Christian Nation (22 page)

And so Sanjay had his first appearance on
The Daily Show
, and it was brilliant. The extroverted wisecracking Stewart had met his match and didn’t mind one bit. Like everyone else, he could not avoid Sanjay’s penetrating gaze. And many of Stewart’s fans listened to what Sanjay had to say simply because they were captivated by the way he looked. After our first appearance on the show, our daily website hits went from about twenty thousand to eight hundred thousand. We had truly gone national, and proven there was an audience for Sanjay’s message.

Shortly thereafter, President Palin made her first comment about Sanjay. She had delivered her prepared remarks at the morning service at the giant New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the epicenter of mega-church evangelism, and was taking questions afterward from the audience, her polished face looming on jumbo video screens all around the twelve thousand parishioners.

“Madam President,” asked a stout woman with big hair, “there are some people saying that you do not believe in democracy. People actually complaining that we want to have a God-centered country. What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that democracy? Isn’t that exactly what we want? Isn’t it what Jesus came for?”

“God bless you,” the president responded. “You got it exactly. You’re right, and some people are more determined than ever to stop it. I mean, if you want to stop God, which is everything good, then doesn’t that have to mean also that you’re, well, the opposite of good, which is evil? I’m no genius, but it seems right to me. I mean, also, have you heard this new guy, this foreign guy who is organizing a movement against our Lord? Theology Watch, I think it’s called. Well, have you seen him?”

She turned to the pastor standing next to her. “What does the Bible say about the Antichrist, Reverend? That you shall know him as a young man with a handsome face and the tongue of a serpent. Something like that? And, from what I hear, a … you know … well, a grievous sinner. Well, have you
seen
him? The Bible warns us that just when the Kingdom is closest, an Antichrist will come to try to reclaim America for the devil. As usual, if it’s in the Holy Book, it happens. So yes, there are dark forces gathering. But really, my friends. Also, really, this is really, you know, a cause for joy. Because it means we are close. Really close. Thank God. Thank you, Jesus.”

That night, the service, including this exchange, was seen by millions of evangelical Americans on CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network. Palin’s remarks about Sanjay were picked up by CNN and eventually the networks other than F3.

The next day, arriving back in Washington, the reporters shouted questions: “Madam President, are you saying that Sanjay Sharma is the Antichrist?” “Madam President, do you know what the word ‘theocracy’ means; do you know the difference between ‘theology’ and ‘theocracy’?” “Do you think he’s cute?” “Do you know that Mr. Sharma is an American citizen?” “Do you think all Americans of Indian descent are foreigners?”

Her aides, once again in control, ushered her along, and the questions were answered only with a small-mouthed “God bless you.”

Walt and I were delighted by this unexpected development, but Sanjay was not so sure.

“It’s not supposed to be about me,” he said.

But it was. Sanjay’s picture hit all the papers, tabloids, and news magazines. Suddenly his face was ubiquitous. “
The face of evil
?” was the caption on the cover of
Time
. Christian blogs and websites overflowed with biblical analysis mostly pointing to overwhelming evidence that he was indeed the Antichrist (replacing Prince William and Barack Obama as previous Internet favorites). Ironically, one of the factors most often cited was Sanjay’s obvious gentleness and goodness. Many evangelical pastors cited a well-known early church sermon on the subject:

… while a youth, the crafty dragon appears under the appearance of righteousness, before he takes the Kingdom. Because he will be craftily gentle to all people, not receiving gifts, not placed before another person, loving to all people, quiet to everyone, not desiring gifts, appearing friendly among close friends, so that men may bless him, saying—he is a just man, not knowing that a wolf lies concealed under the appearance of a lamb, and that a greedy man is inside under the skin of a sheep
.

At press conferences, reporters from the Christian media tried to connect Sanjay with biblical prophecy regarding the Antichrist, asking, for example, whether he would support a seven-year treaty guaranteeing peace with Israel, the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, a socialist “New World Order,” or one-world religion (all signs of the end times familiar to the millions of devotees of the
Left Behind
series of books and films). He was even asked if he had ever visited Babylon, to which he replied in a typically light but respectful way, “If you mean the location of the ancient Mesopotamian city, the ruins of which are currently located in modern Iraq, the answer is no. If you mean the town on Long Island, yes, I confess I attended a friend’s wedding there. A Christian wedding.”

F3’s attack against Sanjay was more sophisticated and began with a multipart “exposé” of TW, focusing not on the biblical case for belief in Sanjay as the Antichrist but making an astonishing array of spurious allegations about Sanjay and the staff, board, and funders of TW, all based on “informed sources” and not a single one backed by any evidence. These included accusations that TW was funded by radical Islamic groups, that new staff members underwent bizarre homosexual induction rituals, that I had been fired from RCD&S for embezzlement that was then covered up so as not to embarrass the firm, and that Sanjay subscribed to an obscure Hindu pagan yoga cult whose rituals required aborted fetuses. It would have been farcical had most of the enormous F3 audience not simply accepted it all as true.

The liberal and mainstream press again fell into the trap of ridiculing the president’s ignorance and superstition as opposed to taking her words at face value. But at least Sanjay and TW now had a platform. When we held a press conference, all the media showed up. When Sanjay traveled and lectured, he was treated as a celebrity.

After the burst of legislation in the first months of Palin’s second term, the considerable drama of Justice Steven’s death, the Supreme Court’s dramatic reversal of a century of constitutional jurisprudence, and the resulting tsunami of social legislation in the red state capitals, the second year of the Palin administration was relatively quiet, and the East and West Coasts of the country seemed to draw a collective sigh of relief. But Sanjay knew that the pacing was deliberate. Jordan and the other evangelical leaders allowed the fear to abate and the non-evangelical population to adjust to the new reality. After a year, the prevailing view, expressed both by pundits and the man on the street, was “It’s not so bad.”

While things became relatively quiet in the Congress, the administration was busy imposing its agenda on the executive branch of the federal government. In early 2014 President Palin appointed Michael Farris as the new secretary of education. Farris was the founder and chancellor of Patrick Henry College, a four-year Christian college founded in 2000 whose motto is “For Christ and for Liberty.” But Farris was no ordinary Christian educator. A lawyer, Farris in 1983 founded the Home School Legal Defense Association and was the leading force persuading evangelicals to remove their children from the public schools and all the distractions of a modern education. Instead, he promoted a curriculum of Christ-centered homeschooling texts to ensure that the children emerged into adulthood with a wholly fundamentalist Christian worldview and prepared, as Generation Joshua, to assume their places in the battle to retake America for Jesus. He was remarkably successful. And these evangelical homeschoolers—estimated to number somewhere between one and two million—were in addition to the 15 percent of all private school students in the country who were enrolled in conservative Christian academies.

All faculty and students at Patrick Henry were required to sign a Statement of Faith, and all teaching was strictly required to adhere to the literal truth of the Bible as its core principle. The college had been denied accreditation in the normal way due to its exclusive teaching of creation science, although it did receive an alternative accreditation from something called the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. In a widely aired radio interview, Farris had explained his contempt for the concepts of religious and social toleration. No other religion could be tolerated, he explained, because it was “error.” His comment that “tolerance cannot coexist with liberty” had been widely reported. This was the core theocratic principle: True liberty meant the liberty of the Christian to exist in a Christian Nation free of competing faiths or tolerance of practices at odds with his fundamentalist theology. As a result, in a perversion of ordinary meaning and common sense, the pursuit of liberty became the pursuit of a society in which there was no freedom to believe or live in any way that was at odds with the evangelical faith.

In any other period of American history, Farris’s appointment to any position in the cabinet would have been unthinkable, but in the second year of President Palin’s second term, it hardly seemed surprising that such a man would assume a high position. The second Bush administration provided over $1 billion in federal funding to subsidize fundamentalist Christian homeschooling texts, so it was hard to argue that Farris’s obsession with homeschooling was something new to government. But the rigor and purity of his evangelical beliefs would be a potent force at the highest levels of the administration.

At the Farris confirmation hearing, Senator Charles Schumer from New York read one of the Patrick Henry “credos”—professions of belief that were required of all students and faculty:

“Satan exists as a personal malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity
.”

The senator then asked, “So, Mr. Farris, in your capacity as a future secretary of education, does this mean that every child in America should be taught to believe that every Hindu or Muslim in India, every Buddhist or Confucian or atheist in China, every Jew, every Roman Catholic, every person everywhere in the world who has the bad luck to be born to parents who are not born-again evangelical or Pentecostal Christians, that every one of those other people, when he or she dies, faces conscious torment for eternity—that this is the fate chosen for all these people by their creator? Do I have that right?”

“Yes, Senator,” Farris replied, “that is what the Bible says, but only if they die outside of Christ, without having accepted Christ as their redeemer, which of course is their choice. With respect, sir, you may think it strange, but who are you to question the wisdom of God? I don’t second-guess my creator.”

F3, by now the principal source of news and views for almost half the population, hyped the purported achievements of Patrick Henry students and Farris’s own academic and legal credentials, and the appointment was approved by the Senate over the vociferous objections of the minority Democrats.

Only a few weeks after the Farris confirmation, Walt conceived of a platform for Sanjay that proved remarkably effective. The National Prayer Breakfast was an event that had been held in Washington every February since 1953. The breakfast itself was safely anodyne, and the US president, together with three thousand other politicians and movers and shakers from around the world, could usually attend the event at the DC Hilton Hotel without fear of embarrassment. Walt’s idea was that Sanjay should use his new celebrity status to shine a spotlight on the more sinister aspect of the gathering. Sanjay called a press conference on the street outside the Hilton and, while the breakfast was proceeding in the ballroom inside, opened with a short statement:

I am sure most Americans think that having our president—and members of Congress, judges, diplomats, and other leaders—come together for an annual moment of spiritual reflection and prayer, a moment of unity, is not a bad thing—indeed, that it should be commended. I agree completely. But since 1953 those same good Americans have been deceived by the people inside this building. Yes, that is right.
Deceived
. They have been deceived because this break fast is sponsored by, and is one of the rare public manifestations of, a long-standing secret political movement that calls itself The Family. This organization, led by the man—Doug Coe—whom our national leaders are inside applauding as I speak, has only a single purpose: to recruit politically powerful people to the cause of dominionist theology—that is, rule by God’s law, or theocracy. There can be no confusion; The Family exists to acquire power. Doug Coe has said, in a perversion of everything I know about Jesus Christ, that Jesus “prefers power to piety.”

Once you realize what its goals are, then it should be no surprise that The Family operates on the basis of strict secrecy. They describe themselves as “an invisible organization,” and they want to hide their methods and goals from the American people. They deliberately emulate the structures and practices of the old Communist Party, organizing themselves as a system of “cells” without traditional hierarchies and with few if any members having sight of the whole organization. Did you know, my friends, that these cells, sometimes simply referred to as “prayer groups,” have existed for years within the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Pentagon—in virtually every department of our federal government? Did you know that The Family tries to impose its fundamentalist policies on impoverished foreign countries, like Uganda, where they prevented our country from supporting programs promoting condom use, causing a doubling of AIDS infections, which was followed by The Family’s urging that the country adopt the death penalty for homosexuality? It is true.

So I ask the media and the American people to ask themselves, and to ask President Palin and the representatives and senators who attend this event every year, whether they are members of The Family and support its goals. Please ask them if they believe that biblical law and not the Constitution should be the ultimate rule in this nation. If so, please ask them why are they not honest with you about this. Please ask them when they come out of this building whether they are members of a prayer group that meets in government offices. Please ask them why they hold those meetings in secret. And please, please ask them whether or not they are committed to tolerating the beliefs of their fellow Americans who are not born-again evangelical Christians.