The war on religion comes from within
I suppose this hardly even needs saying, but Fox News television host Laura Ingraham really is outrageous.
On Friday in a message to her 3.5 million Twitter followers, she wrote, “Will Joe Biden do more to protect religious liberty than Donald Trump? Not a prayer. City of Toronto Bans Catholic Churches From Administering Holy Communion” and then linked to an article by an obscure right-wing writer named Shane Trejo. He’d written, “The city of Toronto has announced that they will be banning the sacrament of Holy Communion in Catholic Churches, using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to attack religious liberty.”
He went on to discuss “Canada’s war on Christianity, which has seen pastors arrested for preaching the Gospel in public after being attacked by soulless LGBT degenerates.” That ugly sentence was actually about the eventual arrest, after several warnings, of a high-profile antiLGBTQ activist for the crime of disturbing the peace.
A rabid unknown is one thing, but Ingraham is another. As irresponsible and hyperbolic as she may be, the author and broadcaster has enormous influence in the U.S. and a sizable following in Canada. Her comments about Biden come as no surprise, but the truth is that he’s likely far more rooted in his faith than the self-worshipping Donald Trump. On the issue of what happened in Canada, however, this is nothing more than a slice of total fabrication.
Cardinal Thomas Collins, archbishop of Toronto, is perhaps a little more informed than a pair of far-right polemicists. In March in a sensitive and gentle letter, he wrote: “In view of the requirements of the Government of Ontario, during this medical emergency, I instruct that all public Masses be cancelled, both during the week and on the weekend. Churches will be available for individual private prayer.”
He continued, “Perhaps this sacrifice will help us to cherish more profoundly the great gift of the Holy Eucharist” and, “While it is a painful moment in the life of the Church to take these extreme measures, we pray that they will aid in combating the pandemic that has affected so many in our own community and around the world.”
There had been prolonged consultation before the government acted, and mainstream churches and other religious bodies were in full agreement with the policy. It was, they agreed, an issue of caring for one’s neighbour. Catholics have been back in churches receiving communion for a month and there have even been criticisms that the government’s decision to reopen churches in mid-June was too early. So much for a war on religion. Several other denominations have opted to remain closed until at least September
All of this plays into the now familiar and hackneyed conservative abuse of religion, and Christianity in particular, to claim some sort of moral authority and to depict their opponents as the enemies of God. It’s particularly repugnant at the moment because unlike Trump, his predecessor Barack Obama is someone of profound faith.
I once interviewed a leading Christian thinker who told me that the then-president changed his incredibly busy schedule so as to be able to meet with her and discuss theology. It’s difficult to imagine the incumbent doing such a thing.
The political and religious right has managed to crystalize and distort Christianity into an obsessive concern for a handful of hot button issues: abortion, assisted dying, and homosexuality. None of which Jesus ever mentions. The subjects he does speak of repeatedly — peace, equality, inclusion, forgiveness, the dangers of materialism, the errors of the powerful, the hypocrisy of the ostentatiously pious — they tend to ignore.
As a Christian, this breaks my heart. Partly because it shames the truth that I hold to be sacred, but also because it creates such a deathly cartoon of what the Jesus movement should be. As such it leads people to be cynical or even angry about Christianity.
So if anybody it waging a war on religion it’s the Christian right and their secular friends in the various conservative parties and media outlets that have so much influence. They’ve turned a revolutionary doctrine of grace and justice into a stale icon of complacency and reaction. There Laura, now go and tweet about that.