I’ll begin with the flyer. Which, in the spirit of due diligence, I’ll transcribe word for idiosyncratically capitalized word:
Jewish-Christian
National Committee
AMERICA’S
NEW
Party Needs YOU
to Run for Office!
Stay in School.
We’ll Run Your
Campaign for You.
CALL NOW!
(434) 258-5254
Equal opportunity! Women & Minorities Welcome!
JNC…America’s NEW Biblical values party.
“Pro-Life, Pro-Religious Freedom, Pro-Israel”
What I couldn’t fit in, what was off to the left of every line from “AMERICA’S” to “Stay in School” was the founder’s picture, name, and, I suppose, motto. The picture was that of a gamely, possibly latina blonde's smiling visage, her name is Ishah Wright, and what I take to be her motto reads as follows:
“Supporting
candidates with a
Judeao[probably sic]-Christian
platform is
Constitutional.”
As some of you may or may not be aware, I was at Liberty University yesterday. Western, though not to say, West, Virginia, the semi-rural Blue Hill Mountain town of Lynchburg to be precise. Verdant and vaguely vertiginous, with a Wal-mart and a Falwell airport and a [Tim, one presumes] LaHaye Ice Rink splayed out over the flat parts. A rainy, early spring day.
The event was to start at 10, which it didn’t because nothing happens on that campus between 10 and 11, there isn’t even coffee sold, the vending machines work I suppose but nothing else, nothing manned by men and women at any rate, nothing personelled. Book stores and newspaper stands, formerly echoing hallways and every single lit and unlit classroom. An eclipse of campus life in the middle of the day, a momentary moon passing in front of the chatter and smatter and everyday thrum of a campus life, how odd, how peculiar, why was this happening. Chapel. Although I still don’t know what goes on at a Liberty Chapel--is it all god/bible, is it all chapter:verses, is there some speechifying, does Falwell take matters into his own hands, are there also school matters, does someone stand up to make announcements—all a mystery to me, still, and unless I go out of my way it will always be, so just suffice it to say for now, for all of us: Chapel from 10 to 11, attendance required, to further discourage you from truancy you can't even buy coffee, not if Liberty has anything to say about it (though they can’t stop you from getting a Coke).
So. So this odd quiet—(moon of something passing in front of the source of light)—there we were milling around amidst this odd quiet. Tables carried inside the building, chairs and electronic equipment, boxes of sponsor-embossed books and highlighters (our assorted accoutrements of the shill), power cords and paper, our black table cloths, our still-intact blears. We arrived at 9:20 and finished setting up just before 10, I walked back inside the bustling building and the bustling building was still. Natalie, the newcomer, was walking towards us saying something about not being able to buy coffee, there being a rule. I thought I heard the word “chapel.” The bustling building was still. The hallway lights were on, but every other light was off. Come to think of it, she really did say the word “chapel.”
This was the second school we’ve been to where they actually had something called chapel that people actually were required to go to. But this was so emphatic. There really was something like a silence.
I wandered around. Up and down hallways a little, you might call it poking, I went poking around. There were classrooms to peer into, bulletin boards to examine, I had an hour to kill after all, I didn’t feel like looking at glass-encased pictures of Jerry Falwell with various caucasian dignitaries of the late-twentieth century. Some of the things were interesting, but not as interesting as what I’ve given you above. (I took it with me after all; mostly, though, I think I was attracted to the marriage [of convenience] of “Christian” and “Jewish.”^) Ishah Wright and her “Judeao-Christian” dream. The United States as the purview if not provenance of JC. And isn’t it funny how many things those initials can stand for. Or maybe they always only stand for one, depending on whom you ask.
As promised, at 11 the hallways again sprang to life, various interior lights were turned on, coffee was again sold. [Author’s Note: the line, within minutes, was over 20-feet long.] I bought coffee for myself and Natalie and began my day making business cards for Liberty University students, and without further ado I’ll write here in this initial, action-filled sentence that sometime between noon and 1 pm, after making around 15 or so sets of cards, I look over the shoulder of the next student-guest filling in boxes and see that the name she has typed into the “First Name” box is “Ishah” and into the “Last Name” box she has typed the word “Wright.” Lo, and behold.
An opportunity. (Though I did not know then for whom.)
Things didn’t exactly evolve from there. We got into it. I told her I found the question unanswerable, proof, empiricism, et al, my five senses, et al, she asked if Jesus revealed himself to me through a miracle would I accept him, I said of course I’d love to see it. (In my mind: Jesus descending in a canted shower of light, were those flower petals trailing behind him, no but seriously such is the sophomoric level of my knowledge of religion, I know miracles come in other forms, highway underpass approximations of the visage of Mary, that sort of thing, but I swear to you those flowers and that rain of light are what descended through my mind.) I said of course, doubting I ever would, she asked if she could pray for me, for this to happen, I told her it was a free country. She bowed her head and began praying. Right there. Out loud and in the middle of the hallway, people walking by, young men and women standing in line to fill out business cards. And yes it felt like she was forcing herself on me, yes she had spiritually mounted me, she was up there suddenly riding. Riding my tiny agnostic.
Obviously, I was a little taken aback. Not to sound like the pith-helmeted San Franciscan astounded in the Blue Hills of Virginia, but…I really didn’t know what to do. I stood there wearing a visible “uh.” Do I bow my head concurrently, out of something like respect? Do I wait silently, patiently? Go on about my business and my day, leaning and assisting the next form-filling-out student until she was done, which I would know through aural evidence because she would stop addressing god and again start addressing me? Ought I to have politely asked her to engage in this sort of activity alone, or in those places which have been socially designated?
I won’t bore you with the rest of the details. She finished, we finished, she went on her way…and another rose to take her place.
As this is the thing about Liberty. An evangelical school…well, an evangelical school—they are there to evangelize, or because their parents want them to (and most likely do so themselves), and so this is the thing about Liberty: there will usually be someone there to take the last person’s place. As there was yesterday for me.
Krystle was her name, and no I won’t bore you with all the striking details, I won’t bore you with any of them this time and instead I will cut to the striking chase: as a result of this second proselytic^^ conversation I realized that I am a patriot, that I love and am thankful for Jefferson’s United States of America.
No I am not talking about someone having the freedom to stand and talk to god in a once more bustling Virginia hallway while I have the freedom to lean towards a computer and ignore her, and no I’m not talking about my being able to drive around the country claiming San Franciscaness, no I’m not talking about voting, no I’m not talking about rockets and red glares. And no I’m not joking. I’m being serious. And I want all of you who think as I do to take a moment to consider.
You see I told this young woman named Krystle that I didn’t need a god to tell me to be a good person, that I could figure out for myself that killing people, for instance, was wrong, that on my own--or, at any rate, through my own use of reason--I came to the conclusion that helping people and making them feel good and seeking justice for all involved felt, in turn, good to me. That acting in such a way and seeking to legislate at least a similar disposition could only be good for a society, a culture, a civilization, that this made sense to me, that this was the only way to ensure happiness for one and for all. I told this young woman that at some point in adolescence I found two things to be true: that everyone has a right to determine her or his own future, unless these determinations impinge upon the rights of others to do so; and that it is good (and right and proper) to act justly towards others, ideally with kindness. I told her I came to these notions because they made sense to me, and because—though I didn’t know this concept at the time—if I put them to the test of the categorical imperative they passed--that is, if they became the rule of law and action for everyone, everyone would be happy, and everyone would have the opportunity to be happy.
She told me that I couldn’t possibly know this on my own. She told me that humans are inherently wicked and sinful, and that if we didn’t have someone (someOne) telling us to do otherwise, and if we didn’t have the fear of that someOne in us to make us obey, there would be no goodness, there would be no society, there would be no civility. She told me that we as a society needed an otherworldly guidance in order to not, and here yes I’m putting words into her mouth, tear each other to pieces.
I told her I didn’t think this was true, I told her that in fact I know it not to be true because history has been nothing if not an inexorable march towards finding enlightenment closer and closer to home, that, in fact, the very country we were standing in, the very nation her college seeks to extol at nearly deafening levels, is indeed the perfect love-child of the Enlightenment and the belief that humans need no kings, thorny or otherwise, to tell us that justice is good, and that the Good is to be sought.
Let me write that again. Because this is what I am getting at.
The United States of America, this country we live in, conceived by 18th-century exemplars of the Enlightenment, that epochal acme of the inexorable march of reason and rationality against the darkling forces of myth and superstition, is the greatest proof yet offered by homo sapiens that we need no kings, thorny or otherwise, that we need not invisible or omnipotent Unmoved Movers to tell us what reason itself dictates: that self-determination and the categorical imperative lead to justice, that justice and the categorical imperative call for self-determination.
Call this a white paper if you want, call this an apologia if you want, call this a line in the sand if you want, but here is what this is to me: Jefferson’s America is proof of the rightness and inevitability of the Enlightenment, and I will not let them take it from me. And I challenge all of you reading this now: See America for the bastion of Reason it was meant to be, and recognize that there are those who would rapturously take it away, that they are working to do so right now, that something needs to be done about it before the sky begins to darken, before the eclipses begin to stay….
^I am, of course and in the interests of full disclosure, the product of a marriage—though not one of convenience—between a Christian and a Jew. But for the life of me I don’t think this has anything to do with the present fascination.
^^ sp., I know, but I’m coining it and you can figure it out.
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