Christian Nation (28 page)

I was relentless in forcing our team to focus on what we would do after the inevitable happened. Our strategy was simple. The Blessing would be completely impotent if each and every of its fifty elements was litigated in federal court and the courts of each of the states. The Blessing read like no federal statue (or any statue in any country) and was not only unconstitutional on numerous grounds but also completely deficient as a law due to its vagueness and uncertainty. As long as we had a functioning court system in the country, we figured we could delay its implementation for years—at least four years in any case, following which the country would have the opportunity to replace the House and restore to the White House a president who would take seriously his or her oath to uphold the Constitution. It was on this that we pinned our hopes.

I do not want you to underestimate our effort during those two weeks. The Catholic archbishop of New York, with the sanction of the Vatican, convened a summit of all the non-evangelical religious leaders in the country. The entire conference of American Catholic bishops, the apostles of the Mormon Church, the leaders of Orthodox and Reform Judaism, the most respected American imams, the Episcopal bishops, the presidents of the great Presbyterian seminaries and leaders of each other mainstream Protestant denomination all gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to consider The Blessing. It was the idea of New York’s mayor, Christine Quinn, to turn the event into a major spectacle that would capture the attention of the country and illustrate to those waffling on the edges of the fundamentalist movement that this was not a battle between God and the godless but between this peculiarly American strain of fundamentalist Christianity and all the other Abrahamic religions that worshiped the same God. Delegations of religious leaders arriving at the city’s airports were treated like visiting heads of state and escorted into Manhattan by impressive motorcades led by scores of NYPD motorcycle cops. Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic, and crowds lined the sidewalks to witness the arriving religious leaders. Each group was greeted on the street in front of the cathedral by the mayor and governor with symbolic keys to the city. The archbishop stood at the top of the steps to Saint Patrick’s and made short remarks of welcome to each delegation. These remarks, more than anything else about that day, gave great swaths of the country momentary cause for optimism. The archbishop, a jovial Irishman who was also a learned religious scholar conversant with all the denominations represented, spoke movingly of the traditions and teachings of each other denomination, emphasizing all that it held in common with other faiths and assuring the leaders of the profound respect of the Roman Catholic Church. This was followed in each case by a warm bear hug from the archbishop. The first time it happened, I saw a tear leak from the governor’s eye. Christine Quinn beamed with joy. Part of me wanted to believe this would be a redemptive moment, pulling the country gently away from the precipice by reminding it of its better self. But the other part of my brain could only ask why they had waited so long. Why hadn’t this happened immediately after 9/11? Or after Sarah Palin’s Christian Nation resolution in 2009?

At the end of the day, the delegations reappeared on the steps of the cathedral and issued a forceful joint condemnation of The Blessing. They even asked their own faithful to take to the streets and oppose the law, but they fell short of a call for violence. Jordan and F3 stridently contested the part of the religious leaders’ statement claiming that The Blessing threatened their own religious freedom, pointing to the Tenth Covenant guarantee of “the right of non-Christian citizens to believe and practice, in the private sphere of their families and places of worship.” Many Americans took this at face value and believed that their own rights of belief and religious practice would be protected.

After the summit of religious leaders, the Mormons, never easy bedfellows with the evangelicals, worried that they alone among the other Christian denominations in the country would be considered a “cult” whose property would be forfeit to the states. They immediately began moving their financial assets to Canada in secret, an error that eventually made their worst fear a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The United Nations Security Council met in emergency session and adopted a resolution warning the United States that implementation of the theocratic system contemplated by The Blessing would breach the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that it and its members would take all actions available to them under international law to enforce America’s obligations under the United Nations Treaty, the UN Headquarters Agreement, and America’s many other multilateral and bilateral treaties. All the NATO allies warned that abrogation of the NATO treaty would be illegal and fundamentally destabilizing to world peace. China and Russia, however, said repeatedly that it was “an internal matter” for the United States.

The country stood still for two weeks, transfixed by the situation in which it found itself. The stock market tumbled by 40 percent in the days following Jordan’s speech, to which the Securities and Exchange Commission responded by suspending trading until after the vote, which itself dealt a devastating blow to Wall Street and other financial markets. Mainstream college campuses were gripped by violence, with noisy clashes between right and left rendering most of them unable to maintain a secure environment for the continuation of classes. So many evangelicals had poured into Washington on church buses from around the country that non-evangelical constituents could not break through the crowds to lobby their legislators on Capitol Hill.

Two days before the vote, TW recruited virtually all mainstream American popular entertainers to participate in the Real Freedom mega-concert in New York’s Central Park, televised and streamed live on every media outlet other than F3. If reason could not win the argument, we hoped to turn popular culture—a tool that the other side had used with such great effect—against them. Under a clear sky and a full moon, three generations of pop, rock, rap, and blues stars stepped to the stage, performed their all-time hit songs, and then entreated their fans to stand up for their rights and prevent the introduction of a religious state. Many wept and cried and begged America to come to its senses. Millions were moved by the event. But virtually none of Jordan’s political base watched the concert, for at the same time all the leading country and Christian music stars had assembled on the mall in Washington for a competing Thanks for The Blessing concert.

It is hard for me to think in an orderly way about that time. Sanjay and I hardly slept. TW had trebled its staff, and law professors, scholars, historians, and journalists from around the country signed up to volunteer. What they wanted from us were assignments. We dispatched them to interviews, to rallies in the coastal cities, and to interface with congressional staffs. We were in a mode of hyperactivity, but at the same time we were watching a slow-motion train wreck because we knew the outcome of the vote.

We toyed with the idea of sending Sanjay to the House gallery to be present for that vote but decided against it, fearing that he might be arrested before he could leave Washington. Sanjay and I were invited to New York governor Bloomberg’s Manhattan town house to watch the vote on television with Mayor Quinn and some of the governor’s close friends. The House voted first, followed immediately by the Senate. When it was over, Mayor Quinn was in tears, holding the hand of her partner and sobbing on her shoulder. I looked at Sanjay, who was staring at his hands. I remember wanting to give him a hug. I didn’t. The governor let loose a string of expletives and left the room.

A
T THE END,
only five Republican representatives and two Republican senators broke with the administration and opposed the bill. The strangest piece of legislation in American history passed with overwhelming majorities. What they voted on became, after the president’s signature, a federal law, but its opening words were the following: “An Act to Accept a Covenant With God and the Blessings Thereunder. The United States of America hereby humbly and gratefully enters into a covenant with the Lord our God and protector, accepting each of the following as His Blessings, and as the supreme law of the land.” The text of The Blessing, with its strange combination of vague generalities and specific normative standards, thus entered the US Code as federal law.

Within hours of the vote and presidential signature, in a strategy orchestrated by TW, every possible class of plaintiff with a legal complaint against The Blessing—non-evangelical Christian groups, non-Christian churches, states and municipalities, judges, unions, businesses, and individuals—filed more than 2,500 lawsuits in every state and in every federal district court in the country, challenging each one of the fifty Blessings on multiple grounds. It was a massive effort to pull together and execute in two weeks. This had been my job. I persuaded the most prominent lawyers and firms in the country to appear as counsel of record, including every living former head of the American Bar Association and the deans and senior faculty of every major law school. Together, the various lawsuits sought immediate stays of the effectiveness of, and any action predicated on, The Blessing as well as seeking eventual determinations that the purported federal law should be invalidated. My job was to be sure that every possible legal basis for challenge was being advanced and that every relevant jurisdiction and court was engaged.

True to the pattern set by Jordan from the day he first walked in the side door of Sarah Palin’s White House, he allowed the nation to revert to a strained calm following the tumultuous two weeks preceding the vote on The Blessing. The stays we requested from the courts had in almost every instance been granted, so The Blessing had no legal effect and, for the moment, people’s lives were not changed.

During this lull, Sanjay made a close study of Jordan’s cabinet and subcabinet-level appointments to better understand the administration’s most likely next moves. Jordan had appointed the globally popular evangelical preacher and author Rick Warren (author of
The Purpose Driven Life
and its many spin-offs and franchises) to be the secretary of Health and Human Services. It was one of a number of celebrity appointments made by the new President.
Time
magazine noted that it was the most media-savvy cabinet ever assembled, with the great majority having risen to prominence through media-centric careers in the now nearly unified realms of journalism, entertainment, and politics. Each of these cabinet appointees had compelling personal narratives, an uncanny knack for pandering to the narcissism of the American public, a deep knowledge of how to peddle the fantasies for which America thirsted, and a profound mastery of celebrity style. Five cabinet secretaries,
Time
reported, had appeared on reality television shows. I remember the comment by another journalist that I thought particularly revealing at the time. She said that the Jordan cabinet marked the triumph of personality over character.

A few days into his study of Jordan’s appointments, Sanjay made a strange and disturbing discovery. A federal office for the promotion and coordination of “faith-based initiatives” had been established under President Bush and, although not eliminated, was strangely inactive during both of Sarah Palin’s two terms. President Jordan, during the transition, chose the evangelical preacher and popular revisionist historian David Barton to head the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. Sanjay was one of the few people to focus on the Jordan administration’s lower-ranking appointments to that agency. He discovered, to his surprise, not the usual group of evangelical pastors who had delivered key precincts for the party but a strange mix of MIT-trained computer scientists, Chinese software engineers, and web consultants who had worked for the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Most of the Palin appointees to the faith-based office had been summarily dismissed following the transition, and the two most disgruntled of them spoke to Sanjay’s sources. Over a period of two months, Sanjay pieced together the story, discovering that Barton had assembled a team of the world’s leading experts on Internet censorship. The credentials and experience of these new employees of the faith-based office included the development of efatwa.com (a site for obtaining Islamic religious rulings online); the invention of the algorithms for China’s famously sensitive and flexible web censorship; and the development, for the infamous Saudi religious police, of the software for the monitoring and integration of all security cameras in the kingdom (this software allowed for the automated detection of activities—such as single women driving cars or couples kissing in public—that were forbidden under the kingdom’s version of sharia). This project, dubbed by the code name Purity Web, was under the personal supervision of the president, with Barton as his chief lieutenant. What exactly the goal of the project was, Sanjay could not say, but when he revealed all he had found out, there was a firestorm in the media, and the president himself had to appear on F3 to explain.