When people start talking about oppressive governments, they're apt to invoke George Orwell's 1984. When they talk about oppressive religious regimes, they're apt to invoke Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
That latter book now has a serious competitor. Just read Christian Nation: A Novel by Frederic Rich.
Holy shit.
While Atwood's book is better from a purely literary standpoint, she created a completely fictional event to drive the plot, a plague of sterilization among women, which the Republic of Gilead seizes on as an excuse to make rape slaves of the few fertile women left.
What makes Rich's book so harrowing is that it relentlessly PLAUSIBLE. He populates the book with real-life Christian dominionist people, events, and stated goals, then uses those as a basis for his speculative story. Even to somebody like me, who has been following the rise of the Christian Taliban since the 1980s, some of the details Rich drops were surprising. I'd say, "nooooo…that HAS to be part of the fictional story!" Then I'd go look them up and…yikes: real. The depth and breadth of the real-world dominionist figures Rich mentions shows that he has done his research well. He even calls out The Family, which even many non-fiction writers on the dominionism topic never mention.
The book, written in 2013, deviates from real life when Obama loses the 2008 presidential race to John McCain and his godawful VP Sarah Palin. Shortly afterwards, McCain dies of a stroke leaving the dimwitted but VERY dominionist Palin in charge. The consensus is that Palin will be too dim to cause much damage and will just fade away.
But then a second, even more deadly 9/11 happens, where terrorists shoot down dozens of planes taking off and landing. Instead of doing anything to shore up the numerous security holes that allowed it to happen, President Palin (Jesus…doesn't that even give you a chill to just READ?) declares martial law and assures us that this happened because we've turned our face from Jesus (something real-life fundies are always saying). The insidious final march towards a full fascist theocracy begins.
And shit starts going downhill fast.
Rich even accurately predicts certain events that happened after the book was published, like the sudden death of Ruth Ginsberg being seized on to install a dominionist goon on the Supreme Court (real-life dominionist goon Roy Moore in the book), and the nuking of Roe v Wade. Admittedly, one didn't need to be Nostradamus to see THOSE coming, but it shows Rich is keeping his fiction firmly rooted in the plausible.
The narrator is a lawyer named Greg, whose longtime friend Sanjay runs an organization called Theocracy Watch, which attempts to warn people of what's going on right under their noses. But people don't wanna hear that noise. Anyway, they reason, democracy will save us. Spoiler alert: it totally won't. The constitution will save us. Spoiler alert: it totally won't. It can't happen here. Spoiler alert: it totally does. Sanjay is Cassandra, a role I am not wholly unfamiliar with on the topic of the Christian Taliban.
Somewhat like Handmaid's Tale, Christian Nation is written from the perspective of Greg writing an underground history of what happened as the government methodically destroys all books it doesn't care for. And at the end, it also casts the fate of the characters on the faint hope of an unknown number of resistance cells still fighting in the US.
Anyone trying to reduce their anxiety level should probably give this book a wide berth (though you are in for a nasty surprise some day…). But if you want a horrifying peek at something going on right now, today, under our very noses, and what it could plausibly lead to, this is the book.
Talk about the feel-good book of the year…this ain't it.
by DrColdReality