At the height of the COVID crisis (for two years, has the crisis ever not been at its height?), I listened to a veteran pastor explain to his congregation that the polarization between COVID extremists who wanted absolute fealty to government mandates and those who believed in individual freedom and responsibility in determining their response to the virus as nothing more than a simple misunderstanding or disagreement between each side.
As I pondered his conclusion, it occurred to me that this pastor, like many others, had misunderstood the crisis in terms of biblical, Judeo-Christian morality and, thus, did not understand some very key fundamentals from scripture that apply to the COVID crisis.
With one side touting totalitarian impulses with long-term negative consequences and the other side promoting individual freedom, it is obvious that these opposite positions cannot be moral equivalents.
One side wants to control and dominate; the other side chooses egalitarianism, personal freedom, and individual human value.
From the emancipating imago Dei (image of God) in Genesis chapter one, the destruction of the empire at Babel, the birth of the first republic at Sinai, to book of ultimate human freedom emancipation in Galatians, it is clear that God does not endorse tyranny or coercion by governments ran by fallen, fallible humans.
As it has dealt with many deleterious aspects of the American culture, the American church as a whole has responded poorly to the COVID crisis due to biblical ignorance, fecklessness, Marcionism, or gross naiveté when it comes to the totalitarian impulses of the secular left and governments in general at present and throughout history.
To the American left, the crisis has been a serendipitous windfall in opportunities to control and suppress the population with unlegislated decrees that create ever more pliable serfs who obey capricious whim and lack the ability to think critically and question, due to the purposeful failure of the American education system to teach students how to think critically and independently as is promoted by Judeo Christianity.
This has been a long-term goal of the left since the 1960s. After the failure of Marx’s Economic Marxism (the have’s versus the have nots), Antonio Gramsci (1940s) formulated a neo or cultural Marxism in which the goal was to gradually take over a country’s major institutions (government, education, financial, religious, etc.) to implement Marxist revolution, led by a few so-called elites that would control and guide the masses.
After the failure of the 1960’s radicals to affect such a revolution in America, Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt School) and other communists initiated the long march (a term borrowed from Mao in China) to infiltrate and eventually dominate key American institutions (education, government, religious, financial, etc.) in order to transform American society into a communist dictatorship, or at least an oligarchy dominated by a few elites.
As is now clear, they have been quite successful in their goal, and COVID mandates are merely another formidable step further in that direction.
If you do not believe this, consider that there has been no real difference in efficacy between states that have exercised the most draconian control measures and those that have remained largely open such as Florida and Texas, among others. Even with this equality of outcome, the country is still nearly split between those advocating strict government control and those who advocate for individual freedom in response to the epidemic.
On the whole, the American church has been compliant with government control and offered only a whimper of civil disobedience to the totalitarian tidal wave. This response in no way comports with the tremendous value the bible places on individual freedom. Sometime in the future, at least part of America will come out of their collective coma and realize the freedoms that have been lost.
With seventy percent of the US still claiming to be Christian, American pastors will bear much of the responsibility due to their overall torpid response.
American pastors are either biblically ignorant, craven, or adherents to the ancient heresy of Marcionism in which the Old Testament was proclaimed illegitimate as Christian doctrine in favor of the New Testament only.
Imago Dei (Gen. 1:26-27), one of the key doctrines of the Old Testament, the Christian faith, and Western culture, is, if nothing else, a God-given license to human utility in making personal choices about caring for one’s health.
When did we decide as a country that human beings should be forced to push vaccines in their God imaged bodies?
God’s scattering of the peoples at Babel (Gen. 11:1-9, 3000 B.C.) was the destruction of Nimrod’s empire in favor of people groups who would form distinct “states” based on individual cultures and not the tyranny of empire.
God’s “consensual” covenant with the Jewish people at Sinai (Exodus 19) birthed the first republic (consent of the governed) of a free people, complete with separation of powers (priests, prophets, judges, and later kings).
In the New Testament, Paul wrote the letter to the Galatians, which was like an emancipation proclamation for believers.
Given the ubiquitous evidence of human value and freedom in scripture, it is indeed difficult to understand the pusillanimous response of the American church in the forceful administration of vaccines and the deleterious effects of closed schools or diminished faces of masked children, particularly when one considers American church history where brave pastors were the rule and not the exception as they are today.
Prior to the American Revolution, pastors such as George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards promoted human freedom and the “kingdom of priests (Ex. 19:6).”
During the Revolution, the British feared the American pastorate more than any other segment of American culture due to their support for the overthrow of the tyranny of the British in favor of biblical, individual freedoms.
The English term of derision, “Black Robbed Regiment,” given to American pastors, became a badge of honor among much of the American clergy.
All instances of brave American pastors during the Revolution are too numerous for me to report here, but two brief case studies will be quite illustrative to the reader.
Jonas Clark (1730-1805) was the pastor of the Church of Christ at Lexington and had personally trained the approximately seventy militiamen that participated in the first shots of the Revolutionary War at Lexington-Concord.
Though burning with Godly fire for American freedom from the pulpit and desirous of forming a company of militia from his community, Pastor John Rosbrugh (1714-1777) had been personally reluctant to join the war due to his advanced age of sixty-two.
Adjourned by his congregation, Rosbrugh did eventually join the fray and wound up as battlefield chaplain at the Battle of Trenton. Eventually captured by the British, Pastor Rosbrugh’s body was so mutilated by his Hessian tormentors that a bayonet was actually broken off in his lifeless corpse.
These were brave men and not unusual among the clergy at the time of the revolution. Ask yourself, when you think of America’s modern Christian clergy, does courage come to your mind? Generally speaking, it, unfortunately, does not!
The common theme for American pastors is more their use of modern marketing techniques to tickle the ear of congregants, who move from church to church at fickle whim or in promoting moralistic, therapeutic deism that can be closer to pop psychology than the human freedom-loving word of God.
In his visit to America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville had expected to find a Christian church with little cultural influence since there was no government coercion involved in church attendance as there had unfortunately been in Europe. What he found was the opposite; there was a profound, cultural influence in regard to maintaining God-given liberties and responsibilities of all citizens.
The modern American church would do well to learn and revive biblical doctrine on human freedom and stand up to a tyrannical government bent on totalitarianism which is the sinful opposite of biblical freedom.
There is almost no greater violation of human freedom than being forced to inject a vaccine into one’s body, regardless of efficacy or inefficacy (my wife and I are both vaccinated). If a government can force this most intimate of intrusions on one’s body, their power is limitless onto death.
The modern church must wake up from its hundred-year biblical slumber or face the rhythm of the ages: totalitarianism, which always leads to the terror of the God-given soul.
We, Christians, are still the majority in this country; what a great opportunity for pastors to lead us towards freedom and not tyranny, the death of the God-given, human spirit of freedom. As for me, “give me liberty or give me death.”
