Is COVID-19 Exposing The Death Of God And The Worship Of Christian Nationalism And Trump? DMT.NEWS

Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling

As COVID-19 rages across America, many are asking how socially and morally responsible should one be to take precautions from spreading it. After exposing 180 churchgoers for not following shelter-in-place guidelines, one Christian minister’s answer was a refusal to apologize.

“You don’t need to defend us. When Jesus went before Pilate, he didn’t defend himself. So I don’t feel the need,”

he told his members. (1) Another Christian, a lawmaker, said he will not wear a face mask because God did not wear one. (2) Other Christians are flouting state and social distancing orders, claiming religious liberties are at stake and that God will protect them from the virus.

There is also President Donald Trump. Early on during the coronavirus pandemic, he would frequently say not to worry about the disease because it would go away “like a miracle.” It did not. CNN religion editor Daniel Burke argues that Mr. Trump’s childhood minister may be part of the reason he ignored numerous warnings about the disease and discounted science and instead adopted an approach of “magical thinking.” As a child, he attended sermons by the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, who is best known for his self-help book titled, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Sunday after Sunday Trump learned that “attitudes are more important than facts.”

The Rise of Christian Nationalism

Poor leadership, inadequate healthcare, racial and economic disparities, and magical thinking are not the only things pandemics expose. They also expose the death of God, where the attributes of God are no longer visible within the very people who profess them. These attributes are instead replaced with an identity that resembles a nationalistic religion and its culture wars. With COVID-19, it is a civic religion that has not only embodied the America that was once known and loved for generations, but a Christian Nationalism which asserts dominance on the local and national levels and always, always places the American flag and Mr. Trump in front of the cross.

Conservative and fundamental Christians have watched their beloved social crusades-right or wrong-lose again and again in the Supreme Court, elections, and popular-opinion polls. Most Americans now support same-sex marriage and government-sponsored birth control. The white male patriarchal leadership that continues to be the norm in many conservative and fundamental churches and families has been challenged on the national stage as well, especially with the Black Lives Matter and #Me Too Movements, the importance of science and medical advancements, and the widely publicized alleged sexual misconduct of religious and political leaders.

In response, Red State Christians turned to the flag and Donald Trump, feeling their patriotic fervor and nostalgic desire for a more “Christian American” (where children prayed in school, abortion and same-sex marriages were outlawed, African Americans were segregated, and interracial marriages were illegal). In “Red State Christians,” Angela Denker writes:

“This desire to turn back the clock is more about national identity than Christian identity. They want to be the ones who get to define what America is, and for them, it must be conservative, and it must be Christian. Otherwise the country-and their faith-will utterly collapse.”

Consequently, many of the poorest districts across America are in so-called red-political states, where the politicians most familiar with the story of Jesus are routinely elected into office. These same areas claim great allegiance to Christianity. Critics wonder, though, what kind of theology is being preached in these highly religious sections of the country that allows persons to claim such loyalty to the Gospel of Christ but then elect persons who support a society where children hunger and lack education, or where workers do not receive ample pay to provide basic healthcare and medicines or other necessities like shelter for them and their families.

The Rise of Mr. Trump and Gospel Distortion

As for President Trump, he is no devout Christian; he is no fundamentalist warrior or longtime pro-life activist, as is Vice President Mike Pence. But he does speak the same language this civic religion does, popularized in Evangelical churches across America, especially in the South. As a result, they worship him and his misogyny and dog-whistle race politics. They worship his QAnon conspiracies, his solipsism, and his Birther Movement: the suggestion that Barack Obama-who symbolizes the African American community-is neither an American nor Christian.

They worship his fear, anger, jingoism, and pseudo-science, mixed with the sense that they are the real victims.

Above all, they worship the near-deification of the American military, a sign that determines if you are a member of the growing Christian Nationalistic Movement. The appearance of military support for the president, and his support for them, and the intertwining of his nationalistic rhetoric and of a “Christian America,” serves to sustain and increase conservative Christian support for Mr. Trump. In fact, support for America as a Christian and Trump-loving nation may be the most prominent lesson many American Christians learn in church, rather than a focus on the Gospels, on mercy and forgiveness, or even on Jesus’s suffering and death.

Compare this to the Gospel of Luke 4:18-19 where Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Or compare this to Micah 6:8, “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with you God.” It just so happens that in 2016, more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for a presidential candidate and super-billionaire who openly attacked immigrants and those with disabilities.

There is a name in theological circles for the “death of God syndrome,” in replacing God with nationalism, Christianity, and Donald Trump. It is called a “gospel distortion,” forgetting about the message of Jesus that is. A gospel distortion is the idea that another ideal is impeding the truth of the gospel. The current gospel distortion and the one before Mr. Trump’s presidency has its roots in Christian Nationalism and Nativism. Christians at odds with this new movement warn: “We have to be Christian first. If you are American and Trump first, Jesus will be at odds with you. Patriotism is not a fruit of the Spirit as love or forgiveness is. It’s idolatry on the Fourth of July.”

The Other Virus Raging Across America

Ministers have been unable or unwilling to stem the tide of Christian Nationalism and Mr. Trump, and in their preaching or in remaining silent, they have further encouraged the linking of American patriotism and the president with the love of Jesus. This is particularly true in the strongly Republican South, where the idea of God, militarism, firearms, xenophobia, and country still defines people’s faith. Instead of backing traditional Christian social support for people in need and receiving the stranger, Christians in churches that embrace Christian Nationalism are taught to back American strength, militarism and retaliation as embodied in the president.

Critics caution that the church should not be considering people like the world considers people, including their ideas of greed, usury, and self-centeredness. Salvation in Luke 4:18 is God’s initiative to bring healing and wholeness back into the created order. It is meant to save humanity from its inhumanity, from its own narcissism and pathological behaviors. God desires to save us from anything that oppresses us-including economic and political injustices and anything that works against the solidarity of the human community.

The church in America has become so captive to capitalism and elevated businessmen that it has lost its prophetic witness in the world.

In, “The Pandemic Has Exposed America’s Most Dangerous Virus,” Tim Wise puts it another way. “There is a virus ravaging America, but it’s not the one you’re thinking of. It has been here for a long time, for much longer than COVID-19. Patient zero would have been present among the nation’s founders perhaps, or even earlier, in the colonies of what would become the United States. It has mutated over time, and some have been struck with more serious symptoms than others who contracted it. But we have all been exposed, no matter the care we have taken to avoid it. It is a virus of white supremacy… and that certain people are disposable.”

In the past week: President Trump played golf one day for the first time in over three months Ralph Northam broke… https://t.co/xceS5PJCKB

2020-05-25 22:53:45

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More than 500 doctors have added their names to a letter to President Trump urging him to end the lockdown, warning… https://t.co/C3Wt4wDBVk

2020-05-25 12:53:32

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Wait, what? Fauci does a dramatic about-face and is now on the same page as Trump https://t.co/dtpBtYqUSO

2020-05-24 22:46:23

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He adds that this infectious virus lives in the DNA of the nation, in the Puritan ideology of a “city on a hill,” in the genocide against the American Indian, and in the history of Black slavery and desegregation that never went away. It is a virus of Christian Nationalism and indifference, maybe even hate, towards those who do not agree or belong and look different. It had always been here. The Hitlerian philosophy of “life unworthy of life” was not German in the least. It was borrowed from this country’s top theologians and scholars-nativists and eugenicists alike. If anything, Nazism was simply an act followed by America’s hierarchical taxonomy of human value.

It Is the Death of God

This hierarchical order of human value was not only fueled by Christian Nationalism and now Donald Trump, but by solipsism-the opposite of what the Gospels and Christians consider to be God’s revelation in Jesus. This helps explain why Mr. Trump and Christian Nationalists rely solely on their own reality-propagated through conservative media and Fox News. They rarely absorb new information that they may disagree with or that runs counter to their worldview, a view that reflects a psychological state in which a person feels that there is no reality outside of the self. Consequently, they would have been the religious and nationalist zealots that tortured Jesus.

President Trump’s demand to reopen churches echoes this image of a tortured Jesus. It stems from a pair of surveys that found waning confidence among Christian Nationalists in how he responded to the pandemic. Churches continue to be hot spots for hundreds of outbreaks. In Montgomery Alabama, 74 people contracted the virus during a service. In Arkansas, the CDC traced 92 COVID-19 cases back to a church. More than 70 people were infected at a church in Sacramento, and hundreds more at churches in Georgia, Kansas, Texas, and Kentucky. Dozens of people have died. What is more, some outbreaks took place after state’s were reopened.

As virus cases and deaths rise across America, especially in the South, it is not that some Christians value some lives less than others, but they value some lives less than an idea, less than their conservative politics and Christian Nationalism. It is the death of God, the death of a historical Jesus who was born and had to live also under oppressive rulers and a fatal religion, a social situation he could not ignore and still give meaning to life. There was a demand upon him to respond to the political, social, and economic issues of his day, and it was not the demand that others should have to suffer and sacrifice their lives.

Sadly, this is the same Jesus that is disinherited in every age, including our own.

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)

(Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.)

(1) www.sacbee.com. “No Apology from Pastor of Butte Country Church Where 180 Were Exposed to COVID-19,” by Dale Kasler and Ryan Sabalow. May 18, 2020.

(2) www.nbcnews.com. “Ohio Lawmaker Refuses to Wear Mask Because He Says It Dishonors God,” by Elisha Fiedlstadt., May 6, 2020.

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