Christian Nation (25 page)
He walked out of the room. For the first time, I fully understood the questions that I was being asked to answer in this book.
The national government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.
—Speech by Adolf Hitler, February 1, 1933
Today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcism…. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the … course of normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism.
—Leon Trotsky,
What Is National Socialism
? (June 1933)
“
I
SUBMIT
A
MERICA
TO
C
HRIST
.”
With those words, Steve Jordan began his inaugural address. Within moments, the rain promised all morning by the gray skies began to fall gently and did not stop.
For the twenty years prior to that rainy day when Steve Jordan finally mounted the steps of the Capitol, Christian fundamentalism had
been the largest mass cultural and political movement in America, and the fortunes of each side in the ongoing “culture war” had ebbed and
flowed. For the eight years following the election of McCain/Palin and
Sarah Palin’s unexpected ascension to the highest office in the land, the nation had headed slowly and unsteadily down the path envisioned by its evangelical leaders. But the year 2017 was entirely different. With the long-sought goal in sight, a popular mandate for Jordan, both houses of Congress solidly in control of the Christian right, martial law still in place, and a Christian Militia in almost every state ready to do their bidding, Jordan and his team now sprinted toward victory.
In an Orwellian twist, Jordan chose in his inaugural address to call his program New Freedom. It encompassed neither more nor less than the Christian right had promised were it to obtain unrestrained power.
In the speech, Jordan claimed the mantle of “our great devout, Bible-believing twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson,” quoting Wilson, correctly, as saying, “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple.” It was left for Sanjay to point out that Wilson, although no doubt devout, would have found the evangelicals’ biblical literalism to be abhorrent, and that Wilson’s program to
increase
economic and political liberty bore no resemblance to Jordan’s attempt to limit personal freedom in the name of religion.
Jordan said that the New Freedom would be a blessing to the nation and a foundation for finally creating the Godly republic that America’s founders had envisioned. The New Freedom program, he explained, had seven principal planks. First and foremost, the touchstone of all his policies would be obedience to the will of God. Second, he would protect the sovereignty of the United States so it was entirely free to fulfill its destiny. Next, the federal government, he promised, would officially recognize the authority and laws of Jesus Christ, would enforce the law in a manner consistent with biblical authority, and would remove any federal judge who stood in its way. Fourth, he would dedicate his administration to freeing the small and large businesses in America to enjoy the blessing of “biblical capitalism,” the only path to the prosperity promised to America by the Lord. Fifth, he would protect and defend marriage and the family from every single slight and assault. Next, he said he would work within the Constitution toward the goal of eradicating abortion, homosexuality, adultery, and all other practices similarly abhorrent in the sight of God. And finally, he would ensure that each and every American child was free to enjoy the blessing of a Christian education.
Given the constitutional barriers standing between Jordan and the implementation of the New Freedom program, he did not immediately introduce implementing legislation but instead fell back to the age-old refuge of Washington politicians, and appointed a commission charged with developing, within ninety days, a specific legislative program to implement each of the seven planks of the New Freedom. Its chair was President Palin’s education secretary, Michael Farris, the lawyer, homeschooling advocate, and former president of Patrick Henry College. The members included Senators Coburn, DeMint, and Santorum; former vice president Brownback; former Bush attorney general John Ashcroft; Texas governor Rick Perry; evangelical leaders Gary North, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Howard Ahmanson, Jr., Rick Warren, Doug Coe, Ralph Reed, David Barton, Charles Colson, Luis Cortes, and Gary Bauer; and a group of legal and constitutional “scholars” from Christian colleges.
When the speech was over, Sanjay was interviewed on the steps of the Capitol building holding a black umbrella and surrounded by a crowd of Jordan campaign workers who had attended the inauguration. His bodyguards shifted nervously from foot to foot. The interviewer asked, “So, Mr. Sharma, you heard the president. Can he do what he wants?” Sanjay did not give a false smile, nor did he look grim. His answer was unequivocal.
“It cannot be done,” he said. “The Supreme Court stands as the guarantor of our liberties. The Founding Fathers were prescient in understanding that the day might come when the citizens of the country would need to be protected against the religious yearnings of a majority. That’s the difference between pure democracy and constitutional democracy. Even the conservatives on the court will not permit it. They are scholars and serious men and women. They will not let the United States of America join with the likes of Iran and Saudi Arabia in embracing intolerance as a core principle of the state. The essence of this country is diversity and tolerance, not fidelity to a single faith enforced by authoritarian rule. The whole point of having constitutional rights is that they cannot be overridden by the majority. The president is seeking to save face with the Farris Commission, but there is no legislative program that can fulfill his objectives that will be found constitutional by the Supreme Court.”
Sanjay was wrong. Shortly after the inauguration in January 2017, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of the four remaining justices who consistently opposed the conservative approach of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Cruz, died of a recurrence of pancreatic cancer. At eighty-four, she had overcome the death of her husband, colon cancer, and a previous bout of pancreatic cancer and was the court’s most ardent defender of civil liberty. Ginsberg said repeatedly that only death could take her from the court while Sarah Palin was president. Friends said she had become deeply depressed by the Jordan victory in November and seemingly lost the will to live.
Jordan’s response to Justice Ginsberg’s death set the tone for his presidency. Three days later, at a press conference in the Rose Garden, with his nominee standing by his side, the president nominated the deposed former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore, to the highest court in the land.
Roy Moore was one of the great heroes of the evangelical movement but was only vaguely known to the rest of the country. The rest of us learned quickly. Moore was a fundamentalist Christian of the more robust sort, having worked as a cowboy and kickboxer, attributing his pugilistic successes to divine favor and intervention. As a state judge in Alabama, he displayed wooden Ten Commandments plaques in his courtrooms and opened his judicial sessions with prayers, sometimes calling on a clergyman to lead the jury members in conversation with God prior to the start of jury deliberations. He was then elected by the people of Alabama to the position of chief justice of that state’s supreme court.
To drive home his fundamentalist belief that God was the sole legitimate source of law, and that all civil institutions must be subservient to God’s will, in 2001 he arranged for a five-thousand-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments to be placed in the rotunda of the state courthouse. The federal courts ordered its removal, and Moore responded that the orders of the federal courts on such a matter had no legitimacy and that he obeyed only the orders of God and the great state of Alabama. The great state of Alabama responded by establishing a judicial commission that proceeded to remove him from office. It is sobering to remember that in 2003, when the federal courts ordered the removal of the monument, 78 percent of Americans polled objected to the federally ordered removal, expressing the view that Judge Moore was entitled to have the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. Seventy-eight percent is a high number and should have been seen by all of us as a foreshadowing of how the non-evangelical middle would tip when it came to questions of separation of church and state.
“Roy’s Rock” then began its peripatetic travels in the American heartland, appearing at hundreds of Christian conventions and state fairs, including appearances in thirty-one different states in one year alone. Moore became a folk hero to the Christian right, and in 2003 drafted the Constitution Restoration Act, which was finally passed in the early days of President Palin’s second term, opening the door to the theocratic legislative program of the states whose legislatures were already dominated by evangelical forces.
The response to Jordan’s nomination of Moore was powerful. An ad hoc group of several hundred law professors and federal judges of every political persuasion took out full-page ads in the country’s major newspapers and petitioned the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Moore. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy broke protocol and leaked to a trusted reporter their views that the nomination, if confirmed by the Senate, could “destroy the Court.” “Maybe,” said a leak from the White House in response, “the Court needs a little bit of ‘creative destruction.’ ”
The nomination proved wildly popular with the nation’s evangelicals. F3 orchestrated a day of national “outrage” at the “snide, sniping, liberal whining about a true American hero.” Senators were deluged with petitions, calls, and e-mails in support of Judge Moore. The day the Senate Judiciary Committee started its hearings, a crowd estimated at 750,000 gathered on the national mall chanting “Take Back the Court,” “Get Out of Our Way,” and “The Time Is Now.”
When the Senate confirmed Moore, every Democrat and six brave Republicans opposed it. Four of those Republicans failed to achieve their party’s nomination at the end of their terms. The two others were dead by the start of President Jordan’s second term.
Moore’s tenure on the court had a rocky start. Chief Justice Roberts, who would traditionally administer the two oaths required of an associate justice, reported to the chief administrative officer of the court that he was indisposed, and he instructed the officer to poll the associate justices in order of seniority to see if one of them would be willing to do the job. Justice Thomas administered the oath with no other justice or federal judge of any seniority in attendance. The president responded to this slight by hosting another oath ceremony at the White House the following day. It was, I think, the first time that a wooden cross joined the row of American flags as the backdrop for a White House event. From that day forward, it was how we always saw the president on television and in photographs: the top of the cross over his right shoulder and an American flag over his left.
The ceremony opened with the president himself administering the oath to Moore a second time and presenting him with a small model of Roy’s Rock. This was a sweet moment for tens of millions of Americans, a symbolic righting of what they regarded as a monstrous wrong. A succession of evangelical senators then delivered speeches in praise of Moore, reminding the nation that the jurisdiction of the federal courts had been limited by Congress as expressly permitted by the Constitution and that the days of the will of the sovereign states, the will of the people, and the will of God being thwarted by an overly active federal judiciary were well and truly over. But Moore’s real job, of course, was to ensure an ideologically pure vote to ensure a sympathetic majority even when, as was feared, one of Justices Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, or Cruz, would join the remaining liberal jurists to overturn the legislation necessary to implement Jordan’s “New Freedom.”
S
OON AFTER
J
USTICE
G
INSBURG’S
timely (for Jordan) death, things continued to break in favor of the new administration. Just one week following Justice Moore joining the Supreme Court, the court heard a petition for a writ of certiorari in the case of
Gonzales v. Nebraska
. The case had been winding its way through the federal judiciary for nearly four years since the Nebraska legislature, during the frenzy of state legislation following President Palin’s signing of the Constitution Restoration Act, had adopted a law constituting a full frontal assault on
Roe v. Wade.
The Nebraska statute simply outlawed abortion outright regardless of the time during pregnancy or other circumstances. With
Roe
still the law of the land, this seemed like an empty political gesture. The Nebraska statute, as expected, was promptly stayed by a federal district court and declared unconstitutional following a short trial. A year later, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. Had the cert petition been received two weeks earlier, it would almost certainly have been denied, but with Moore added to the court, acceptance of the cert petition signaled to the world that at least four of the justices were prepared to overturn
Roe
(this was because the informal “rule of four” ensures that a hostile majority cannot prevent cases from being brought before the court). When word leaked out from one of Justice Moore’s new clerks that five justices had voted to accept cert, abortion foes around the nation were overjoyed, believing that the era of legalized abortion in America was coming to an end. They were right. The case was heard and decided on an accelerated basis, and during a sitting in early June, the court’s decision in
Gonzales v. Nebraska
was released. The day both dreaded and longed for by millions of Americans had come. The court, with Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Cruz, and Moore creating the majority, simply reversed its 1973 finding of a right of privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment or otherwise and held that there was no constitutional bar to the Nebraska statute.