Interior States

  * * *

  —

  Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall. After Cyrus conquered Babylon, the region remained within the Persian Empire until 331 BC, when it fell to the Greeks under Alexander the Great. The Romans came next, then the Arab Islamic empires, and the Ottomans. Today, several of the countries that once made up the Neo-Babylonian Empire—including Syria and Iraq—are blighted by war and political chaos as vicious as that of the biblical era. Since the beginning of the civil war in Syria, 11 million people have fled their homes. Many are living in exile across the Middle East, while others have sought refuge in Europe or the United States—a humanitarian crisis that, according to the UN Refugee Agency, is the worst since the Rwandan genocide.

  In November 2015, days after the Paris terrorist attacks, Mike Pence, as governor, issued a directive suspending the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Indiana. He claimed this was a security measure, arguing that Syrian refugees had carried out the attacks. (The culprits were in fact believed to be EU citizens, though there were reports one had posed as a refugee.) Pastor Vroegop noted, during our conversation, that Indianapolis was home to a sizable refugee community. It was something he mentioned in passing, while describing the church’s outreach programs, but it stuck with me. During my time at College Park, nobody said anything nativist or xenophobic; Vroegop himself spoke of the “growing, beautiful diversity” of his congregation. Still, it became increasingly difficult to ignore a central, nagging irony: that the rhetoric of exile had cleared the way for an administration that is waging war on actual political exiles—particularly those who come from the land of the Old Testament.

  Before I left Indianapolis, I visited Exodus Refugee Immigration, the largest resettlement agency in the state. The offices occupy a large warehouse on the east side of the city, in one of those postindustrial neighborhoods that has an almost rural quietude—empty lots reverting to prairie, long shadows across vacant sidewalks. After Pence’s 2015 Syrian ban, Exodus partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union, which believed that the ban was unconstitutional, to file a lawsuit against the governor. Eventually, an appeals court ruled that Pence’s directive amounted to “discrimination on the basis of nationality.” Cole Varga, the executive director of Exodus, told me that last year had been “fairly chaotic,” which struck me as a morbid understatement. Because of the travel bans, Exodus had received roughly half the arrivals they had expected, and their federal funding had taken steep cuts; that February, he’d let go of more than a third of his staff.

  Varga introduced me to Shereen, a Syrian exile whose journey to the United States was almost derailed by the travel ban in January 2017. She, her husband, and her son had been living in Turkey as refugees for four years when their file was finally referred to the United States. They were packed and ready to go when they got the news that their flight had been canceled. “We thought we would never get the chance to come,” Shereen told me. “For my husband and I, it’s not a problem. We can live anywhere, we can work. We can start all over. But we were more concerned for my son….We wanted the opportunity to come to the United States to provide a life for him.”

  Her son, Jowan, was in the Exodus office with her. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth and is in a wheelchair. Shereen explained that from the time they fled Aleppo in 2013, Jowan hadn’t been able to attend school or receive physical therapy. When a federal appeals court put the ban on hold, she and her family came to the United States, and Jowan is now enrolled in school and receiving treatment. But they are among the lucky ones. Varga told me that he spends a lot of time thinking about all the people who “should be here right now.” When I asked what happened to the refugees who’d been barred by the travel bans, he said they were likely still in the camps. Once a refugee’s file is allocated to the United States, he explained, it’s stuck in that pipeline, and it would be rare for it to be transferred to a different country. “So they might just be sitting there—well, maybe forever.”

  Throughout our conversation, I kept thinking of a speech Pence gave a few months earlier at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, at an event for persecuted Christians. He argued, as he has elsewhere, that Christians are called to live in exile, “outside the city gate,” barred from the security of the polis. Even though this administration has returned evangelicals to power, Pence still refers to Christians as an endangered minority. “No people of faith today face greater hostility or hatred than the followers of Christ,” he said in the speech. His sympathy for exiles, it seems, doesn’t extend to those of other religions. Pence often pays lip service to the religious liberties of “all people of all faiths,” but he has consistently defended Trump’s measures to prevent Muslims from entering the United States. When Trump signed the travel ban that would have prevented Shereen and her family from immigrating, Pence stood by his side.

  Though the vice president often draws from its promises of redemption, the Old Testament is undergirded by a brutal moral calculus that is often difficult to reconcile with the teachings of Christ. Israel always gets what it deserves—punishment or deliverance—and yet so many others are the collateral damage of that cycle. There are the enemies of Israel, who are slain without mercy. And there are the countless foreign tribes who get caught in the crosshairs—groups who are settled on territories God intends for Judah, or people whose religion poses a threat to Jewish purity. Their demise appears in the margins of these stories, often in a single sentence: “They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps.” I remember coming across these passages when I was in Bible school, struggling with the first shadows of doubt, trying and failing to understand why so many people had to suffer for one group’s redemption—why this ongoing drama between the elect and their God had to come at such a terrible cost.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am incredibly grateful to Gerry Howard for his dedication to this book and for prompting me to write about Mike Pence; and to Matt McGowan for believing in this collection and helping it find a home. Many thanks to all the magazine and anthology editors who selected, contributed to, and published these pieces, including Robert Atwan, Emily Cooke, Eleanor Duke, Alex Halperin, David Haglund, Bill Henderson, Leslie Jamison, Silvia Killingsworth, Wendy Lesser, James Marcus, Stewart O’Nan, Jeramie Orton, Ladette Randolph, Dayna Tortorici, Michelle Wildgen, and Rachel Wiseman. I am especially indebted to Nausicaa Renner, without whose enthusiasm and encouragement many of these essays would not exist, and to Jon Baskin, who published some of the earliest pieces and whose editorial guidance has made my writing more expansive and more rigorous.

  I’ve had the good fortune of learning from several writers whose instruction and mentorship has been invaluable, among them Fred Schafer in Chicago, as well as all the folks at the University of Wisconsin–Madison—especially Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ron Kuka, Anne McClintock, Judith Claire Mitchell, Lorrie Moore, and Rob Nixon. Many of these essays benefited from early readers who are also friends, most of whom live (or have lived, at one time) in Madison: Lydia Conklin, Krista Eastman, Zac Fulton, Alyssa Knickerbocker, Christopher Mohar, Hannah Oberman-Breindel, Marian Palaia, and Yuko Sakata. I cannot offer enough gratitude to my family for their enduring love and support; to Lisa Tomczak for her guidance and wisdom; and, above all, to my husband, Barrett Swanson, for everything.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.

 

 

 
r: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share