Converted Pagan Headhunters and the Shining City on a Hill

 What follows is a (mostly) unedited, exclusive excerpt from my recently published expat memoir, "Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile":

June 2017, Bangkok, Thailand:

As we sat eating som tum at the mom-and-pop stall on the BangkokThonburi University campus, the heretic Indian bigot Zien, in contradiction to Neoliberal Church© orthodoxy, insisted that transgender individuals have diagnosable mental disorders – an assessment, which, incidentally, until very recently, the American Psychological Association (APA), the World Health Organization (WHO) (as late as 2019) and countless other medical authorities agreed with. These institutions, once upon a time before transgenderism became the fashionable gender identity de jour, labeled the condition "gender identity disorder" and similar terms, and prescribed medical and therapeutic interventions to correct it.  

How quickly the tides turned in the Western orthodoxy. Zien had not ever heard of "gender non-binary," "pansexual," "gender fluid," or myriad other creative inventions of the LGBTQ4GF150+++© community that have overtaken the culture of the West. I treated her to a brief exploration of queer theory -- which she, because she was a bigot or whatever, found appalling.

"There are not 76 genders," Zien insisted.

From the semi-autonomous, highly Christianized region of Northern India called Nagaland, home to ethnic minority tribes that immigrated either from Mongolia or China around a thousand years ago, Zien was devoutly spiritual in the old-fashioned monotheistic sense of the concept.

She meant well, and obviously believed what her forefathers had believed since the first Christian missionaries arrived.

"They just discovered the Pillar of Salt in Palestine," she delicately nudged the subject of lunch conversation away from transgenderism and towards divine revelation.  

This discovery, she asserted, constituted incontrovertible proof that God, eons ago, had actually literally turned some wayward lady-sinner into salt for looking at something he told her not to or whatever. It was confirmation of Biblical literalism, sweet vindication for the True Believers, etc.

I knew the routine.

What struck me though, in that 2017 moment, was how much I preferred to listen to a Christian fundamentalist than a social justice crusader.

Zien's threats of hell (which she told me I was headed for if I didn't adopt the Christian faith) stemmed from a genuine desire to save me – in her mind, through her evangelism to me, she was reaching out a hand to salvage a soul.

On the other hand, I was not sure what the Neoliberal Church™ faithful -- the kind of neon-haired goons who riot on college campuses against speakers they don't approve of, whose first instinct is to reflexively brand all of their political opponents "white supremacists" and "fascists," and who claim "free speech is hate speech" or whatever -- wanted from white, cisgender heteronormative, male scum like me, except to die sooner.

…

Pagan-headhunter-tribalist-turned-Evangelical Zien wanted to go to America, she told me over lunch, to do some postgraduate work in social sciences.

In her mind, America was still the One Nation Trusting Under God or whatever, like it's faithfully inscribed on our dollars, etc. It was still the land of fulfilling, God-filled lives and overflowing abundance.

She didn't know what had been happening in Gomorrah for the last few years, because the grimy reality doesn't usually feature in Hollywood blockbusters – and if it does, everything more often than not has a Hollywood ending anyway.

"If there is a God," I told her, "He abandoned America to its own devices decades ago and conceded His territory to the Pagan Feminist High Priests."

She didn't know what walking into a postgraduate sociology department at an American university would do to her with all of her religious devotion and starry-eyed optimism about what the "Shining City on a Hill," as Reagan put it, that America was. Those professors would fix her pretty quick.

I pleaded with her: "Massive student debt and ruins of a once-great civilization is all you’ll find. Save yourself."

America replaced Jesus with a new God, and it’s a non-binary Zhe.

Find "Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile" at Amazon and Barnes & Noble — and a bunch of other places if you Google it — in digital and paperback form.