Christian Nation (42 page)
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.”
D
URING 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.
… 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
O
UR 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 its 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.
GI was remarkably well suited to our rehabilitation program and was a smart choice by the Jordan administration. As an island, it was highly secure, both from escape and uninvited visitation. Most of the large barracks had been built before World War II, during which troops from all over the country were assembled on the island before boarding transport ships for Europe. Liggett Hall, the main barracks building, was the first single structure big enough to house all the facilities of an entire army regiment. It was huge, spanning nearly the entire width of the island, with an imposing arch and tower at the center. Designed by McKim, Mead & White, architects of the gilded age, Liggett was certainly one of the classiest buildings ever to serve as a prison. With his well-known sense of theater, Stanford White gave the building an enormous courtyard designed as a dramatic setting for the ceremonies of regimental life. It proved equally suitable for the ritual needs of Camp Purity.
Equally useful to the eventual needs of Camp Purity was Castle Williams, an early nineteenth-century fort used by the federal government as a prison for Confederate troops during the Civil War and thereafter maintained as a military stockade. The castle was the New York counterpart to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Some called it the Alcatraz of New York harbor. Its small stone cells remained largely unimproved for two hundred years. For the first few months, we did not know that Castle Williams was anything other than an historical monument. Indeed, for the first few months, some of us simply pretended that we were not in prison. Yes, the edges of the island were wrapped in double rows of coiled razor wire. And yes, guards with guns were everywhere. But you see what you want to see.
Each morning, after breakfast and before morning Bible study, the entire company of prisoners, guards, and workers gathered in the impressive courtyard behind Liggett Hall for “assembly.” Superintendent Joe Jones, whom we quickly nicknamed Super JJ, the other federal civilian administrators, the military officers, and the clergy sat on a raised platform with their backs to the building. A small stone obelisk-like structure dating from the nineteenth century marked the center of the courtyard, and all 3,500 prisoners stood in an arc around it and faced the leadership on the platform. The guards were arrayed in a larger-radius arc in back of the prisoners. We never saw Super JJ or the other administrators wearing a tie. Instead, they all dressed in mid-American “business casual”—khakis, brown loafers, and short-sleeve button-down shirts. Super JJ, whose buzz-cut hair and fondness for tight T-shirts gave him a more military look, was the exception. The guards were all in military uniforms, and the prisoners wore standard-issue orange jumpsuits.
Assembly followed the same pattern every day. The chief chaplain, referred to by Super JJ only as “padre,” opened with a prayer. Super JJ’s adjutant then made announcements regarding things like mess hall hours and the posting of Bible class and work assignments. Super JJ then gave a brief summary of what he described as the “news” but that we believed was a carefully programmed series of lies dripped out to convince us of the finality of their victory and the hopelessness of the secular cause. We later learned that his description of events—the immediate capitulation of Manhattan following our loss at the Battery, the return of New York to the Union, and the gradual cessation of violent resistance throughout the country—was largely accurate.
Toward the end of the second month, the assembly program changed for the first time. The chief deacon reported each morning on inmates who had advanced to a new step in the SLURS program. The first time he appeared at assembly, he introduced about a score of prisoners who had progressed to step one (understanding that they were vile sinners), who were then invited to come forward to an area in front reserved for those in the first stage of grace. Within another week, about the same number had advanced to step two (understanding that, notwithstanding their sin, they were loved by God). When a prisoner progressed, his badge also changed color, allowing guards and prisoners to know at a glance his progress. Over the first months the ranks of those in step one swelled to hundreds, scores reached step two, and a couple even stood alone in the quadrant reserved for prisoners attaining step three.
Although we indulged in the minor disobedience of using nicknames for the staff, and sometimes referred disrespectfully to the Four Graces as SLURS, we did so with circumspection, believing—correctly as it turned out—that all interior spaces on GI were closely monitored by video. We eventually discovered many of the pinhole cameras, which were ubiquitous. For example, there was not only a single camera in the hall bathroom used by my brothers and me but one in every shower and toilet stall. The food line in the mess hall was miked, as was each table. After a couple of months, we all felt the considerable strain of not being able to discuss our situation freely. With little more than glances, we shared with trusted acquaintances our skepticism about the growing band of prisoners advancing to step two, but we were unable to discuss it further.