Christian Nation Page 4

  There were, of course, rewards. In addition to the salary, we got first-class training and great work. We also ate with clients in the city’s best restaurants, learned not to feel guilty when drinking hundred-dollar bottles of wine, rode around town in radio-dispatched “black cars,” and—when entertained by RCD&S partners at their penthouse apartments and perfect country houses—received a glimpse of the life that we too might have. Despite the suddenness of our immersion in this world, within a few months it seemed entirely natural and completely deserved that we now sat near the top of the vast pyramid that was New York City.

  The quid pro quo for our provisional access to this rarefied world was total dedication to the firm. The first rule was that the clients were to be treated like gods. Their phone calls and e-mails were to be answered promptly. Their requests and deadlines, no matter how unreasonable, were to be met—and met with perfection. The firm was obsessive about quality. We aspired for our work product to be perfect. In doing legal research, no stone was left unturned. Every possible solution to the client’s problem was explored and analyzed. I quickly came to have pride in the firm, while at the same time doubting constantly that I was really up to the job. For a young lawyer, the sources of stress were manifold. I was often exhausted from lack of sleep. Worse was the uncertainty. You made plans but never knew when a last-minute assignment or crisis would keep you at the office. Your friends quickly became used to empty seats and unused tickets. And for overachievers accustomed to excelling at everything, having memos and drafts come back from senior associates and partners covered with corrections and comments was deeply disturbing.

  EARLIER TODAY I looked up and was startled to spot a person walking along the far bank of Indian Lake. I quickly convinced myself that each time the man stopped and turned toward the water, he was staring across at the cottage. If I could see him, I thought, then he could see me through the large plate glass window. My heart raced. I didn’t know whether to be still, so as not to attract attention, or to go and alert Adam. I chose not to move. Sitting here, ridiculously frozen, I was overcome by a feeling of guilt: guilt for being off the Purity Web, guilt for lying to Lurlene at the archives, guilt for breaking their rules. But quickly guilt turned to anger. Faced suddenly with the possibility that this project, which I had taken on so reluctantly, would be interrupted or terminated, I became angry. I have not been angry for a very long time.

  When the person moved farther down the lakeshore, I went downstairs and found Adam. He could see I was shaken.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Someone is out there,” I said, my voice trembling slightly.

  “Let me see.”

  “You can’t. He’s gone,” I answered.

  “Are you sure it was a he?” I nodded. “And where was he? On the other side of the lake?”

  “Yes. He was staring across at the cottage.”

  “OK, thanks for letting me know. Don’t worry about it. It’s probably nothing. Some of the old-timers remember the lake and walk here.”

  “Not an easy place to take a walk,” I said.

  “No, you’re right. It could be a deacon. But if so, there’s nothing we can do. Don’t worry about it.”

  When I seemed reluctant to return to my desk in front of the window, Adam asked me a strange question.

  “There’s something I want you to think about, Greg. When you remember 2005 and the start of your career, what were the things you believed or assumed then—the certainties you embraced—that ultimately proved most wrong?”

  Whether or not it was his intention, he succeeded in distracting me from worrying. It was an odd question, and a hard thing to think about. Of all the things I held certain at the beginning of my adult life, which one was most mistaken? Of course, there’s my family. I never imagined I would lose them so early. But that’s not what Adam meant. At the start of my career, I knew that the exact path of my career would not be clear or certain. But I did think that the ground over which that path would lead would be more or less stable. I believed that the stage on which my life would play out—this country and its institutions—would be essentially static and unchanging. I see now that this was a spectacular failure of perspective. I should have known from history that the ground on which we take the walk of our lives is shifting and unstable, and that change is unpredictable and spasmodic. Nothing seems to us—in human time—to be more solid than the ground. And yet in reality the earth’s crust jerks across the globe in devastating spasms. Centuries or millennia of rock-solid calm punctuated by a few minutes of heaving and rolling readjustment. This is the perspective of geological time.

  But after the cataclysms of the twentieth century, it seemed to me in 2005 that the ground was stable. Indeed, the framework within which I thought my life and career would unfold seemed so settled as to be invisible. The status quo—a stable federal union, an open society, democracy, personal freedom, or indeed basic civil order—was so expected, so much a given, that not once did even a flicker of appreciation for these things cross my consciousness. What I gave no thought to then, though, has for the last fifteen years never been far from the center of my mind.

  WITH NEW YORK having recovered from 9/11, and the credit and housing bubbles being in full flower, life in New York seemed strangely detached from the broader trends of the Bush years in America. When one of our Princeton friends got married in central Pennsylvania, I rented a car, and Sanjay, Emilie, and I drove together to the wedding. These excursions out of the city often gave us a sense of dislocation, a sense that the suburban and rural America of our youths—not so many years before—was changing beyond recognition.

  “There it is again,” said Sanjay.

  We had been driving through a sprawling landscape of shopping malls and housing developments, grotesquely ugly beads strung randomly along a strand of four traffic-choked lanes. The cars—windows up cocooning their passengers in air-conditioning on a lovely spring day—mysteriously shuttled among malls even though most seemed to contain exactly the same blend of national chain stores and fast-food outlets. The rare undeveloped pockets between commercial strips and sprawling housing developments hosted overscale billboards carefully angled toward the slow-moving traffic. Sanjay had noticed a particular billboard advertisement, repeated over and over, that featured a recognizable image of Jesus, looking rather more stern than I was used to, looming over the dome of the Capitol building in Washington with the strident message “The time is now” floating above on a banner supported by two angels. It seemed there had always been religious billboards, most of a fairly anodyne variety, announcing, for example, that “Jesus Saves.” But this seemed different.

  “Tomorrow belongs to me,” I said.

  “What?” asked Emilie.

  “The song. That’s what the billboards remind me of. In Cabaret, when the young Nazi starts singing. You know, ‘Fatherland, Fatherland give us a sign …’ I can’t remember the rest. But it ends with ‘Tomorrow belongs to me.’ It always gives me the creeps. I mean serious creeps. Not sure why. Every time I hear it I get goose bumps.”

  “You are a sentimental twit.” Emilie had started to pick up all sorts of anglicisms from the British bankers at Credit Suisse, a habit that had started, even then, to annoy me.

  The wedding was in a suburban “mega-church”—a large gray metal building seating thousands and surrounded by acres of blacktop parking that entombed the fertile soils below that had been farmed for centuries. I had never seen anything like it. It was near the intersection of two state highways, far from any village or town center. Other than a grossly overscaled cross mounted on the roof, the architecture was not at all ecclesiastical. It could have been a factory. The complex included a vast sanctuary with a platform at the front that was more stage than altar, with elaborate theatrical lighting. In another bit of stagecraft, a large crucifix, which looked to me as though it was made from fiberglass, was suspended by invisible wires, giving the appearance that it hovered over the back of the sta
ge. A rock band was positioned on one side, and a large choir in shiny purple robes was on the other. Enormous video screens were arrayed, stadium-like, around all sides of the room. During the service, a talented producer chose images for the large screens. He projected close-ups of the preacher but frequently interrupted that feed in favor of ecstatic faces from the audience and angelic choir girls who then appeared in flashing superscale all around the room. This clearly was religion as entertainment. It made me remember that so much of the historical success of Christianity was owing to its ability to embrace and incorporate popular culture from all parts of the world and all eras. The pagans are wedded to celebrating the winter solstice? No problem, we’ll shift the birthday of Christ to accommodate.

  I reflected how different this was from the Catholic Church of my childhood, holding fast to the old hymns and refusing to make any expedient accommodation to contemporary sensibilities. What we saw that day, in contrast, was religion finely and completely attuned to every nuance and preference of contemporary American popular culture—attuned, that is, in terms of experience and presentation. Content, as we found out, was another thing altogether.

  The sanctuary stood at the center of a complex that included several schoolrooms, a library (which contained mostly religious DVDs and few books), a senior center, and a kindergarten, among other facilities. This church seemed to loom large in the life of the bride’s family. The church, our friend Jim said, had given back the sense of community that this suburb had been missing. He also had called it a “Bible-believing church,” but he didn’t elaborate.

  At the dinner after the ceremony, the three of us were seated with the sister of the bride, who was slightly older than we were and worked at an accounting firm. Sanjay was talking about You and I and happened to mention that the first group attracted to the website were yogis.

  “Oh,” the sister said, suddenly looking troubled. “And that was … well, ok?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sanjay. “Really perfect. They got it immediately.”

  “But … well,” she asked, “aren’t yoga people, you know, atheists?”

  Sanjay, who had been polite but clearly bored, suddenly looked interested.

  “Well, some are, I suppose. But no more or less, I would think, than the general population. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t think so,” the sister said. “I mean, yoga is a religion, an atheistic religion, so that means that yogis don’t believe in God. In our church, we believe that yoga is one of the ways that Satan recruits souls.”

  I had rarely seen Sanjay at a loss for words. He looked genuinely confused.

  “Sue, with all respect to your church, I have to tell you that is not right. You can be a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim and still do yoga. It is true that it emerged from the Hindu tradition and that there is a spiritual dimension in addition to the physical practice. But many devout religious people do yoga. And,” he added, attempting to lighten the mood, “I have done yoga since I was ten, and have never encountered Satan.”

  “You cannot know that. Satan doesn’t announce himself, you know. And anything that calls itself a spiritual practice that doesn’t have Jesus at its center is … well, you know, an illusion.”

  Sanjay was just about to say something conciliatory when Emilie, who had drunk too much wine, jumped in.

  “And I suppose your church teaches that evolution is also an illusion?”

  “No,” she answered, “not an illusion but a theory that is incorrect because it conflicts with the Bible. We’re a Bible-believing church. The Bible is pretty clear about creation. But even if you don’t believe the Bible, there are so many problems with evolution that many eminent scientists don’t believe it, you know. Surely you understand that much.”

  Emilie opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  The sister, sensing success, went on.

  “Last year our church did a field trip to Kentucky to visit the Creation Museum. It was awesome. It explained the right way to understand fossils and about all the evidence for the flood, and showed how man and the dinosaurs coexisted with all the rest of God’s creation. You’ve got to go, really. You’d never think the same way about it if you went. There’s just so much nonsense you hear from the mainstream media—it’s really important for people like you to be exposed to both sides of the story. Oh, and there was a fantastic exhibit at a nearby museum proving the existence of hell. So clever. They put microphones down some abandoned oil wells in Texas and recorded the screams of the damned. Terrifying. You really should go.”

  I could tell that Emilie was on the verge of saying something she would regret, so I interrupted and changed the subject. Sanjay clearly wished to probe and explore the woman’s beliefs and views, but with one look I warned him off. He looked very thoughtful during the rest of the dinner.

  In the car on the way back, Sanjay was animated and clearly fascinated by the experience. I was driving, and Emilie was in the back, with a hangover.

  Sanjay was looking down at his Palm Treo. “Amazing. Did you know,” he asked, “that 84 percent of Americans believe that Jesus is the son of God, 80 percent believe in the Day of Judgment and in miracles, 50 percent believe in angels, and 40 percent believe in the literal truth of the Bible? Fifty-five percent say God created humans in their present form, and only 13 percent believe in evolution without divine guidance.”

  “Impossible,” said Emilie. “I don’t know anybody who believes in angels or who doesn’t accept evolution. Who are these people?”

  “Those numbers are true, I am afraid,” continued Sanjay. “I am looking at the latest Gallup Poll. It says that 25 percent of Americans describe themselves as evangelicals and 40 percent self-describe as born-again Christians—40 percent. I had no idea.”

  “So what?” asked Emilie. “I mean, these people say ‘I believe this, I believe that.’ I’m supposed to care? Why? I mean, these people cannot get the small stuff right. Did you see on the news that Miss South Carolina said on TV that she thought Europe was a country and she had never heard of Hungary? Unbelievable. So if they can’t get the small stuff right, why should I care about what they believe about the really big stuff, like creation and infinity and the universe? It’s absurd. Why do we pay attention to these people?”

  “I am not sure, but I found the weekend very interesting,” Sanjay answered. “Those people are not what I thought fundamentalists were like. We were not in the Deep South or a stereotypical ‘red state.’ We were in Pennsylvania. And the family. Well, they did not appear to be unreasonable people. But the sister at dinner …”

  “Wasn’t that a scream?” Emilie interrupted. “When she started explaining to you why yoga was satanic … oh my God, it was classic, classic. Sanjay, dear, it’s not often that I’ve seen you at a total loss for words. And she’s an accountant. What an idiot. Unbelievable. My head hurts.”

  That weekend in Pennsylvania is what first got Sanjay interested in the evangelical movement and eventually in its quest for political power. Would something else have triggered the same interest, or would he and I have had completely different lives if our friend had married someone else or if Sanjay hadn’t gone to the wedding? A frivolous thought. Coincidence and randomness create opportunity and choices, and our lives then take a path determined by the opportunities we take and the choices we make.

  Within days I realized that Sanjay had become fascinated by the mega-church phenomenon, by the theology of fundamentalist Christianity, and by the rapid rise of the Christian right to the pinnacle of political power. Running You and I at that point was not really a full-time job, and Sanjay immersed himself in the topic and spoke of little else. It was not, at the time, a topic of great interest to me. In fact, as I immersed myself in my work and had my eyes opened to the worlds of business and finance, Sanjay’s preoccupation seemed to me to be more than a little quirky. I had the sense that, after years of academics, I was finally learning how the world really worked. The people with whom I spent my days
were what we pretentiously called at the time “players,” and San—despite his success with You and I—seemed to have taken a turn back to a world of abstraction, theory, and academic speculation. Despite our closeness, I occasionally was tempted to see Sanjay as an artifact of my past life as opposed to a major part of my current life—a view that Emilie did nothing to discourage.

  It is painful for me to realize how far things already had progressed by 2005. Even Sanjay didn’t have the full picture at the time. After the 2004 election, not only were the president of the United States, the Speaker of the House, numerous cabinet members, and other senior federal officials born-again Christians, but forty-two out of a hundred US senators were entirely supportive of the Christian right agenda, holding ratings of 100 percent from the Christian Coalition. Extreme fundamentalist Christians entered the US Senate, including Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (calling for the death penalty for abortion doctors) and Jim DeMint (wanting to ban gays and unmarried pregnant women from teaching in public schools). Fundamentalist Christian theology was already driving our federal policy on medical research (with the ban on stem cell research), sex education (which the government decreed should focus exclusively on the promotion of abstinence), and US foreign policy in the Middle East (where an important driver of US policy was the need to have Jerusalem in the hands of the Jews in order to satisfy a biblical condition to the second coming of Christ). The federal government was channeling billions in taxpayer funds to faith-based organizations—nearly all evangelical. And, perhaps most significantly and least noticed, much of the legislation that would eventually implement the theocratic program, including the Constitution Restoration Act (preventing federal courts from hearing church/state separation cases) and the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act (allowing tax-exempt churches to engage in partisan political activity), had already been introduced in Congress, ultimately failing to become law but attracting significant pluralities. We had already been given, unknowingly, a preview of what was to follow.