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Occasionally, I’ll get bouts of insomnia and then I’m stuck watching late night television until I fall asleep out of sheer boredom. After watching women’s gymnastics (Go USA), there wasn’t much left on to watch on television, so I started to channel surfing.

Clicking randomly around, not really paying attention, I suddenly heard a male voice going “Can we be one nation UNDER GOD, indivisible with liberty and justice for all?”

“Huh,” went my disengaged brain. “What kind of crazy is this?” This was my favorite kind of crazy, God’s News: the 700 Club.

It’s…interesting to say the least. There, of course, was a blurb on the UC- Calvary lawsuit, in which they quoted the attorney when he said that this court case would “have a chilling effect on Christian schools”. Being the evil, secular hedonist that I am, I thought “well, good. If this court case “chills” Christian schools into teaching actual facts instead of opinion, isn’t that good for everyone?”

Then, there was a story where they were talking about “The Call”- hundreds of Christians who pray in various areas, trying to change the world. This had Lou Engle- whom I recognized from Jesus Camp, talking about how “prayer would cause a revival” and that “division was a good thing- we needed to be divided if anyone supported spilling the blood of innocent unborn children”. This was a little creepier, because this guy is REALLY intense- he might actually be a true believer, instead of a scam artist. His major thing seems to be “Dream interpretation”; he shared a dream of a woman from Kansas City. She dreamed that she saw a scroll unroll with the words “America has asked for a king, and I will give her a king, because the cry for change is greater than the cry for mercy”. Lou then talked about how we needed “Jesus, not change”. Honestly, this guy did everything but flat out say that Obama would be a king. But, Lou’s strategy for changing the world was to get a bunch of people in public places and pray (guess that literal interpretation of the Bible forgot Matthew 6:2, and I’m fairly certain that praying will accomplish exactly nothing.

Even as creepy as this was gentleman was, by far, the creepiest thing about this show was the “international news” section. Lee Webb boiled the Georgia/ Russia conflict down to “We need to help Georgia because they are a fledgling democracy and because they are the OLDEST Christian nation, which has been steadfast against the encroaching Muslims”. It was like a wing-nut trifecta: spread democracy, Christian nation, against Muslims. I think this is going to be the new talking point: Georgia is a Christian nation; therefore we need to protect them. He also went on to say that if we didn’t send a military force, we were letting the Russian forces steamroll Eastern Europe. It seems like there are some people that are bound and determined to restart the Cold War, and then turn it hot.

All of this makes me think of the original question Mr. Webb posed: can we be one nation indivisible? Probably not- at least the way he wants it. In order for us to be the indivisible he wants us to be, we’d have to shut our brains off and believe everything authoritarian leaders say, no matter how illogical or reality-contradicting. The UC-Calvary lawsuit shows that they really want us to believe that black is white and white is black if a man talking in Jesus’s voice says so. I want to be able to look at the sky and say “the sky is blue. It is blue because of light and prisms, not because ‘god made it so’. If we had a different atmosphere, or a different sun, the sky would be a different color”. “Indivisible” would mean “lockstep”- I would either have to be brainwashed or dead. Isn’t that a pleasant thought to try and go to sleep to?