washed in amber light. Perhaps I was a little dehydrated, but Benek’s ideas began to make perfect sense. This was, after all, the promise implicit in the incarnation: that the body could be both human and divine, that the human form could walk on water. “Very truly I tell you,” Christ had said to his disciples, “whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.” His earliest followers had taken this promise literally. Perhaps these prophecies had pointed to the future achievements of humanity all along, our ability to harness technology to become transhuman. Christ had spoken mostly in parables—no doubt for good reason. If a superior being had indeed come to Earth to prophesy the future to first-century humans, he would not have wasted time trying to explain modern computing or sketching the trajectory of Moore’s law on a scrap of papyrus. He would have said, “You will have a new body,” and “All things will be changed beyond recognition,” and “On Earth as it is in heaven.” Perhaps only now that technologies were emerging to make such prophecies a reality could we begin to understand what Christ meant about the fate of our species.

  I could sense my reason becoming loosened by the lure of these familiar conspiracies. Somewhere, in the pit of my stomach, it was amassing: the fevered, elemental hope that the tumult of the world was authored and intentional, that our profound confusion would one day click into clarity and the broken body would be restored. Part of me was still helpless against the pull of these ideas.

  It was late. The café had emptied and a barista was sweeping near our table. As we stood to go, I couldn’t help feeling that our conversation was unresolved. I suppose I’d been hoping that Benek would hand me some final hermeneutic, or even offer a portal back to the faith, one paved by the certitude of modern science. But if anything had become clear to me, it was my own desperation, my willingness to spring at this largely speculative ideology that offered a vestige of that first religious promise. I had disavowed Christianity, and yet I’d spent the past ten years hopelessly trying to re-create its visions by dreaming about our postbiological future or fixating on the optimization of my own body—a modern pantomime of redemption. What else could lie behind these impulses but the ghost of that first hope?

  Outside, the heat of the afternoon had cooled to a balmy warmth. I decided to walk for an hour along the streets of the shopping district, a palm-lined neighborhood along the canals of the Intracoastal from where you could glimpse the masts of the marina and, beyond them, the deep Prussian blue of the Atlantic. Fort Lauderdale is a hub for spring breakers, but it was only January and the city was still populated by the moneyed winter set. Argentineans and Chileans and French Canadians spent all day at the beach and now, in these temperate hours before dusk, took to the streets in expensive-looking spandex. People jogged along the gauntlet of beachside boutiques and unfurled polyethylene mats beneath banyan canopies for yoga in the park. A flock of speed-bikers swooped along the shoulder and disappeared, leaving in their wake a faint gust of sweat.

  I was thinking of the scene from Hannah and Her Sisters where Woody Allen’s character, who spends the course of the film searching for the right religion, is in a morbid mood, walking along the footpaths of Central Park. “Look at all these people jogging,” he scoffs, “trying to stave off the inevitable decay of the body.” I have often felt this way myself when watching people exercise en masse, as though the specter of all those bodies in motion summed up the futility of the whole human project—or perhaps offered an unflattering reflection of my own pathetic striving. But on this particular evening, in the last light of day, there was something mesmerizing in the dance of all these bodies in space. There were old bodies and young bodies, men and women, their limbs tanned and lambent with perspiration. They were stretching and lunging with arms outstretched in a posture of veneration, all of them animated by the same eternal choreography, driven by the echo of that ancient hope. Perhaps it was, in the end, a hope that was rooted in delusion. But was it more virtuous to concede to the cold realities of materialism—to believe, as Solomon did, that we are sediment blowing aimlessly in the wind, dust that will return to dust?

  The joggers swept past me on either side of the sidewalk and wove through the crowd, like particles dispersing in a vacuum. All of them were heading in the same direction, up the bridge that crossed the marina and ended at
the spread of the ocean. I watched as they receded into the distance and disappeared, one by one.

  2017, n+1

  EXILED

  It has become something of a commonplace to say that Mike Pence belongs to another era. He is a politician whom the New York Times has called a “throwback,” a “dangerous anachronism,” and “a conservative proudly out of sync with his times,” a man whose social policies and outspoken Christian faith are so redolent of the previous century’s culture wars that he appeared to have no future until he was plucked, in the words of one journalist, “off the political garbage heap” by Donald Trump and given new life. His rise to the vice presidency has marked the return of religion and ideology to American politics at a time when the titles of political analyses were proclaiming the “twilight of social conservatism” (2015) and the “end of white Christian America” (2016), and reveals the zombie-like persistence of the Religious Right, an entity that has been deemed moribund many times over and whose final demise was for so long considered imminent that even as white evangelicals came out in droves to support the Trump-Pence ticket, their enthusiasm was dismissed, in the Washington Post, as the movement’s “last spastic breath.”

  But Pence is a curious kind of Christian politician. He is more fixated on theological arcana than on the Bible’s greatest hits (the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes). His faith is not that of Mike Huckabee, say, whose folksy Christian nationalism is reflected in the title of his book, God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy; nor is it the humble self-help Methodism to which George W. Bush once deferred (at least in his early years, before his faith was hijacked by a geopolitical crusade), speaking of Jesus as the guy who had “changed my heart.” Indeed, the most peculiar thing about Pence’s Christianity is how rarely he mentions Christ. Despite his fluency with scripture, he seldom quotes the Gospels. He speaks fondly not just of “the Good Book” but also of “the Old Book,” by which he usually means the Hebrew Bible, and it is this earlier testament that he draws from in his speeches, often with the preface that it contains “ancient truths” that are “as true today as they were in millennia past.”

  Pence does indeed live in the past, a past far more ancient than anyone has assumed. He speaks of the Old Testament as familiar terrain and regards its covenants as deeply relevant to evangelicals like himself. The God of these stories is not the familiar, tranquilized Jesus of gospel hymns and dashboard figurines but the more forbidding Yahweh who disciplines and delivers the nation of Israel. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and the God of Mike Pence—is a God who sets up kings and tears them down, who raises up the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, who pulls candidates off the political garbage pile and allows them to rule with princes. He is a God who keeps his promises, and the promise, throughout the ages, has always been the same: that the chosen people will be restored to their rightful home.

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  The biblical concept of exile—a banishment followed by a return to the homeland—has lately acquired special meaning for evangelicals. The term inundated Christian discourse in the United States following the failure of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which Pence, then the governor of Indiana, signed in 2015, soon after a judge struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The bill, which would have allowed businesspeople such as florists and caterers to discriminate against gay clients, inspired a national boycott and culminated in a disastrous appearance on George Stephanopoulos’s This Week, in which Pence evaded question after question and stammered about open-mindedness being a two-way street. “From people who preach tolerance every day,” he said, “we have been under an avalanche of intolerance.” Pence was forced to neuter the bill, and the ordeal soon fell out of the news cycle.

  But for conservative Christians, who had long seen themselves at war with the culture, the backlash was a wake-up call. Rod Dreher, an Eastern Orthodox writer for The American Conservative, claims this was the moment he realized that American believers were “living in a new country.” In late June 2015, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized gay marriage in all fifty states, and Dreher proclaimed in Time magazine that the culture wars were officially over. Progressive views on marriage and sexuality had become consensus, and Christians would now be targeted as dissenters, their beliefs classed as hate speech. “We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country,” he wrote. “We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution.” The same day, Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Convention, lamented Obergefell but offered a brighter forecast, calling on Christians to “joyfully march toward Zion” as “strangers and exiles in American culture.” Both Dreher and Moore went on to write books on the role of the church in an increasingly hostile culture, and soon, cries of exile (or #exile, per Twitter) could be heard all over Christendom.

  I left the faith more than a decade ago but remain connected to it, tangentially, through a large born-again family and an abiding anthropological curiosity, so these things tend to reach me. I knew that while exile appeared to be a fluid metaphor—a way to talk about religious liberties and political impotence—it also had a specific historic referent: the period the Jews spent in Babylonian captivity. Accounts of the exile are scattered throughout the Old Testament, though the story generally begins in 587 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar’s army razed Jerusalem and burned the Temple to the ground. The Israelites were deported to Babylon, where they remained for seventy years, lamenting the ruin of Zion and praying for deliverance. In these stories, the empire is led by a series of despotic rulers—Nebuchadnezzar, Nabonidus, Belshazzar—who seem to find sadistic pleasure in forcing the Jews to renounce their God and, when they refuse, throwing them to wild animals or into the fiery furnace. When I was studying theology at Moody Bible Institute—during the Bush years—none of the believers I knew were particularly drawn to these books. But Christians have returned to them during times of persecution, and apparently they had become newly relevant for believers who saw themselves as a religious minority in a hostile pagan empire—a people who had long mistaken Washington, D.C., for Jerusalem, and for whom the image of the White House lit up in a rainbow was a defeat as final as the desecration of the Temple.

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  Of course, for anyone familiar with evangelical rhetoric, it is obvious that “exile” is not a white flag but a revamped strategy. The Babylonian exile, after all, was temporary. All the lamentations were ultimately about deliverance, and that deliverance came in the form of a strongman: in 539 BC, Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia, conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem.

  Once Donald Trump became a serious contender for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in early 2016, some Christians saw him as the instrument of deliverance. This idea came primarily from the theological fringe that Trump courted during his campaign: televangelists, Pentecostals, health-and-wealth hucksters. It came from men like Lance Wallnau, an evangelical public speaker who met with Trump during his campaign and, in 2015, began writing articles that likened the candidate to Cyrus. Throughout history, Wallnau argued, God had used pagan leaders to enact his will and protect his people. Just as Cyrus was a powerful leader anointed by Yahweh to end the exile, so Trump was “a wrecking ball to the spirit of political correctness.” Wallnau eventually published his theory in a book, God’s Chaos Candidate. Just before the election, it reached number nineteen on Amazon’s bestseller list.

  Plenty of Christians cautioned against this narrative—most notably Moore, in the Washington Post. He and Dreher represent a more orthodox core of believers who remained skeptical of Trump and believed his presidency would be a continuation of pagan rule. (Dreher has condemned Christians who want to “Make Babylon Great Again.”) This contingent was more likely to compare Trump to Nebuchadnezzar, a king who is not remembered kindly in the Old Testament. In one story, he decrees the co
nstruction of a gold statue of himself and orders his subjects to bow down and worship it. In another, his advisors fail to interpret his dream, and he threatens to kill off his entire court. He is suspicious of his advisors, tortured by nightmares of his own demise, slowly succumbing to madness. For Christians who were anti-Trump, the parallels were obvious and cause for concern. “There’s another biblical figure who didn’t acknowledge God, yet God used him to carry out a purpose,” Dr. Alan Snyder, a Christian historian, wrote about Nebuchadnezzar on his blog. “His purpose? To destroy Jerusalem and take the people into captivity.”

  It was not immediately clear to me how Pence fit into these narratives. That summer, shortly after the Republican National Convention, a friend asked me about the likelihood of Pence solidifying the evangelical vote. (As a former believer, I am sometimes considered an authority on such things.) I remarked offhandedly that Christians regarded Pence as an intercessor, one who would temper the president’s moral excesses just as Christ intervened two thousand years ago to mollify the reckless whims of Jehovah.

  I’d forgotten that there is a more apt analogy in the Old Testament. One of the foremost heroes of the exile stories is Daniel, an Israelite who serves in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. Daniel manages to preserve his Jewish identity in the Babylonian court, refusing the king’s food and wine and continuing to pray to his God, sometimes in secret. When Daniel correctly interprets one of the king’s dreams, he is promoted to chief advisor, a position he uses to establish protections for the Jews and secure appointments for his Hebrew friends. He also ends up serving as the king’s spiritual advisor, encouraging him to turn from idolatry and worship Yahweh, the one true God. Still, despite earning royal favor, Daniel frequently comes into conflict with the king’s temper and the paganism of Babylon. When he refuses to obey a decree that would prohibit him from praying to his God, he is thrown into the lion’s den.