Christian Nation (43 page)
For me, the apparent progress by hundreds of prisoners through the Four Graces program was truly puzzling. Yes, I knew about the Stockholm syndrome, and the natural tendency to want to please those who control your life. But the 3,500 men in that courtyard were New York’s most committed secularists. All had chosen to risk their lives to resist the Christian Nation. They were mostly committed atheists, with many observant Jews and the occasional Muslim. My fellow prisoners were cynical journalists, tough-minded lawyers, foul-mouthed cabdrivers, and liberal professors—hardly the ideal candidates for conversion, much less full-on second birth. And though we had been through a period of enormous stress, and rose every morning under threat of execution, it seemed improbable to me that capitulation would start to occur so quickly. I was preoccupied with the question of how and why a new group, every morning, transitioned publicly to steps two and three. Was it an escape strategy? Had they learned how to fool our captors? Were they plants intended to inspire the real prisoners? Or had the mental strain of the war and imprisonment unbalanced their minds sufficiently that they were in fact open to religious conversion?
“So you made step two,” I said with complete neutrality to a stranger following assembly. We were outdoors, where we all hoped the risk of being overheard or recorded was lower.
“Yes,” he answered.
“I’m interested. How did it happen?”
“Think about it. Aren’t we all sinners?” he said, walking away and revealing nothing.
I did not dare to pursue him.
T
HE MORNING OF
the first flogging changed everything. We assembled and the program proceeded as usual. Super JJ, who usually had the last word, ascended to the podium.
“A reading from the Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 25, verse 2:
Then it shall be if the wicked man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall then make him lie down and be beaten in the presence with the number of stripes according to his guilt.
“That is the infallible word of God. You are all wicked men, and with justice and fidelity to God’s word we could beat each of you every day. But in the Christian Nation we have a mandate to live our lives according to the model of our Lord Jesus Christ and his mercy. I have been clear with you about the rules, and clear about the consequences if you break the rules. Prisoner Number 4587, come forward with your brothers.”
A prisoner whom I did not know was brought in front of the podium by two guards, and behind him two guards similarly held each of his five brothers. The guards looked nervous.
“Yesterday evening Prisoner Number 4587 was observed engaging in sexual intercourse with one of the assistant cooks behind the kitchen. She has been sent off island and will be dealt with by the civilian authorities. The prisoner has been sentenced to twenty-four lashes. Each of his brothers, accordingly, will also receive twenty-four lashes. As you know, the Bible permits a maximum of forty lashes, so this sentence is a merciful one. Each of the brothers will be punished first so that the miscreant can observe the consequences of his own sin. Only when all his brothers have suffered will he be permitted to join them. Guards, do not hesitate to do God’s will.”
The stone pole that I had always thought of as an obelisk had old iron rings mounted about seven feet off the ground on each face. I now recognized that it was a nineteenth-century whipping post. The guards took the youngest of the five brothers, a scrawny redhead who looked to be about twenty-five, and roughly unzipped and removed his jumpsuit. Trying not to look scared, he gave the guards a cocky look of defiance as they looped a rope around each wrist, snaked the ropes through the rings on the right and left sides of the post, pulled his arms above his head, and secured the rope on cleats lower down the post. I could no longer see his face. They then attached a stiff wide belt around his waist, a device to protect the kidneys and lower back that I recognized from the extensive media coverage given to “judicial caning” in Singapore. I was sure that in their eyes it gave the ancient barbaric punishment a modern clinical veneer. One of the guards then unfurled a whip. The single-tail black bullwhip was about eight feet in length.
The first stroke produced a loud cracking sound that no one was expecting. A red welt rose from the upper right shoulder to midback. The young man threw back his head in wordless pain.
“One,” said the other guard.
On the third stroke a loud “oh” escaped from the man, the breath expelled in a blast from the force of the whip on his back. The fourth stroke was the first to cross another, and blood began to trickle from the places where the stripes crossed.
“Six,” said the first guard, handing over the whip to the other guard, who recommenced the flogging from the other side.
With this stroke a long sob welled up from the man’s gut. The only sounds in the large courtyard were the sickening crack of the whip, and sobbing that became increasingly convulsive and desperate with each stroke.
By the time the second guard handed back off to the first guard following the twelfth stroke, the prisoner whose indiscretion had given rise to the flogging, had lost all color and looked to be on the verge of collapse. His mouth was open and his eyes were blank. Two of his four other brothers were crying softly. Two looked outraged.
Only months before, I had killed men and seen men killed. I saw horrible suffering. But that suffering was incidental to a violent battle. The point of that violence was to kill the enemy, not to inflict pain. It was far different from deliberate physical torture. I had never seen anything like this. I had never seen one man look into the suffering eyes of another and calmly count out further torment. I had never seen a torturer steel himself to the sounds of desperation and carry on. At eighteen strokes the victim’s back was a single blue and purple bruise decorated with a crazy crisscross of red lines oozing blood. The soft touch of a single finger would have been unendurable on such a back, and yet he would receive six more lashes. It did not seem survivable.
An angry murmur rose from the prisoners. A few guards shouldered their weapons, and others shifted their weight uneasily.
By the time the guard shouted “twenty-four,” the young man hung limply from the ropes. When they took him down I saw he was conscious, his eyes partially rolled back into his head, his breathing shallow. The guards who had administered the flogging took one arm over each shoulder and dragged him upright in the direction of the infirmary.
The eyes of his brothers and all the other prisoners turned expectantly to Super JJ. I longed to believe that he would be satisfied with the horror we had just witnessed and suspend the other punishments. The guards holding the next brother looked similarly hopeful. The Super disabused these hopes with a barely discernible nod to the guards to proceed.
The second brother, terrified, panicked and struggled against his guards. Two others rushed forward to hold his arms while the ropes were looped over his wrists. Even secured to the post, he continued to struggle like a wounded animal, moaning over and over “no, no, no.” They tied his feet and waist so he could not turn around. After the first stroke, he let out a scream. It was more the sound of terror than of pain, but as the strokes went on, the pain overwhelmed the terror, and he too was reduced to gasping sobs, sobs that eventually abated as he sank into shock during the final strokes.
By the time the final prisoner was secured to the post, both he and the assembled company seemed to be in a daze. Disoriented. More uncomprehending than scared or angry. JJ and his thugs had committed the crime, but it was the other prisoners and I who felt guilty. We had stood and watched a monstrous evil and done nothing.
At the end, the superintendent resumed his place at the podium.
“Remember this. What you saw this morning is nothing compared with the suffering of our Lord. Nothing. Each flogging should remind you of the terrible suffering that Jesus endured for you. He suffered to redeem your sins. And with his stripes, we are healed. Think on this. You are dismissed.”
After this first flogging, the atmosphere at GI changed considerably. The summer camp illusion was shattered. The prisoners became sullen and the guards more aggressive. It was as if the genie of latent violence had been released. In our private metaphoric language, certain prisoners started to allude to rebellion and escape. Others accelerated their progress on the four-step program, focused only on escape through the path that had been laid out for them. The vast majority was simply at sea. Being born again was not something they could do honestly, and to do so dishonestly was both repulsive and risky. And yet, somehow having survived the Holy War, our determination to live seemed to have grown. We did not want to die.
The first floggings led inevitably to a spiral of disobedience, fear, and further violence. Prisoners were caught speaking out against the authority of the administration. Small acts of resistance proliferated. The guards became more cautious in their dealings with inmates, and they took offense more easily. The next flogging occurred only three days after the first and thereafter became a regular feature of morning assembly. Super JJ had reduced the standard sentence from twenty-four to twelve lashes because, as rumor had it, the initial victims of twenty-four strokes had yet to leave the infirmary.
It would not be exactly correct to say that we became accustomed to the morning violence. We no longer suffered the shock of the first day, but the weight of observed suffering accumulated differently within each man. All of us, I think, felt a gradual sense of emasculation and helplessness as, day after day, through our inaction we became complicit in their crimes.
Time passed slowly, marked by the larger and larger numbers of inmates clustered at assembly in the spots designated for those who had reached steps two, three, and four. At the first anniversary of our incarceration, more than two dozen men wore the gold badges of the born again and had commenced the six-month trial designed to test the authenticity of their second-birth experiences. Scores of others had reached step three.
As for me, after the first year I had read the Bible front to back three times. We were permitted no other reading material, so I devoted all my intellectual energy and analytic skill to that single anthology. I regretted not knowing Greek, as some prisoners were allowed to read the gospels in their original language. I was a diligent student and an active participant in Bible study, but I needed to be exceedingly careful not to stray too far into the mode of literary criticism, thus indirectly challenging the only approved manner of engaging with the text, which was as revelation received directly from the omnipotent being. We were permitted to debate what God meant and how to apply the lessons and the mandates of the Bible to everyday life. We were not permitted to note the inconsistencies among the gospels and the wonderfully different voices of their human authors, or to acknowledge the existence of the non-canonical gospels.
I gave little thought to the endgame. I had managed a sophistic confession of sin and moved to step one, but I remained stuck there for many months. To profess knowledge of God’s love was to admit to the existence of God, a line I saw no way to cross. But the third anniversary was still a long way off, and I did not allow myself to think ahead.
Oddly, I was not miserable. My brothers and I had avoided the whipping post, and I found myself much strengthened in body and mind from the regime of regular food, sleep, study, and fresh air. After all, the years before my incarceration were years of unparalleled stress and uncertainty. In contrast, at GI, there seemed during this period to be little uncertainty about what the next day would bring.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
—Blaise Pascal,
Pensées
O
CTOBER 9, 2022,
STARTED LIKE
each other day. My brothers and I rose, showered, shaved, dressed, and cleaned our room. At GI, purity included a quaint emphasis on cleanliness and grooming. Facial hair was not permitted.
It was one of those rare early October days with the clarity and cleanliness of autumn but the lingering warmth of summer. The leaves were still on the trees and had not yet turned color. The harbor reflected the hard blue of the cloudless sky and slightly cooled the warm breeze out of the south. It was, in some ways, a paradise. The assembly area was shaded by 250-year-old white oaks, straight-trunked passive observers of the long-running human drama played out beneath their crowns. The trees inspired confidence. Behind them, the great McKim, Mead & White barracks were an exemplar of the classical revival style—visible testimony to the Enlightenment, an architecture of reason and civilization. Surely, I thought, the species that computed the entasis of the column and took joy in its perfection would return to its senses. It started out as a very good morning.
When Super JJ entered assembly, I was surprised to see two men with video cameras following behind. Our morning program had never before been televised. I tried to imagine what propaganda end might be served by recording our normally pedestrian proceedings. If there was to be a whipping, that hardly seemed like something to advertise to the outside world.