What about religious liberty?”
Bobby Jindal was huddled with a small group of advisers in his spacious, sunlit office at the Louisiana governor’s mansion, trying to decide what he should say at the Ronald Reagan library in a couple of months. He was scheduled to speak on February 13, 2014, and his inner circle was determined to use the appearance at one of the holiest sites in all of Republicanism to finally shed the malaise that had settled over Jindal’s political profile.
But engineering a pitch-perfect breakout performance was proving tricky. The audience inside the room at the Reagan library would be made up of serious-minded Republican elites—the kind who had once fawned over Jindal’s wonky smarts and polished credentials. But to be effective, the speech would also need to reach a broader audience of carnivorous conservative activists—people who wouldn’t take notice of the governor unless he was serving up a heaping platter of red meat.
There was discussion among the governor and his aides of Jindal recycling the economic speech he had been giving all year. But Curt Anderson, his media consultant, thought the topic was a snoozer.
“That’s a really great speech, and you’ll give it some more,” Anderson told Jindal. “The problem with that speech is, serious people really enjoy it, but it’s not something that crowds get fired up about.”
That’s when Timmy Teepell, an evangelical who was homeschooled as a kid and remained tapped into the Christian grass roots, suggested making the address about religious liberty. The issue had taken on a growing urgency in Jindal’s mind lately, as he watched secular liberals adopt an increasingly triumphalist attitude toward traditional Christians, spurred on by a series of gay rights victories. Jindal had been searching for the right venue to voice his concerns about this cultural development, and he thrilled to the idea of making his case at the Reagan library.
Anderson was uneasy about the idea. He told Jindal the topic seemed “kind of obscure” for such a prestigious speech, and he was worried that it would come off as esoteric. After all, Jindal needed to get people talking about him again—and religious liberty was not exactly top of mind in American political discourse at the moment.
But all that changed on December 18, 2013, when GQ posted its profile of Phil Robertson online. The bearded patriarch from A&E’s monster-hit reality show Duck Dynasty—a feel-good series about a family of proud country Christians who got rich selling duck-hunting merchandise—was quoted in the piece crudely musing about the superiority of heterosexual intercourse (“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus”) and the sinfulness of homosexuality (“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men…”). The outcry from gay rights advocates was loud and immediate, with the Left threatening boycotts of A&E as long as Robertson was on the air. When the network responded by suspending Robertson indefinitely, religious conservatives pushed back, arguing that the cable star was only expressing a biblical view of sexual ethics, and that left-wing bullies were now punishing him for exercising his right to free speech. Insults were hurled, hashtags were born, chyrons flashed across cable news screens. It was a week before Christmas and, in the spirit of the season, America had fumbled its way into yet another bitter culture war battle.
In Baton Rouge, Robertson’s antigay quotes arrived like manna from heaven. Jindal couldn’t have scripted a national pageant of umbrage more perfectly suited for him to take a starring role. Duck Dynasty was filmed in Louisiana, and Jindal had been close with the Robertson family for years. He had been searching for the perfect example to illustrate the secular Left’s hostility toward conservative Christians, and now it was playing out in his own backwater backyard.
As soon as A&E announced the suspension, Jindal gathered his staff and began drafting a statement in support of Robertson. Not everyone was on board, though. Anderson raised an obvious political concern.
“This may play well in Louisiana, and other places in the South, but we don’t know how this will play everywhere else,” he said.
Jindal was defiant: “I don’t care.” The Robertsons were his friends, and he wasn’t going to let fears of being seen as uncouth among the country’s coastal snobs prevent him from speaking up.
But other aides made a more high-minded case against going out on a limb for Robertson. They argued that the quotes published in GQ were coarse, at best, and at worst abhorrent. Not only had Robertson graphically ranked the preferability of certain sex acts; he had also, later in the story, cheerfully shrugged off the history of racial oppression in the Jim Crow south. “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person,” Robertson was quoted as saying. “Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say. Were they happy? They were godly. They were happy. No one was singing the blues.”
Did Jindal really want to aggressively defend language like this? the staff contrarians asked. Wasn’t this the exact kind of damaging, unthoughtful, “stupid” rhetoric that just a year ago Jindal was calling on his party to purge?
Jindal sympathized with their arguments, but he also knew it wasn’t often in politics that an easy pitch like this gets lobbed at you, and he wasn’t about to let it sail over the plate.
“That’s not the point,” he replied. The point was that no one should be banished from public life for expressing an unpopular viewpoint that appears in the Bible.
He tried to appease the holdouts on his team by assuring them that he would make “passing acknowledgment” of the fact that, while he supported Robertson, he wasn’t a fan of his friend’s choice of words.
But when the statement went out to press the next day, even that caveat was missing.
“Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the state of Louisiana,” Jindal’s statement read. “The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with. I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.”
(For the statement’s kicker, the governor had originally proposed Britney Spears standing in as the symbol of cultural decay, but one of his aides suggested swapping out the aging pop star for the more topical twerker.)
Jindal was the first prominent politician to publicly defend the Robertsons, and his swift, hard-hitting response turned him into a lead cast member in this culture war pageant. While other high-profile Republicans—from Chris Christie to Rand Paul—steered clear of the confrontation, the governor of Louisiana was busy firing off a barrage of tweets, press releases, and made-for-cable sound bites that decried the Left’s assault on religious freedom. And when A&E was ultimately forced to walk back its initial statement on the GQ story and quietly reinstate their once-shunned star, it was Jindal who received much of the credit from religious conservatives.
In the end, even the staff naysayers had to admit the wisdom in charging full speed into the Duck Dynasty kerfuffle. “It was a good nexus of what he believed, and what was politically good, too,” one adviser later conceded to me. Jindal was now basking in the celestial bliss of the conservative movement’s adoration. By sacrificing a small bit of nuance at the altar of populism, he was once again being elevated as a bold and courageous leader.
He had seen the light, and he was not about to retreat back into the darkness.
Though Jindal didn’t hesitate to make partisan hay out of the religious freedom issue while he scrambled toward 2016, the concept of unfettered worship was in fact deeply personal for him—rooted in a tumultuous and dramatic conversion, and a disorienting night in 1987 that would change his life and politics forever.
The lights were lowered in the chapel, and the projector screens high above the stage filled with scenes—taken from a 1979 adaptation of the Gospel of Luke called The Jesus Film—of a naked, whip-scarred Savior hanging despondently from a cross. A choir of wide-eyed teenagers below the screen belted out the opening notes of a contemporary Christian electronic-pop song, “This Blood Is for You,” and then a soloist leaned into the microphone and began lending graphic description of Christ’s suffering with a soulful recitation of the spoken lyrics.
Laced with chips of bone they beat him hard,
From his shoulders to his feet!
And it sliced right through his olive skin,
Just like razors through a sheet.
Sixteen-year-old Bobby Jindal sat in the second row of the audience, taking in the spectacle with a mix of bafflement and wonder. He had been invited to the production, held at a nondenominational church near Louisiana State University called The Chapel on the Campus, by his best friend, Kent, a born-again Christian with a penchant for evangelizing. Jindal, who was Hindu, had taken an intellectual interest in Christianity, mostly to humor his friend, but to him the religion existed primarily as a day-to-day mundanity of life in the Deep South. Christianity for him was LSU football players pointing to the sky after big plays, and omnipresent church marquees lining the streets, and Jesus fish bumper stickers dotting sedans, and pretty girls chattering on Monday mornings about the weekend youth group activities they had attended.
Now, all of a sudden, it felt like much more than that.
In Jindal’s accounts of the evening, decades later, he would paper over the specifics of this production, perhaps embarrassed that such a dated, unstylish performance was what planted the seeds of conversion in him. But the Christian God is famously disinclined to bestow tasteful spiritual epiphanies, and he chose this moment to touch Jindal’s heart. By the time the choir erupted into the song’s chorus, he was overwhelmed with a sense that the violence he was watching Jesus endure was somehow suffered for him personally.
The choir sang, and Jindal’s mind raced.
This blood can save the soul!
Heal the sick! Mend the heart!
This blood can give you access,
To the very throne of God!
When the song ended, Todd Hinkie, a square-faced college student who served as the church’s youth pastor, stood and invited those who wanted to learn more about Jesus to come talk to him. Jindal sprang from his seat and made a beeline for Hinkie, cutting in front of other audience members in order to grab the pastor’s hand. Jindal began talking a mile a minute as he pumped Hinkie’s arm in a frenzied handshake.
“Sir, my name is Bobby Jindal; I’m Kent’s friend. I really have a lot of questions about Christianity and Christ and the Bible, and to be honest with you, my friends who are Christians, they just can’t answer these questions. Can I by chance meet with you?”
A few days later, Jindal met Hinkie at LSU’s student union, and the two found a quiet table in the corner where they could talk. Jindal was carrying a long yellow legal pad covered in his own handwriting, and the moment they sat down, he catapulted into his grilling.
“Okay, here’s my first question…” Jindal began.
Hinkie, who later recounted the experience to me, was taken aback as he realized that this teenager had scribbled down several pages’ worth of theological queries, and he tried to slow him down.
“Hang on, let me tell you the ground rules, dude,” Hinkie said. “This is awesome that you have all these questions, but I know I don’t have all the answers. So here’s what I’ll do: I will do my best to direct you to the answers that are in the scriptures, instead of just giving my opinions. If we can’t answer the questions directly out of the Bible, I’ll write them down and bring them to people who are smarter than me. Does that work?”
Jindal, impatient and unmoved by this pastorly show of deference to a book he was still quite skeptical of, waved him off. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.
“Now, here’s my first question…”
To start, Jindal wanted to know about the man he had seen depicted the other night writhing in agony on the cross, and why God had selected such a sadistic and irrational method of achieving salvation for his children.
“Why did that man have to die for my sins?” Jindal asked. “Why couldn’t God just say, ‘Okay, your sins are forgiven’? I don’t get it.”
Hinkie took him through the Bible verses that illustrated the competing universal demands of divine mercy and justice, the incompatibility of man’s sinful nature and God’s holiness, the sacrifice Jesus made on behalf of all mankind. Jindal was mesmerized by the doctrine, and insatiably curious. Up until now, his religious views had been restricted to the Hinduism of his parents; now Christianity was providing him with a whole new theological galaxy to explore.
There was a lot to learn. Jindal was only peripherally aware of many of the most famous Bible passages Hinkie pointed him to, and he frequently had the stories confused with popular fairy tales or children’s movies. During the course of their conversations, as Hinkie briefly mentioned the story of Noah’s Ark, Jindal interrupted.
“Wait: I thought that was a Disney movie.”
When Hinkie showed him that the prophet and his collection of paired-off mammals were, indeed, in the Book of Genesis, Jindal’s response was to ask, in all sincerity, if the Little Mermaid was also in the Bible.
The two began meeting weekly to work through Jindal’s list of questions. At the end of every session, Jindal would ask for a reading assignment, and Hinkie would give him one—first a few verses from Mark, and then, when the student complained that it was too short, multiple books in the New Testament at one time.
Throughout the process, Jindal kept his flirtation with Christianity a secret from his parents. He knew they would be devastated, and quite possibly enraged, if they found out he was considering abandoning Hinduism. To avoid the confrontation, Jindal waited until late at night, when his family was asleep, before he slipped into his bedroom closet to pray and read the Bible by flashlight.
For a while, he attempted to reconcile Christianity with the traditions of his parents, once speculating to his friend Elaine Parsons that perhaps he could just believe in Jesus as one of the many gods that Hinduism teaches about. He also tried taking ownership of his native religion, reading Hindu religious texts for the first time. When his grandfather died, Jindal immersed himself in Hindu teachings about the afterlife. But while the idea of Nirvana seemed nice, Jindal was far more compelled by the Christian concept of a just God dividing humanity between heaven and hell on Judgment Day.
While Jindal would spend much of his adult life facing accusations from skeptics who believed his interest in Christianity was a product of political ambition, the truth was that any ulterior motives he might have had were probably more hormonal than Machiavellian. His high school crush-turned-girlfriend, Kathy, was a devout Catholic who was eager to see Jindal convert. On one memorable night, the two sneaked away from their hotel rooms during a regional math tournament and spent hours on the roof, flinging pennies into the fountain below and talking about the future. Kathy said her ultimate ambition was to become a Supreme Court justice so she could “stop the country from killing babies.” Jindal was enthralled by her convictions, and also by her smile, and their relationship was no doubt a driving force in his exploration of Christianity.
One afternoon, Jindal sat with Hinkie in the student union, and during a lull in the conversation, the pastor asked, “What’s your next question?”
The yellow legal pad lay untouched on the table between them. Jindal replied emphatically, “I don’t have any. I’m done. I’ve got everything I need.” Then he paused just long enough to reveal a chink in the armor of his teenage bravado and asked, “So, what do I do now?”
Hinkie had been schooled in the evangelistic crusades of Billy Graham, who instructed proselytizers in training that the moment a potential convert expresses faith in Jesus, one should take him by the hands and urge him to say the sinner’s prayer immediately—thus ushering him into salvation before the devil has time to meddle with his resolve. But when Hinkie proposed such a prayer, Jindal demurred.
“Uh, no,” Jindal replied. “That’s not something we need to do together. That’s something I can do myself.”
That night, he knelt in the privacy of his closet and said a prayer that would set him on a new spiritual journey and shape his political destiny—but not before it threatened to collapse his entire world. He accepted Jesus as his personal savior.
The next year, Jindal was driving his father’s Toyota Corolla one day when another vehicle slammed into him, sending the teenager’s head crashing through the driver’s-side window. Miraculously, he endured only minor injuries, and when his parents arrived at his hospital bedside, his mother asked a question any grateful Hindu parent might ask.
“Which god do you have to thank for your safety, Bobby?”
He managed to evade his mother’s question in the hospital room, but he could no longer shake the guilt of lying to his mom and dad. These were his parents, after all, not authoritarian rulers—and he was a teenage son, not a conscientious objector. In a fit of frustration and shame, he went to see Hinkie.
“I’ve got to tell my parents,” he said to his spiritual mentor. “I know it’s time.”
Hinkie tried to offer reassurance. “I’m behind you. And who knows? Maybe the timing is right and their ears will be open.”
Jindal was more clear-eyed about the likely fallout.
“They will see this as a total rejection of being Indian,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘I hate everything about who I am and I reject everything about my family.’”
As they talked, Hinkie was startled by how severe Jindal believed the repercussions of his confession would be. Jindal was so convinced that his parents would punish him by withholding college tuition money that he had secured a full-ride scholarship to LSU as a backup plan. He also seriously believed his parents might kick him out of the house, and he was bracing for the possibility that he would have to finish high school homeless. But he felt he no longer had any choice, so he went home to tell his parents.
A couple of days later, he met Hinkie in his office at the church. The young pastor could tell right away that Jindal was deeply agitated.
“How’d it go?”
“It was really tough,” Jindal replied. “They reacted really, really strongly.”
Raj, Jindal’s mother, was grief-stricken that her son had betrayed their family’s faith; meanwhile, his father, Amar, saw this second life as a reckless detour on Jindal’s path to medical school. Both parents were irate. Rather than kick Jindal out of the house, they decided to transform their home into a sort of correctional facility for their apostate son. He was told he was not allowed to attend church, read the Bible, or even talk to any of his Christian friends anymore, and that he would be expected home every day within fifteen minutes of school ending. He was forbidden from participating in any activities outside his academic work, and was strictly instructed not to talk to any family members about his spiritual dalliance.
And, of course, he would no longer be allowed to see Hinkie.
“What do I do?” Jindal asked.
Hinkie was at a loss—distressed by the news, yes, but also reluctant to advise a seventeen-year-old to wage holy war against his parents’ unrighteous rules. Searching for something to say that would square this pragmatic impulse with a biblical principle, Hinkie felt compelled to open to a verse in Ephesians: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.”
The young pastor proceeded with caution. “As I listen to what your parents have told you,” he said, “you actually can choose to obey both them and the Lord. I know it would be incredibly hard, but you don’t have to go to church. You can obey them on that. You don’t have to talk to those friends you have at school that are Christians. You can obey them on that. You don’t have to meet with me anymore…”
Hinkie felt a wave of nausea come over him. He couldn’t believe he was counseling Jindal—his brand-new convert, his greatest ministerial achievement, his friend—to abandon the trappings of a God-fearing Christian.
He hastened to add, “The only thing they said that you probably shouldn’t obey is that you don’t read the Bible anymore—because there is a higher authority than Mom and Dad. So I would say, figure out a way to keep reading scripture secretively.
“But other than that… God’s word says if you are honoring your father and mother, it’s going to go well with you.”
A pause.
“So, is that what you want to do?” Hinkie asked.
Jindal nodded. “Yes. That’s what I’ll do.”
They said a farewell prayer together and embraced, and then Jindal left Chapel on the Campus for the last time.
As he watched Jindal go, Hinkie said a quiet prayer to himself: “Lord, he’s in your hands—and he is completely out of mine.”
When Jindal arrived at Brown in the fall of 1988, it was a contentious time for the small, tight-knit Christian community on campus. A year earlier, the student-run magazine Good Clean Fun had published a cover story titled “The New Crusaders” that cast Brown’s evangelicals as insular, self-righteous, and anti-intellectual. The three-thousand-word feature was rife with caricature—an almost perfect culture war time capsule showing how secular Ivy Leaguers viewed conservative Christians in the late eighties—and it drew vocal outrage from Brown’s believers. The magazine dutifully ran several incensed letters to the editor in its next edition, and the episode was largely forgotten by the time the leftover copies were tossed in trash cans. But among the school’s Christian students, the feelings of aggrievement lingered well beyond this particular campus controversy.
As a brand-new freshman bulging with pent-up spiritual energy and finally free from his parents’ restrictions, Jindal decided his first act of collegiate rebellion would be to immerse himself in campus Christian culture. He populated his social circles with faithful classmates, and seized every chance he got to wage rhetorical combat with the secular student body in defense of his religion. In one emblematic episode early on, he refused to participate in a student orientation program that sought to teach open-mindedness by inviting straight men to identify as gay. When a resident adviser told him the session was mandatory, Jindal shot back, “You can send my dad’s tuition money back, but I’m not going.”
Jindal’s dual interests in highbrow theology and picking fights with campus liberals made him popular among his fellow Ivy League Christians, who gathered in religious clubs that often functioned as salons for high-minded scriptural discussion. Matt Skinner, who was president of Campus Crusade for Christ during Jindal’s freshman year, described the club—and Brown’s Christian scene in general—as “kind of idiosyncratic… It took on the nature of the college, in the sense that it was primarily more about the kind of stuff going on in our heads.”
But during Jindal’s freshman year, the friendly, cross-denominational unity that held together the school’s conservative Christians was threatened by an unlikely—and jarring—wave of Catholic fervor that was sweeping across the campus. Christian students were turning to the Vatican for spiritual stimulation and in-depth doctrine, attending Mass together, and diving into the catechism. Students who were there at the time later told me this Roman reawakening was driven by Opus Dei, a controversial Catholic organization, known globally for its secrecy and elitism, that was then active on campus. The group, which would later be immortalized (and fictionalized) in the book The Da Vinci Code as a cultish secret society, was famous for targeting intellectual elites and prominent conservatives for conversion, and it worked fervently to cull Brown’s crop of up-and-coming influentials. Its proselytizing paid off: in 1989 alone, at least a dozen Protestant students converted to Catholicism—a phenomenon that plunged the Christian community on campus into heated sectarian debates.
“A lot of us were really concerned about what was going on,” said Michael, a Protestant classmate of Jindal’s. “Why were [so many] students converting to Catholicism and taking that really seriously? I had deep concerns theologically.”
It is unclear whether Jindal associated with Opus Dei while at Brown, but he was one of many campus Christians who became intensely interested in Catholic doctrine at the time. He was confirmed in the fall of 1989, during his sophomore year. The ceremony took place at a Mass in Providence, where he gave testimony to an audience filled with friends who had helped him along his path to conversion. It was a joyous day, and he felt he had finally reached the destination to which his youthful spiritual journey was meant to take him. It wouldn’t be long, though, before his new faith was put to the test one dramatic and unexplainable night; Jindal would wrestle with its events for years to come.
Around the time of Jindal’s confirmation, strange things started happening to the Christian students at Brown. There were reports of a sulfuric odor—supposedly a sign of the devil’s presence—mysteriously surfacing in dorm rooms, accompanied by confounding sights and sounds. One young woman claimed that a demon had assaulted her, leaving scars up and down her arms. Others complained of night terrors they believed were painted by evil spirits.
These phenomena were not entirely out of place at the Ivy League school. Many of the students came from East Asian countries, where charismatic Christian pastors were famous for speaking in tongues and performing miraculous, forehead-thumping healings. What’s more, the past decade of popular cinema had seen a string of blockbuster movies like The Exorcist, Poltergeist, and The Amityville Horror that lent dramatic weight to the notion of demonic forces reaching into the terrestrial world.
The incidents left Brown’s Christian community frightened and flailing, in search of guidance. They sought out help from local priests and pastors, but the staid New England clergy balked at their requests. Feeling helpless, some students began attempting their own exorcism-like rituals to help disturbed peers. Michael recalled one such experience, during which he and three other students laid hands on a young woman they believed to be possessed. As they prayed over her, a larger group of believers huddled in a separate part of campus, pleading with God for a miracle. The exercise was anticlimactic and, looking back on it years later, Michael would acknowledge that it may not have been doctrinally sound.
“If you’re really in faith and you really know Christ, the enemy cannot take possession of your soul,” said Michael, who went on to become a professional minister after college. “Could he get a foothold in that person’s soul and take possession of your voice? Maybe? To be honest, I was twenty-one at the time. What did I know?” He said that if their efforts seemed melodramatic in retrospect, it was only because they were young and grappling with a scary situation. “We were foolish enough to say we cared about these [people] and we were willing to try to free them. I remember saying, ‘We’re trying to cast out a demon, yes, but what we really want is for her to feel spiritually free.’”
Jindal kept his distance from these episodes at first. For all his religious zeal, he was still a biology major, acquainted with the natural sciences and uncomfortable with the more mystical aspects of his new faith. He had once heard a Rhode Island priest confidently declare that biblical references to angels and demons were not meant to be taken literally, and he was happy to cling to that interpretation. But his aloof attitude toward the darkness that seemed to be settling over many of his classmates wouldn’t last long.
Jindal met Susan, a pretty fellow freshman, on a quiet walk to church one Sunday morning shortly after arriving in Providence. “She was beautiful and lost, and I was more than happy to fulfill my Christian duty by showing her the way to church,” he later wrote. They quickly became best friends. “Susan” would surface under a variety of pseudonyms in a series of personal essays Jindal wrote for obscure Catholic magazines years later. In them, he described intense, late-night conversations with her that covered everything from past breakups to abortion policy to theology. They pulled all-night cram sessions together—Jindal double majored in biology, to satisfy his father, and public policy, for himself—and scandalized their see-no-evil Christian friends by frequenting local dance clubs. But despite their intimate connection, their friendship remained stubbornly chaste and romance-free, and Susan eventually grew frustrated by Jindal’s inability to make a move.
Their friendship ebbed and flowed over the following months. On one emotional evening, she confided in him that she had been diagnosed with skin cancer and would need an operation; the next day she avoided him altogether. Soon, though, Jindal began hearing unsettling rumors about Susan from mutual friends. She was behaving erratically, her days derailed by sudden emotional outbursts, her nights defined by terrifying “visions.” Jindal reasoned that these were natural responses to the stress in her life: in addition to her diagnosis, Susan’s Bible study leader back home had recently committed suicide, and the grief was taking a toll on her emotional well-being. Other friends, however, suspected that Satan was striking again.
On the last week of the semester, the University Christian Fellowship called an emergency prayer meeting for Susan on the eve of her operation. When the night of the meeting arrived, about ten students, including Jindal, gathered in a classroom and sat down with Susan in a circle. They sang worship songs and prayed together, but the enthusiasm that typically characterized their meetings was missing. It was finals week, and many were distracted by academics. After going through the motions, a student moved to close the meeting—but he was stopped short. Jindal would recount what happened next in one of his essays a few years later.
“Suddenly, Susan emitted some strange guttural sounds and fell to the floor,” he wrote. “She started thrashing about, as if in some sort of seizure.” Susan’s sister, who had flown in to lend support during the surgery, rushed to her prostrate body and ordered everyone to place their hands on her.
Jindal, horrified and humiliated, felt paralyzed at first. He refused to move. Then, all of a sudden, Susan’s incomprehensible growling formed a single, audible word.
“Bobby!” she shrieked.
The exclamation sent a chill down his spine. He moved reluctantly toward the group, and placed a fingertip on Susan’s shoulder, “as if afraid of becoming infected with the disease that was ravaging her body.” But the moment they made contact, the unfamiliar voice in Susan’s throat directed itself at him again: “Bobby, you cannot even love Susan.”
He staggered back to the other side of the room. Why was she speaking in third person? The voice began lashing out violently at the other students, cursing them one by one, exposing intimate secrets, and verbally assaulting them with a personal cruelty that was entirely out of character for Susan. In a frenzy, they fell to their knees and began chanting:
“Satan, I command you to leave this room!”
“Satan, I command you to leave this room!”
Some of them started sobbing, while others cried out for “demons to leave in the name of Christ!”
Just as they were ready to give up hope, a student leader from Campus Crusade for Christ burst into the room brandishing a crucifix. Someone had called the rival Christian club for advice, and now her presence gave the room energy to keep going. Drawing hope, Jindal reflexively began uttering the Hail Mary—a prayer he had never said before in his life. During his investigation of Catholicism, he had rejected doctrines concerning Mary because they seemed like a form of idolatry. Now, though, it was the only form of prayer he could manage to voice. He said it over and over again, until it became a chant.
The crucifix seemed to have a calming influence on Susan, and her sister seized the opportunity to start reading verses from the Bible. “At first, Susan responded to biblical passages with curses and profanities,” Jindal later wrote. “[But] mixed in with her vile attacks were short and desperate pleas for help. In the same breath [that] she attacked Christ, the Bible’s authenticity, and everyone assembled in prayer, Susan would suddenly urge us to rescue her.”
They encouraged Susan to read from the scriptures, but she choked on the sentence “Jesus is Lord.”
“Jesus is L… L… L…” she tried.
At last, a breakthrough: “Just as suddenly as she went into the trance, Susan suddenly reappeared and claimed, ‘Jesus is Lord.’ With an almost comical smile, Susan then looked up as if awakening from a deep sleep and asked, ‘Has something happened?’”
The events of that night toppled the emotional barrier between Jindal and Susan. The next year, they traveled to Europe together as a couple, falling in love as they took in a Viennese opera and walked the streets of southern France.
Jindal never fully came to terms with what happened that night, but it served to cement his faith in Catholicism and convince him of the reality of supernatural “spiritual warfare.” He also came away with a stronger conviction than ever that people should be free to worship and talk about their faith—no matter how far outside the mainstream it may be—without fear of retribution. Decades later, it would become the bedrock of his political career—and the driving force in his presidential campaign.
On the night of February 13, 2014, Jindal walked out onto the stage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to deliver what had become a highly anticipated speech. In the two months since he had entered the fray of the Duck Dynasty battle, Jindal had become a heroic figure to many on the religious Right. Now he had come to California to issue a dire warning to believers everywhere.
“The American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war,” Jindal declared. “It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square, and the endurance of our constitutional governance.”
He continued, “The war is waged in our courts, and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.”
He predicted that it wouldn’t be long before liberals passed laws targeting churches that refused to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies, and he bemoaned the fact that religious business owners were being forced to violate their consciences by serving same-sex couples.
“Under the Obama regime, the president and his allies are intentional in pursuing these conflicts from the perspective that you must sacrifice your most sacred beliefs to government the instant you start a business.”
He also spoke up, once again, for the Duck Dynasty family.
“I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds, however indelicately they may choose to do so. The modern Left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.”
The 4,500-word address was deeply researched, carefully annotated, and thoroughly fact-checked—substantive enough to impress the elites in the room. But the thrust of the speech—its abundant combat metaphors, its description of sinister plotting within the “Obama regime”—was designed to stoke the righteous outrage of millions of aggrieved Christians. Jindal was aiming his message at social conservatives across the country who felt as though the modern GOP—with its sudden insecurity over not being on the “right side of history”—had abandoned them. He wanted them to know that in the governor of Louisiana, they had a champion.
Jindal had always relished making rigorous, intellectual arguments in defense of his faith, and even though all this had started with a reality TV star popping off with some decidedly ignorant comments, his aides could tell he was enjoying this new role more than many would have guessed. “There is an elitist presumption in the Boston-to-DC corridor that you can’t really be smart and a Christian who believes these things,” one adviser later explained. “Bobby really enjoys taking that on. He says, ‘Throw me in that briar patch.’ I think some reporters look at him and say, ‘Okay, this guy’s really smart, I accept that,’ and in the back of their minds they’re thinking, ‘His parents are from India, so he’s probably good at math, too.’ But they forget something. He’s not from India. He’s from the Deep South. His faith is a big part of him.”
More to the point, this new tack of his was working. For the first time in a long time, Jindal had conservatives buzzing, fawning, cheering—saying his name.