Christian Nation (14 page)
“I did not know. And no, we have not spoken recently. Have you?”
“Nope. Too bad. I mean I hope you don’t blame me,” Emilie said.
“Of course not. That would be irrational,” Sanjay answered.
“Right. So, how ’bout it, want me to set you up again?”
Sometimes Sanjay’s transparency was revealing. He paused, and you could sense the neurons firing as he weighed the tempting aspects of Emilie’s offer against all the negatives and complications.
“That is very kind, Emilie. But no thank you.” He obviously did not think that any further explanation was required, but I sensed that perhaps he had just made quite a major decision. I changed the subject.
“I had my review yesterday.”
“My God,” said Emilie, “why didn’t you tell me?”
“Sorry, forgot. It went fine. Well, not to be immodest, better than fine. They said I was doing fantastic work and was in the very top part of my class. That’s a pretty strong signal for RCD&S, especially after fourth year.”
Emilie got up from the table and, oblivious to Sanjay’s presence—or, perhaps, because of it—straddled me on the chair, took my head in her hands, and delivered an intense and passionate kiss, which I reciprocated. Sanjay slipped out without our saying good-night.
D
ESPITE MY ADVICE,
Sanjay was not to be deterred from his increasing preoccupation with the notion that the long-standing battle over gun control and the theocratic program of the Christian right were deeply synergistic. In a blog on the TW website, Sanjay wrote that it was entirely possible that the most radical evangelical leaders understood well that their ultimate goal of Christian dominion could never be achieved without force of arms. Suspecting that Christian militias were already organizing, he decided to spend a week in Tulsa and see for himself. A few days before he left, I called his office, and the receptionist who answered the phone asked if I had a moment.
“Greg, he probably wouldn’t want me to tell you this. But, well, he listens to you. We had a comment on the website that, well—it was a death threat against Sanjay. It’s probably nothing, you know, but … Well, I wanted you to know.”
I was not worried. Given his subject, it was inevitable that abuse and threats of all sorts would ricochet around the web. But I did insist that he report the threat to the authorities and take two staffers with him to Oklahoma.
When he returned a week later, Sanjay reported that his worst fears were confirmed. He found that the Christian media there was filled with talk of apocalyptic violence. Informal militia and military groups were springing up everywhere, including branches of the Christian Identity movement, which believed that religious war was inevitable. The ranks of these nascent militias were filled with what one brave investigative journalist called “thugs, felons, and low-lifes.” His exposé showed that the shadowy organizers of these militias recruited ex-cons on the day of their release, gang members, and the chronically unemployed who had become homeless.
Sanjay told me he had attended a rally of twenty-five thousand young people organized by the Battle Cry Campaign, a fundamentalist youth movement whose founder wrote, “This is a war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent—the ‘forceful’ ones—will lay hold of the Kingdom.” In the stadium, the chant was “We are warriors.” San showed me the transcript of the speech by an Ohio pastor, Rod Parsley:
“The secular media never likes it when I say this, so let me say it twice. Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! They say this rhetoric is so inciting. I came to incite a riot. I came to effect a divine disturbance in the heart and soul of the church. Man your battle stations. Ready your weapons. Lock and load …”
“I was really not expecting this,” Sanjay told me. “They cite Romans 13:1 all the time: ‘For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God.’ In other words, follow orders as long as those giving the orders wear the cloak of an earthly government ordained by God. They say that violence in the service of God is an act of devotion. At these rallies in Oklahoma, I met homeschooled evangelical kids who referred to themselves as Generation Joshua. They told me their purpose in life is to retake the land for Jesus.”
“San,” I said, “that’s got to be a very small slice of the population. It’s not going to amount to anything.”
“Perhaps. But they are not content to leave it at kids and stadium rallies. The Oklahoma legislature is actively considering a proposal that the state officially recognize and sanction a Christian militia.”
This surprised me.
He continued. “Do you know about the Militia Act—a law originating in 1792 that is still on the books in modified form? It provides federal sanction not only for the state national guards but also for something that is called an ‘unorganized militia.’ That concept has been hotly debated in far right circles for decades, but most believe it means that the states are free to recognize and permit private armies in their own states. The so-called Constitutional Militia Movement really got going sometime in the mid-1990s, and the motivating concept was that the people needed to be well armed and organized to defend themselves against unconstitutional regulation by the federal government, such as gun regulation. They are firmly convinced that the Founding Fathers so distrusted both the federal government and the idea of a federal standing army that they insisted on an armed population ready to resist federal overreaching.
“What the Oklahoma legislature is now trying to do is somewhat different,” Sanjay continued. “Most of the militiamen call themselves Liberty Boys or Freedom Fighters. But the Oklahoma legislation proposes to recognize what it calls a Christian Militia. Imagine, G, all the red states. The most committed fundamentalists organized into armed militias. With ranks, regimental headquarters, advanced weapons, Saturday drills—all sanctioned by the state but not subject to state or federal government control. Most people would have thought it impossible in America. After all, only a few years ago private militias, like the white supremacy groups and neo-Nazis, were hunted down by the FBI and prosecuted. Now they are being sanctioned by the states themselves. What has changed?”
It was a rhetorical question. I had to concede that Sanjay was right about the cultural undercurrent of violence and its embrace by the Christian media and F3. But, as always, it was a question of perspective. America’s libertarian streak, its infatuation with arms, and the use of militarist rhetoric all had deep roots in American history, waxing and waning with the ebb and flow of popular content and discontent, prosperity and distress. Was this different? That was the question. During the siege, we spent many evenings debating whether our collective blindness to the militarization of the Christian right was in fact an understandable error of perspective or some lethal combination of historical myopia and wishful thinking. Does the explanation matter? I’m starting to think that it might.
In any case, when Sanjay returned from his trip to Oklahoma, I expected him to write aggressively about the militias, the quasi-official status they were being granted by that state, and the threat posed by the gradual development of an armed wing of the Christian right. Instead, to my complete surprise, he wrote and published, above the fold on
the opinion page of the
New York Times
, a concise essay on virtue. In the face of the potential for political violence, his instincts turned to the stronger
power of the traditional personal virtues celebrated across all human cultures and religious traditions. He wrote of the civic and political fruits of a society in which generosity, gentleness, humor, and politeness were practiced and celebrated. He explained how these simpler virtues in turn depended on a foundation of humility, tolerance, and sincere truthfulness without which the other virtues could not flourish. He demonstrated how, in turn, the practice of these qualities leads inevitably to the more profound virtues of compassion, mercy, and love. He then asked, with the gentleness and spirit of forgiveness indicated by these great virtues, how those who advocated a “more moral society” could engage in behavior that was, by this standard, anything but Christian. He picked quotes from Palin and Jordan to show that their own morality was arrogant, full of pride, and fundamentally intolerant. If these were their words, Sanjay argued, their behavior was inevitably going to be rude, devious, and intemperate, as it was. Their idea of justice, he argued, was harsh and bereft of charity. For them, the enemy was to be defeated, not, as Jesus had preached, to be loved. Evangelicalism in America was a movement, he concluded, launched in the name of the most compassionate role model man had ever known but was now on the verge of being irrevocably infected by bitterness and hate.
I and many others were profoundly moved by this essay. The rhetoric of obedience to God’s will, of revealed truth and biblical authority seemed hollow compared to Sanjay’s vision of a society that valued generosity, compassion, mercy, humility, tolerance, truthfulness, gentleness, and the rest. And it revealed that Sanjay was a profound thinker and a good man. Although I had known him at that point for twelve years, I discovered in him a depth I had not seen before. Sanjay was growing and becoming a better man, I remember thinking. But was I? He had written an essay designed to move hearts and change history. I was spending my time, and my own powers, writing indentures and loan agreements.
A year after Palin’s legislative program had become law, even her harshest critics had to admit that their lives had not been changed by the largely symbolic acts of her presidency. And the attention of the nation was again focused almost exclusively on the lingering “great recession.”
The economic situation was the most serious since the Great Depression. The Dow had not budged. The savings and retirement plans of middle-class Americans were worth about a third of what they had been, and retired people had to work to pay the rent, if they were lucky enough to find a part-time job. Unemployment rose relentlessly, reaching 18 percent in the summer of 2010. The collapse of the US auto industry had the exact devastating ripple effects on the US economy, especially in the Midwest, that the advocates of a bailout had predicted. Few jobs were available to college graduates. Abandoned and foreclosed houses with unmowed lawns, collapsing gutters, and, increasingly, broken windows languished in every town, depressing the spirits of even those who were still employed and gutting the pride and morale of previously prosperous communities. The homeless returned to the streets of the big cities in numbers not seen since the early 1980s.
The Republican-controlled Congress had steadfastly refused to support any federal action. Despite a public letter to the US Congress from every living Nobel Prize–winning economist calling for fiscal stimulus, no new appropriation could pass the House, and federal spending actually decreased, exacerbating the economic decline in exactly the way predicted by the Keynesians. Moreover, unemployment benefits were allowed to expire. All the president said, repeatedly, was “Washington is the problem, not the solution.”
On November 2, 2010, the people of the United States, suffering and fearful, handed control of the US House of Representatives back to the Democratic Party. For the second time in Sarah Palin’s national political career, the pundits declared her to be finished. Emilie smugly reminded Sanjay that for our entire history, American politics flirted periodically with the extreme but always reverted to the centrist mean and now had done so again. In the face of the largest economic challenge for a generation, the risk of Christian fundamentalism seemed the least of the country’s problems. Sanjay was once again ignored by the media, and I immersed myself in my work.
When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe….
The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children.
—Chris Hedges,
Empire of Illusion
It was characteristic of [authoritarian movements] that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention.
—Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
T
HIS MEMOIR PROJECT
HAS BECOME ADDICTIVE
. I rise early, make coffee for the house, and most of the time take a swim in Indian Lake.
Yesterday we had a visitor. I was writing at the desk overlooking the lake when I had that feeling of being observed. I turned to see a woman, about my age, standing in the doorway with Adam, silently watching me. I don’t know how long she had been there. I started to stand and Adam raised his hand. “Sorry to interrupt, we’ll be going now.” He did not introduce me, and I watched through the window as Adam and the woman walked along the shore of the lake to a small stone platform at the water’s edge with two old Adirondack-style chairs. They sat and talked for at least an hour.