Vox

Jean tells herself that this isn’t Patrick’s fault, though he’s never been good at speaking up. The real person to blame is a man Jackie used to call Saint Carl. The president just had to listen to Reverend Carl. Jean explains how years ago, the Bible Belt started expanding until it took over the entire country. Only politically active women like Jackie saw it coming. As the years passed, the number of women elected to any office dwindled. At the last election, all of Congress was white and male. Jackie also predicted that the religious groups in power would need “an enforcement arm,” and that the force would come from young, white, conservative, and angry men, as well as women invested in a more conservative social order. Jean remembers dismissing this as fearmongering. But now she has no cell phone and can’t even buy postage stamps.