Evangelicals: Just saying no to distancing
Hostility to science among America’s religious right is “crippling our coronavirus response,” said Katherine Stewart in The New York Times. Donald Trump rose to power with the help of an evangelical movement that dismisses science and disdains expertise and government, and now “we’re reaping what that movement has sown.” Witness the arrest this week of Florida pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who violated social distancing orders by holding packed church services, after calling those who fear the virus “pansies.” Or Trump ally Jerry Falwell Jr.’s insistence on reopening his evangelical Liberty University in Virginia, where at least a dozen students now show symptoms of a disease Falwell dismissed as “hype.” By defying distancing guidelines and promising that believers will be protected or healed, Christian right leaders “are definitely going to get people killed,” said Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com. Their superstitious ignorance threatens not just true believers, “but the public at large.”
It was entirely predictable that the Left would blame Christians for spreading the virus, said Timothy Carney in WashingtonExaminer.com. Nothing is more satisfying to secular liberals than
“to look down” on believers “as self-deluded, antiscience rubes.” Let’s review the facts. Covid-19 began in China, where Christians make up less than 3 percent of the population, and has flourished in places— Northern Italy, Spain, New York City, New Orleans— not exactly “packed to the gills with white, conservative evangelicals.” Falwell and Howard-Browne are outliers, said Tristan Justice in TheFederalist .com. To seize on their actions to “stigmatize half the country” is right in line with the “condescension and mockery of Christians that is becoming the norm among our mainstream-media elites.”
I’m no liberal elitist, said Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, but “it angers me” that some evangelicals are acting as if adhering to public health guidelines were “somehow evidence of a weak connection to God.” God’s promise is that “He will always be with us,” not that He’ll put “a magic force field” around us to protect us from rampaging viruses. Pastors who are instructing their flocks to gather and touch are endangering lives. Using the common sense God gave us doesn’t reflect a lack of faith. No wise Christian jumps into shark-infested waters. And “all of us lock our doors at night, do we not?”