In 1996, I had the opportunity to be part of a three-man team sponsored by the International Republican Institute to travel to Rostov, Russia, a port city on the Sea of Azov, a part of the Black Sea, to teach democratic campaign workers how we conduct political campaigns in the United States. In our week-long seminar translated by a Major in the Russian Army (intelligence branch, I suppose), I shared my experience in creating and placing “paid political messages” for candidates like Sen. Orrin Hatch and Gov. Mike Leavitt. On our first night there, we attended a reception where we could mingle with the students and ask and answer questions. With the Major at my side translating, a woman about my age thanked us for coming, and when I asked why she was there, her response was “we want what you have.” I thought, O.K., that must mean free markets, First Amendment rights, more consumer goods. Then she clarified it for me, “We want the Rule of Law!”
Fast forward 24 years: Like most politically conservative Americans and as a person of faith, I was cringing at the ever-growing pile of evidence documenting the illegal and immoral acts of this country’s leaders to entrap, destroy and even imprison political opponents just to hold onto power. And simultaneously, I was binge-watching The Chosen, the incredible first eight episodes of the beginnings of Christ’s ministry. I asked myself, are we becoming like the Jews subject to Roman rule at the time of Christ? Have we lost the Rule of Law in this country, this beacon of hope to the world, this “Shining City on the Hill” as Ronald Reagan called it, paraphrasing the speech by Puritan leader John Winthrop as he sailed to New England in 1630?
Then, I recalled a conversation that my oldest son had with his mother-on-law, a widow and ethnic Armenian and former citizen of the USSR who emigrated here some 30 years ago with her husband and two daughters, the oldest of whom is now married to my son. They all live in Seattle, and at the age of 75, this Soviet-educated physicist is still working in a lab, where she says “you have to be very careful about expressing your political views. It reminds me of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s.” This grandmother, a staunch Donald Trump supporter and a Christian then said, “where can we emigrate to now? Is there any other place where we can go and live free again?”
That’s when I began “binge-writing.”
I started about Labor Day and finished the first draft of The Invitation on Thanksgiving. My Christian-oriented, conservative novel is focused on Winthrop’s speech, but takes place in a contemporary setting. Yes, it is a religious fantasy, but then, to people like Bill Mahr and Richard Dawkins, isn’t the story of a carpenter rising from the dead after being crucified and taking on the sins of the world a fantasy? In fact, faith as fantasy was the subject of Bill Mahr’s documentary “Religulous.” Wikipedia notes that “the title of the film is a portmanteau derived from the words religious and ridiculous. The documentary examines and challenges religion and religious belief.”
It’s time for people of faith to stand up to the Bill Mahr’s of this world! I admit it: my book is fiction. But, it reminds people of faith about what God had been telling his people for generations. As Paul said, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”
The chaos and turmoil in Washington, the dispute between “Red States” and “Blue States,” between coastal elites and “The Deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton described the voters who selected Donald Trump in 2016, boils down to whether or not Americans subscribe to the founding principles upon which this Constitutional Republic rests: As John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
In fact, in The Invitation, a character explains it from her point of view. She says this when answering a question posed to her by the host of a TV show:
“Secularists make fun of people of faith when we bow our heads in a restaurant and say grace. And, yet they’ll yell across the room and ask Google’s Alexa that’s plugged in on the counter, ‘Alexa, what’s the meaning of life?’ and it will provide an answer derived from a Google algorithm. In other words, according to the tech masters, Google can answer our prayers, but God can’t–because He doesn’t exist.
‘As for me, I choose God over Google.'”
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