Spiritual Sunday
While many churches and church denominations have chosen to suspend in-person religious services, enough are bucking health recommendations to constitute a significant risk. Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel Station Eleven, which I wrote about Friday, provides us some insight into their thinking.
First for the news. Two days ago, CNBC reported,
Churches and other religious facilities will be allowed to remain open in more than half of the states that are the most vulnerable to coronavirus, often with special exemptions to mandated closures of nonessential businesses.
Of the 15 states in the nation home to the highest percentage of especially at-risk individuals, at least 11 were not barring religious gatherings as of Thursday morning, a nationwide CNBC review of emergency orders found.
And a week ago, Center for American Progress had this report:
While most faith communities are choosing to follow public health guidance, religious exemptions only encourage some religious entities and leaders to disregard or even openly challenge public health guidance: “We are not stopping anything,” Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne said to his River Tampa Bay Church in Florida. “I’ve got news for you, this church will never close.” In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine (R) implored ministers, priests, and rabbis to “think about your congregation.” But that didn’t stop Solid Rock Church outside of Cincinnati from continuing to hold in-person services. Likewise, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church not only continued to hold services, but also told The Washington Post: “We feel we are being persecuted for the faith by being told to close our doors.” And in New York City, some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities continue to congregate and have seen a “huge spike” in coronavirus cases.
Doubts about the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic among many religious communities didn’t arise organically but rather were spurred by President Donald Trump, who downplayed the concern for many weeks and is now casting doubt on his own government’s social distancing recommendations. Just this week, Trump said he would like to see “packed churches all over our country” on Easter, even as public health experts warn that such circumstances would be disastrous. Some of the president’s top Evangelical supporters have also cast doubt on the public health warnings. Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. peddled conspiracy theories about the virus being a North Korean bioweapon on Fox News and refuses to close the campus of the university. Trump adviser Robert Jeffress speculated that the virus was a “judgment from God,” and Paula White, special adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative, headlined an “Evangelicals for Trump” rally at Solid Rock Church in Ohio earlier this month—ignoring public health warnings. Both Jeffress and White dragged their feet on suspending in-person services.
Howard-Browne, incidentally, was the one who told his congregants that closings were for “pansies” and that only the Rapture would interrupt services. To be fair, that was on March 15 so hopefully he has since seen the light.
I predict we’re going to hear a lot in the upcoming weeks and months about “judgement from God” and end times, with the follow-up belief that the elect will receive preferential treatment. This is the message from “the Prophet” in Station Eleven.
A particularly lethal flu pandemic has wiped out most of the earth’s population, leaving little groups of people to flounder around and build makeshift communities. One group coalesces around a charismatic leader who preaches from the Book of Revelations. At one point he delivers the following sermon:
“We have been blessed,” he said, “in so many ways, have we not? We are blessed most of all in being alive today. We must ask ourselves, ‘Why? Why were we spared?’” He was silent for a moment, scanning…the assembled crowd, but no one responded. “I submit,” the prophet said, “that everything that has ever happened on this earth has happened for a reason.”…
“My people,” the prophet said, “earlier in the day I was contemplating the flu, the great pandemic, and let me ask you this. Have you considered the perfection of the virus?” A ripple of murmurs and gasps moved through the audience, but the prophet raised a hand and they fell silent. “Consider,” he said, “those of you who remember the world before the Georgia Flu, consider the iterations of the illness that preceded it, those trifling outbreaks against which we were immunized as children, the flus of the past. There was the outbreak of 1918, my people, the timing obvious, divine punishment for the waste and slaughter of the First World War. But then, in the decades that followed? The flus came every season, but these were weak, inefficient viruses that struck down only the very old, the very young, and the very sick. And then came a virus like an avenging angel, unsurvivable, a microbe that reduced the population of the fallen world by, what? There were no more statisticians by then, my angels, but shall we say ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent. One person remaining out of every two hundred fifty, three hundred? I submit, my beloved people, that such a perfect agent of death could only be divine. For we have read of such a cleansing of the earth, have we not?”…
“The flu,” the prophet said, “the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago, that flu was our flood. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved”—his voice was rising—“not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be the light. We were saved because we are the light. We are the pure.”
And further on:
The prophet was still talking, about faith and light and destiny, divine plans revealed to him in dreams, the preparation they must make for the end of the world—“For it has been revealed to me that the plague of twenty years ago was just the beginning, my angels, only an initial culling of the impure, that last year’s pestilence was but further preview and there will be more cullings, far more cullings to come”…
Talking about the sermon later, two members of the Traveling Symphony discuss its implications. “If you are the light,” the protagonist reflects, “if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”
Among the things that his group does is kidnap women, designate girls to serve as the prophet’s wives, and hold children hostage to extract guns from their parents. People who object are shot, some as object lessons for the others. There’s very little of Jesus in their vision.
Which appears the case with our own white Christian nationalists. For them, building heaven on earth means affirming their tribal identity and smiting anyone else. When disaster hits, they have ready-made explanations and ready-made consolations. Maybe that’s what makes them nonchalant about COVID-19.
In their certainty, however, they risk infecting the rest of us.
Further note: I just saw a CNN interview with a woman leaving a large church gathering (in Ohio) who said that she wouldn’t hesitate to visit stores like Walmart, Target, and Home Depot in upcoming days because she is “covered with the blood of Jesus.”
