A Pocket Full Of Copperheads

Christianity

A Pocket Full Of Copperheads

How defiant religious worshipers in COVID time are worse than snake-handler Christians

Rod Dreher

Apr 13, 2020 12:29 PM

A reader writes:

I am a young Muslim reader of your column for quite some time now, ever since Mr. Ismail Royer once recommended something you wrote. And, considering the present situation, I’ve have a lot more time to read your articles.

Which is why I was baffled by this stance of yours on Pastor Tony Spell and his church. From your article, “Fanatical Pastor Doesn’t Care If Flock Dies”:

“As a Christian, I hope the sheriff will arrest this man and padlock his church for the duration of the pandemic.”

Really? As a religious traditionalist skeptical of secularism (like me), do you really want to see the secular state assume the power to shutter places of worship at will? I’m no fan of this crazed Reverend from what I’ve read of him, as you say, he seems to have a smug, self-congratulatory showboating manner about him, really basking in the (in)famy he is receiving from the mainstream media. But one does not have to be one of his parishioners to find an element of truth in his speeches.

America is currently undergoing a deep moral self-examination, whether it realizes it or not. All of its businesses, all of its services, all of its institutions, have been divided into two categories: essential vs. non-essential. The consequences of this classification will not fade when the pandemic does. Consider the current spats between the NRA and anti-gun people, pro-choice and pro-lifers, over whether gun stores and abortion clinics should remain open. Do you think this has anything to do with the pandemic or our current situation? Of course not! These people are simply attempting to assert the necessity of their institutions in American life. (For the record, as a culturally conservative Sunni Muslim with some libertarian leanings, I am strongly in favor of the former and against the latter).

And thus comes the question of church/mosque/synagogue as a non-essential service, a question that really strikes at the heart of secularism itself. As Charles Taylor (and others) have elaborated the goal of secularism isn’t so much the abolition of religious faith as much as the abolition of its dominance over everyday life, consigning God to the status of a lifestyle choice, just one option, out of many. From the secular perspective then, keeping churches/mosques/synagogues (as you can see, I’m trying hard to be as ecumenical as possible here) open during a pandemic is an absurdity. Why risk human life (the most sacrosanct quality to a materialist) on your personal hobby or lifestyle choice? And while you obviously write from a Christian perspective, I thought I detected a whiff of this sentiment in your article, PLEASE correct me if I am wrong. Because our perspective is exactly the opposite. There are forces in this universe far beyond and more important than the material world, and it is our duty to Him to worship and give obedience. And that is why I say that we should be keeping our religious institutions open for the same reason we keep the grocery stores and hospitals open: because they are essential to human health and thriving.

Great, eventful moments in history are often unnoticed until after they have passed us by. While this is not the homeland of my people (although it is my homeland), you may find in 20 or so years that it was this pandemic that finally “broke” Western Christianity, and led to even ostensibly conservative American Christians to subconsciously view their faith as a non-essential aspect of their lives. Already, one of my friends in the UK has informed me that some Muslims there are actively collaborating to “snitch” on mosques that have remained open despite the shutdown. Mad world.

I thank the reader for a thoughtful letter. I’ve held it over the weekend to respond on Monday, when more people are reading. Let me add this commentary from Sunday’s Pandemic Diary (#26) I received and posted yesterday:

My misgivings about the extreme measures being taken against Covid-19, dating from the moment the bishops rolled over for the lockdown, continue to intensify. Let me state up front that I am taking the virus seriously. I was the first person in my city wearing a mask to the supermarket. With great grief I have put on indefinite hold plans to visit my mother and other aging relations lest we or our kids inadvertently transmit the virus to them. Yet I feel a cold unease about the eagerness of Christians—including you, of all people! to not only cooperate with the shutdown of churches but loudly support it, and even single out for mockery those unwilling to fall in line.

Rod, the suppression of Christianity you’ve long been warning us about? It’s here. It’s happening right now. And you continue to say it’s necessary and morally righteous for us to cancel our services and stay away from the Eucharist. This I do not understand.

I mentioned in that Pandemic Diary that I would return to this in a later post. Well, this is that post. But first I’ve got to quote a great response to it from reader Jonah R., who begins by quoting the diarist:

“It is not only possible but easy(ish) to celebrate Mass without irresponsible social contact … yet it remains forbidden while not only supermarkets and drugstores are open, but liquor, weed where legal, and unedifying entertainment by the terabyte, including porn, can be freely had by all?!”

I say this as someone who agrees with your correspondent that a “drive-in”-style mass should be allowed: He’s imagining a moral dimension to “social distancing” that doesn’t exist. The orders aren’t in place for our moral and spiritual edification. They’re to stop the spread of a virus, period. “Why can’t we gather in church but you can still get pornography online?” is a juxtaposition that makes no sense in the context of stay-at-home orders. And if he doesn’t understand that people gathering in love and fellowship simply act differently, and more contagiously, than people who pop in and out of liquor stores, drug stores, supermarkets or weed dispensaries (where, at least in my county, the number of people inside at one time is now restricted), I don’t know what to tell him.

He’s also myopic to look at the current restrictions and see deliberate suppression of Christianity. He should ask his neighbors, none of whom can gather either: not Muslims, not Jews, not neighborhood book clubs, not fans of Pink Floyd cover bands, not kids who planned their high school prom, not the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes….this is not about him, his church, or his religion. Look, I found it disappointing and unfulfilling to passively watch Easter mass on the Internet…but can you imagine how quickly people meeting in secret, as he did, would cheat on the rules and spread illness? It took just one infected person at a Christian tent revival to send the entire Navajo Nation into crisis. In Lakewood, N.J., where Orthodox Jews are defying state orders, coronavirus is rampant. How quickly does “secret drive-in church service” morph into something with hugs, handshakes, and other close contact by people who push it a little more, then a little more?

All of this stinks, I dearly miss my family and my neighbors and my friends, and I refuse to let it feel like or become “normal,” but this guy—again, with whom I greatly sympathize—needs to sit tight. At least where I live, social distancing is clearly working.

And this morning, one of my sources for my next book, an immigrant Czech Christian who grew up under communism, writes to say, quoting the diarist:

“the suppression of Christianity you’ve long been warning us about … to cancel our services and stay away from the Eucharist”

That’s not how one suppresses Christianity. To the contrary, I’d say that if your only expression of Christianity is attending a church and olfactory satisfaction, then there is nothing to suppress to begin with. “It is a collapse.” Nope. It’s the exposure of a collapse.

So what do I think? It won’t surprise you that I side with the Jonah R. and the Czech immigrant. This pandemic is a purification of the Church. Those who won’t return to it after the pandemic is over were fair-weather Christians in the first place. One is never happy to see anybody leave the church, but if a Christian is the sort of follower of Jesus who is only willing to be with Him when times are good, then he’s actually a mere admirer of Jesus, not a real follower. If the state began a persecution of Christians, that sort of churchgoer would run away from the church, and deny that he had ever been part of it.

And with Jonah R., I believe that neither state authorities nor bishops and other religious leaders are temporarily banning, or at least voluntarily stopping, religious gatherings for the sake of punishing believers. They are doing it to save lives. As I’ve said over and over, if the lives people were risking by going to religious gatherings during this crisis were strictly their own, that would be one thing. But that’s not how viral transmission works. Another reader sent in a piece about how Hasidic Jews in New York’s Rockland County are being treated with suspicion and hostility, even anti-Semitism, because so many of them will not observe social distancing rules, and how that county has the highest rate of infection in the entire state. There is never any rationale for bigotry, but as a fact of life, if religious people — Hasidic Jews, Pentecostal Christians, any religious group — becomes associated in the public’s mind with the spread of disease, especially if they are seen by the public as flouting rules put in place to suppress the disease, then you will see angry bigotry result.

I have been so hard on the Rev. Tony Spell and his Pentecostal congregation in my own city in large part because I know that people around the US are watching his reckless behavior and forming judgments about all conservative Christians, and about religious liberty. It’s the same thing with the Hasidim of Rockland County. If some of us religious folks show the public that we use our religious liberty recklessly, in a way that satisfies us but literally puts the community in danger, then we should not be surprised if authorities take some of it away.

One thing I really don’t understand about the way some of my fellow religious believers are thinking in all this is that this crisis, and the lockdowns, are about nothing more than competing narratives. That if we can’t gather for Sunday worship, then the secularists win. As Conor Dugan points out in Catholic World Report, those who do gather defiantly may be handing the forces of anti-Christianity an undeserved victory. Excerpt:

Near the end of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI stated that “faith is an incentive to seek always, never to stop and never to be content in the inexhaustible search for truth and reality.” He averred that the “prejudice of certain modern thinkers, who hold that human reason would be as it were blocked by the dogmas of faith, is false.” My deep fear in watching many of my fellow Catholics—especially priests, parish leaders, and theologians—share falsehoods or half-truths is that they are unwittingly proving true the prejudice of those modern thinkers.

In playing into those prejudices these fellow Catholics are undermining our common mandate of bringing people to know and love Christ and serve him in this world and live with him in the next. They are putting barriers in the path of those who might find the faith attractive and compelling, but for the irrationality they see among her adherents. An irony is that many of those Catholics spreading this disinformation are those most forcefully claiming that our bishops are placing worldly concerns ahead of supernatural concerns in canceling Masses. Yet, in their rush to push a certain narrative about the coronavirus, I fear that these fellow Catholics do far more damage to the spread of the Gospel than the temporary cancellation of public Masses in the face of a pandemic. Indeed, they do no service to Christ and those thirsting for his good news by portraying a vision of the faith that is detached from and contrary to reason and reality.

I believe that worshipers — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whatever — who, as an act of pious courage, refuse to obey the authorities of the state or of their own religious community, and gather anyway in this pandemic, are like snake handlers. They are tempting the Lord in a way that stands to scandalize. This is not the same thing as the brave believers showing up for Paschal worship despite the cathedral being surrounded by the KGB. The virus is not a political entity. It’s a virus! The snake doesn’t restrict its striking to unbelievers. It’s a snake! The thing is, the coronavirus is like what you would get if the snake-handlers left church with pockets full of copperheads, and let them loose unwittingly on everyone they met in the world.

I admit that the Muslim reader (and Christians on his side) have a point when they say this:

And thus comes the question of church/mosque/synagogue as a non-essential service, a question that really strikes at the heart of secularism itself. As Charles Taylor (and others) have elaborated the goal of secularism isn’t so much the abolition of religious faith as much as the abolition of its dominance over everyday life, consigning God to the status of a lifestyle choice, just one option, out of many.

What they’re worried about is the designation by authorities (including religious authorities) that gathering for religious worship is “non-essential.” At the risk of going around in rhetorical circles, reacting to the virus is not a status competition. Every time any of us goes to the supermarket, we risk exposure to the virus — but life cannot go on without food. I don’t understand why gun stores remain open, because life can go on just fine without them. But that is an argument for closing gun stores, not opening churches. Again, I guess it’s because I’ve been doing so much reading over the past year about Christians suffering in communist prisons, and how they intensified their prayer lives even though they were denied communal liturgical worship, but it’s not at all hard for me to grasp how believers can accommodate themselves to a temporary cessation of worship gatherings to suppress a pandemic. I mean, look: it is true that, as Christ said, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word from the mouth of God (Matt. 4:4) — but does that mean that we can only receive the word of God, and the experience of God, by gathering in church? I don’t see it.

If the authorities proposed to make bans on religious gatherings permanent, obviously that would be another issue. But they don’t. It’s temporary. Moreover, as Jonah R. said, these directives are not targeting religious believers, but everybody who gathers in groups. If the state could figure out how to get people groceries without keeping the supermarkets open, they would be justified in doing so. It seems to me that the authorities are reasoning from the point of view of trying to figure out what society absolutely has to have open to survive, and designating that an “essential” service. We can argue over whether or not gun stores or liquor stores are “essential,” but I don’t see a strong case that Sunday worship is essential in this narrow sense. If the state, and/or religious authorities, were banning prayer and Scripture reading at home, that would be an entirely different question. But they’re not.

One more thing. My sense is that people like my Muslim and Christian correspondents are seeing this ban on religious gatherings as like the laïcité laws in France and Quebec that ban clothing that expresses religious identity. Those laws, in my view, really are unjust, because they cannot demonstrate any substantial harm to the common good from religious believers wearing crosses, yarmulkes, or hijab. It is about the secular state asserting its power over the public order in a way that suppresses religious expression for no serious good. In the case of the virus, rather, there is demonstrable public harm from large groups of people gathering during a viral pandemic. I believe that it is the moral responsibility of religious believers to show charity towards others by obeying the legitimate instructions of the civil authorities, to say nothing of their bishops and other leaders.

We live in a time when everybody wants to assert their rights, but nobody wants to accept their duties. As Father T.J. White pointed out in his exceptionally strong essay about these matters, in centuries past, when nobody doubted the role of the Christian religion in the social order, civil authorities shuttered churches during plague times; even St. Charles Borromeo, a cardinal archbishop, closed the churches in Milan during a plague. As Father White observes tartly, “It is one thing to make a martyr of one’s self, and another thing to eradicate a nursing home in the process.” That’s precisely what we are dealing with here.

I am a strong defender of religious liberty — it’s the most important thing I vote on these days — but as a practical political matter, if we religious believers are not going to exercise our religious liberty with prudence and reason, with an eye of charity towards all, we may in the future find ourselves deprived of it unjustly. We all know that there are plenty of people on the anti-religious progressive Left who are looking for any reason at all to justify taking away religious liberty from untamed Christians. For example, Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop is back in court now, being harassed by some transgender anti-Christian bigots. We Christians and other countercultural religious believers should be careful not to give these haters ammunition. We have very, very serious battles ahead of us in the years and decades to come. We need to be smart about this stuff now. When we have to take a strong, costly stand — and believe me, that day is coming — let’s stand on something more defensible than “we demand the right to go to church during a deadly global pandemic.”

I’ll end by repeating what I think is a useful simile: going to church during the pandemic is like participating in an Appalachian snake-handler worship service, because it puts the participant in mortal danger. The virus is the poisonous snake, which may or may not bite you. But the virus differs, in that a person who is exposed to it at church could carry it out into the world, and share it unwittingly with every person he meets thereafter. It’s like leaving snake-handler church with pockets full of copperheads, which slide out in the grocery store, and everywhere else the worshiper goes.

UPDATE: A Christian reader writes, tongue firmly in cheek:

Do you know of any Christian leader who has said that churches, as part of their defiance of quarantines, must be willing to bear all of the costs of medical care for those who have caught this virus because of the church’s bravery? Are the leaders of these brave churches urging their members to volunteer for service to those whose lives have been devastated by this disease, e.g., who have lost family members?

A Pocket Full Of Copperheads

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