Christian Nation Read online

  CHRISTIAN NATION

  — A Novel —

  FREDERIC C. RICH

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER ONE

  What They Said They Would Do (2029)

  CHAPTER TWO

  Indian Lake (2029)

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sanjay (1998)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Tomorrow Belongs to Me (2005)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Striving (2007)

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sarah (2008)

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Passionate Intensity (2009)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Currents (2011–2012)

  CHAPTER NINE

  It Can’t Happen Here (2012)

  CHAPTER TEN

  The End of Law (2013)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Not So Bad (2015)

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  New Freedom (2016–2017)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Secession (2017)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Holy War (2018)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Siege (2019–2020)

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Camp Purity (2020)

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Assembly (2020–2022)

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  October 9, 2022

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Born Again (2022)

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Christian Nation (2024–2029)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ripples (2029)

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Credits

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS NOVEL IS a work of speculative fiction. The speculation is about one possible course of American history had the McCain/Palin campaign won the 2008 election. Except for certain historical events and statements by public figures prior to election night 2008, the narrative is entirely fictional. Accordingly, all statements and actions of actual public figures and organizations following election night 2008 are the product of the author’s imagination; the appearance of such statements and actions in a work of fiction does not constitute an assertion that such person or entity would speak or act in that way in those circumstances.

  In contrast to the actual public figures and organizations appearing in the novel, the other characters and organizations are purely fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual organizations, is entirely coincidental. As Evelyn Waugh put it so well, “I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.”

  Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with geological leisureliness.

  —Will and Ariel Durant,

  The Story of Civilization

  CHAPTER ONE

  What They Said They Would Do

  2029

  The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

  —Milan Kundera,

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  [W]ould-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.

  —Hannah Arendt,

  The Origins of Totalitarianism

  ADAM TOLD ME TO START by writing about what I feel now. Sitting here, I don’t feel much except the faint phantom ache of a wound long since healed. It was only six weeks ago that I met Adam Brown. He and his wife, Sarah, are downstairs asleep. In front of me is a beige IBM Selectric II typewriter, disconnected and without memory, immune from the insatiable probings of the Purity Web, and thus the ultimate contraband. A man I hardly know has seated me in front of a typewriter and told me to remember and write. I’ve spent a long time staring at the egg-like ball of little letters wondering why I am here and what they really want from me.

  Here are the facts. I was a lawyer and then a fighter for the secular side in the Holy War that ended in 2020 following the siege of Manhattan. Like so many others, I earned my release from three years of rehabilitation on Governors Island by accepting Jesus Christ as my savior. For the past five years I have lived as a free citizen of the Christian Nation. This is the only truth I have allowed myself. Can I really now think and write the words that express a different truth? Here they are then: I am no longer chained in my cell, but for five years I have been bound even more firmly by the fifty commandments of The Blessing and the suffocating surveillance of the Purity Web. The cloak of collective righteousness lies heavy on the land.

  Before coming here, I did not ask myself how it happened. I have neither remembered nor grieved. But now I discover that recollection is there, a paper’s edge from consciousness. When I close my eyes I find flickers of memory: Emilie’s empty martini glass on our terrace, drinking in the sun, the day after we broke up. And I remember looking at the hard empty glass and remembering her skin soft and warm and full of the same sun only the day before. Hard and soft. Stone and skin. Memories flicker and stutter, old film freezing in the projector, slipping, lurching forward. Dissolving.

  Before, I was a lawyer. I was good with words. I was organized. I was not, frankly, much interested in my feelings, although I was pretty good at telling a story. A story should start at the beginning, but exactly where this one began is still a mystery to me.

  What is clear to me is that they did what they said they would do. This morning, Adam pulled from the wall of old-fashioned gray metal file cabinets a tattered manila folder marked “2006” filled with clippings. In the folder I found a small glossy pamphlet from a group promoting “Christian Political Action.” An affable-looking man stares back at me from the cover. Inside is a letter dated November 2006, just a year after I started at the law firm.

  When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil, and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.

  That certainly is clear. I have read this little brochure over and over, trying to remember when I first heard this message, this promise. Was I listening? I was twenty-five in 2006. I was not very good at listening at that age, at least to things I didn’t want to hear. But what about the people who should have been listening? My parents, for example. I try to imagine my father picking up this brochure from the table in the foyer of our little wooden Catholic church in Madison, New Jersey. What would he have thought when reading these words? Closing my eyes, I can see him, still sandy haired at fifty, his athletic frame softened by scotch and a desk job. A decent man, reading a letter from a fellow Christian threatening to remake his world. He would have looked up, a shadow crossing his handsome face, then thrown the brochure in the little box where people neatly discarded the copies of hymn lyrics. He would have gone to play golf.

  They promised, in 2006, that if they succeeded in acquiring political power, “the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.” In 2006 I was a first-year associate at the law firm. I try to remember. Had I ever heard of Rushdoony, North, Coe, Dobson, Perkins, or Farris? Did I know anything about Brownback, Palin, Bachmann, DeMint, Santorum, Coburn, or Perry? I do remember watching maudlin confessions of adultery from buffoonish TV preachers, stoic big-haired wives at their sides. I knew vaguely that out there somewhere in America, in an America that was to me a dimly understood foreign land, there existed people—lots of people—who
called themselves “born again” or “evangelical.” I wonder what I thought that meant. Something ridiculous about believers flying up to heaven in a longed-for event called “the rapture,” leaving behind those not saved to endure the tribulations of the apocalypse. But I do remember being surprised when a banker client told me that the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels and films had a US audience not so far behind that of the Harry Potter franchise. Both were fantastic stories of magic and miracles—one benign and one that proved to be an early symptom of something far darker.

  It was 2009, I think, after President McCain’s sudden death, that my best friend, Sanjay, first explained to me that behind the public face of the Christian right was a strange mix of fundamentalist theologies, all different and often at odds with one another but aligned in supporting the election of politicians who believe they speak to and for God, aligned in seeking to have their religiously based morals adopted into law, and aligned in rejecting the traditional notion of a “wall of separation” between church and state. Of these fundamentalist theologies, the most extreme, and in many ways most influential, were dominionism and reconstructionism.

  “Dominionism,” Sanjay explained, “holds that Christians need to establish a Christian reign on earth before Jesus returns for the second coming. Dominionists also believe that Christians in general have a God-given right to rule, but more particularly, in preparation for the second coming of Christ, that Christians have the responsibility to take over every aspect of political and civil society. And dominionism is often associated with a fringe theology called reconstructionism, which emphasizes that this reconstructed Christian-led society should be governed strictly accordingly to biblical law.”

  How bored we were at first with Sanjay’s preoccupation with this dark strain of American belief. I didn’t know, and Sanjay only later discovered, that this dominionist outlook had influenced not only the Wasilla Assembly of God, the Pentecostal church attended by Sarah Palin in Alaska, but many thousands of others around the country. What had once been a fringe of exotic beliefs and schismatic sects had entered the religious mainstream in America.

  Before the start of the Holy War, I delivered dozens of speeches warning of the political ambitions of the fundamentalists. Most of the time, I illustrated the meaning of dominionism with a single quote from a prominent evangelical “educator” from Tennessee, George Grant. I still remember it:

  Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ—to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and Godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after…. Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land—of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.

  Of course, it was only later that I made those speeches. After I made my choice. Before, for many years, I just couldn’t take it seriously. Closing my eyes again, I can hear Sanjay’s voice at a dinner at the East Side apartment I then shared with my girlfriend Emilie.

  “It is serious,” he said, leaning forward. “What I am telling you, Greg, is that when they speak of turning America into a Christian Nation ruled in accordance with the Bible by those who purport to speak for God, this is not just rhetoric. It needs to be taken at face value. Right now, tens of millions of your fellow citizens believe—fanatically believe—there is nothing more important, and have been working for decades to acquire the political power to make it happen.”

  “San,” my girlfriend Emilie replied, “I love you dearly,” which was not exactly true, “but on this you’re seriously off base. We’ve always had big religious revivals. Think of the Great Awakening. It’s just mass hysteria—it flares up when people feel anxious about change, and then it burns out. And the evangelicals are, what, only a quarter of the population? Fact is, most of the people are drugged out on shopping and reality TV and couldn’t give a crap. It’s just not going to happen, San.”

  I agreed with her.

  THE TYPEWRITER SITS on a table directly in front of a large picture window that frames a view of three overgrown rhododendrons in the foreground, the narrow lake below, and the rocky shore opposite, dominated by a single large gray-green granite boulder. A dense oak forest punctuated with tall hemlocks rises sharply behind it. The lake is flat, so free of ripple or blemish that every cloud is rendered perfectly on its surface. I hear no sound other than the unfamiliar mechanical hum of the typewriter, in which—I suddenly hear—the dominant note is G, with strong overtones. Secular music has been missing from my life since the end of the Holy War. All we had at Governors Island were Church of God in America hymns, which were so insipid as to kill the joy that I normally found in any music. I listen to the hum of the IBM. It isn’t Bach, but it isn’t Walk with Jesus Mild either. I hum a fifth interval, over and over, harmonizing with the IBM, then stop when I suddenly remember the face of the redheaded kid I killed with a grenade. He ran at my position in Battery Park, alone, screaming, his face twisted in hate. I couldn’t hear him, but his mouth suggested, “Die faggot.” They called everyone left in Manhattan “faggot.” He exploded in a fine red mist.

  This was not the first time that the world didn’t listen. In college I read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Fourteen years before the first shot was fired, Hitler announced his plan to destroy the parliamentary system in Germany, to attack France and Eastern Europe, and to eliminate the Jews. Why, I asked the professor, did neither ordinary Germans voting in the Reichstag elections in July 1932, nor foreign leaders reacting to the rise of Nazism, believe him? Why was anyone surprised when he simply did what he said he would do? She had no answer.

  The fall of my senior year at Princeton, nineteen deeply religious young men flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During the decade before 9/11, Osama Bin Laden had shouted out his warnings of mass murder using all the means of modern communication. And still we were surprised when he did what he said he would do.

  So I suppose what happened here is that they said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Indian Lake

  2029

  An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

  —Marcel Proust,

  À la recherche du temps perdu

  SITTING HERE OVERLOOKING INDIAN LAKE, it feels strange to be outside New York City for the first time in ten years. For the past five years, I have worked at the Christian Nation Archives in New York, in what formerly was the Bobst Library of New York University. The old libraries are closed, of course, but not all the collections have been destroyed. As “indexers,” we are charged with the task of coding the remaining books for preservation or destruction, and occasionally retrieving books requested by public officials or scholars whose research has been sanctioned by the Church of God in America, universally referred to as COGA. All academic and cultural organizations operate under the supervision of COGA, a sprawling enterprise. Most of us from Governors Island were placed with COGA-affiliated employers, which allows them to keep a close eye on our progress. GI has faith in its graduates, but even for them there are limits to faith. I find the physical presence of the books to be a comfort. We are constantly reminded that the eradication of evil is vital work entrusted only to those of us who know Christ and thus have the fortitude for the task.

  Six months ago, a new indexer named Adam settled in to work at a table two rows behind mine. He is the only African American in our group, and his rimless glasses, tweedy garb, and strong vocabulary immediately suggested to me that he had been a scholar. For the first two weeks he ignored me, nearly to the point of rud
eness. Then, during his third week, seeing that I was heading to Washington Square Park for lunch, Adam casually asked if he could join me. He chose a remote bench facing a dense stand of shrubs. He asked lots of questions about work and dodged most of my questions about him. When we finished our sandwiches and rose from the bench, he glanced to see that no one was near and then said simply, “Greg, you need to know that I am here because of you.” Before I could respond, he shook my hand, giving it that distinctive extra squeeze I had felt from a few others, and then turned to walk back to the library by himself.

  Two weeks later, Adam and I had become friends, which is what we now call the sort of superficial acquaintance that is the only relationship possible when people are unable to discuss anything important. I know that Adam is married, has no children, and had spent his career before the siege as a lay professor of theology at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea. I knew from that first day in the park that he wanted something from me, but I waited patiently for him to ask. He would ask when he was ready. When he proposed the risky enterprise of a long vacation during which I should write a memoir, I refused.

  “Why, Adam?” I asked. “You’ve got to tell me why you want me to write this thing and what you plan to do with it.”

  “You need to trust me.”

  “How the hell can I trust you? I hardly know you.”

  “You trust me enough to have this conversation. You know we’re careful,” he replied.

  “True. But talking to you is something I might survive if they found out. But leaving town, somehow going off the Purity Web—which by the way I sincerely doubt is possible—and then writing everything that happened, telling the truth … That’s entirely different.” I paused. “And by the way, who is ‘we’? Are you telling me that Free Minds is real?”

  “No. I’m not saying that.” He looked annoyed with me. “Please, Greg. I know about you. I know what you did. I know he was your friend. We need you to tell your story. That’s all I’m asking.”