We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

We Are Legion depicts a future United States governed by the Free American Independent Theocratic Hegemony (FAITH), a regime born from a fundamentalist backlash against secularism. This setting reflects historical tensions between church and state in the country, drawing parallels to the rise of the Christian Right as a political force in the late 20th-century US and its offshoot movements in the 21st century. Groups like these, exemplified by organizations like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in the early 1980 and more recently in censorship astroturf organizations like Moms for Liberty, seek to influence legislation on social issues based on a specific religious worldview, much like the fictional FAITH. Both the real-life religious organizations and the novel’s FAITH rely on a repressive and authoritarian interpretation of Christian theology that repudiates freedoms of speech and religion (Bob is warned that his atheism is grounds for being killed), the idea of unalienable rights, and other ideals espoused by the US Constitution. 

In the novel, the authoritarian government legally defines personhood through a theological lens. FAITH resolves complex philosophical questions of identity by declaring that cryogenically frozen individuals are “truly dead” (18) and claiming their digital consciousnesses as property without rights.