Genocide & the American Church
Tags: Covid 19, Genocide, Jesus, Christianity, Christian Living

My husband and I recently returned from a 3-day backpacking trip in NE Oregon. Can I just say how incredibly delightful it was to spend THREE FULL DAYS unplugged from all things COVID? It was fantastic! However, our rest was short-lived. Upon getting back on the grid we learned that our friend’s wife is still not doing well and is now on a ventilator from COVID. She is stable, but not out of the woods. Her dad died from COVID about 10 days ago, so we are praying that she makes a full recovery. As we continued to get “caught up” with the happenings from the previous three days, I read the COVID update in the Oregonian, and things are worsening. Oregon, which used to be our little COVID-controlled mecca, has become part of the surge. Unvaccinated people are primarily the ones filling up the ERs and ICUs — and the ones dying — while continuing to insist on their right to be unvaccinated. To add to the whiplash, my brother reached out to ask for prayer because he and a contingent of coworkers plan to refuse the (now) mandated vaccine in the state of Washington and will likely end up suing the governor of Washington. The issue (from what I can tell) is that the vaccine is being required with no provision for alternatives, such as weekly testing or antibody testing for those who have had it. I understand that this mandate to get the shot seems like a governmental overreach, but then I ask myself, is it?

The government already dictates many things in our lives. I honestly don’t know how you can live in a (somewhat) civilized society without some level of governmental overreach. We must wear seatbelts while in a moving automobile, even though the number of people likely to be in a crash is statistically quite low (relative to the number of people on the road). Motorcycle riders are required to wear helmets. Food service workers are required to wash their hands two times after using the toilet. Children are required to be vaccinated against a host of infectious diseases before entering school or their parents must go through a lengthy exemption process. Some people are required to be vaccinated against certain diseases, such as Hepatitis B or tetanus, to maintain employment. And on and on the list goes. So on the one hand, I can (kind of) understand why some people don’t like being told they have to get the vaccine, but on the other hand, it’s also not fair to the healthcare workers who are exhausted and overworked that they have to keep tending to the ill who refuse to get vaccinated. I mean, if we are going to use the“It’s my choice [to not get vaccinated]” logic, then the healthcare professionals should be given equal choice and should get to decide whether or not they want to care for the unvaccinated COVID patients. Hospitals and insurance companies should get to choose to NOT admit or pay for procedures related to COVID treatment for unvaccinated people. I mean, if we are going to make the vaccine an argument about personal choice and governmental overreach, then let’s let this thing play out and extend “personal choice” to everyone involved in the treatment or care of COVID since getting it, or getting complications because of it, is now essentially, a matter of personal choice. As a member of society, there are times when you just have to do things because it benefits society as a whole.

What is causing me no shortage of anger right now is that there are multiple people in my circle of (Christian) acquaintances who take a “then the old and compromised should just stay home” attitude. As a follower of Jesus, I naturally ask, “Where is Jesus in that view?” I am definitely no Bible scholar, but I have read the New Testament at least a half-dozen times and I can find no evidence of this hyper-individualism that we see today in the Standard American Church (which I like to affectionately refer to as a SAC). The folks in the New Testament could rightfully be called a bunch of socialist commies because they set one of the earliest examples of what we would today call socialism. They regularly pooled their money and resources, including selling their own personal things (gasp!) to help care for the church and specifically, the poor, infirmed, widowed, and orphaned. Philippians 2:3–4 says, “Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.” Galatians 6:2–3 says, “Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ. If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important.” And later in verses 7–10, “Don’t be misled — you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant. Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit. So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone — especially to those in the family of faith,” Well shit. What is the church going to do with all that? Oh, I know the answer to this one, they will ignore it. Why? Because so many people in the church only care about themselves, or others who are like them. It’s (part of ) what is totally wrong with the church right now.

The gospel message was originally a message from a poor, brown-skinned rabbi living in an occupied land, under the oppression of Roman rule. His message to love your enemy as yourself was not hypothetical, it had daily, practical implications. He was saying to the other Jews, “We must love our oppressors. We must do good to those who are hurting us every day. We must care for those who mistreat us.” He was NOT telling his people to rise up and take by force what they felt they were due; geez, his message was the complete opposite of that. He was telling them to learn how to live a different kind of life, while living, day-to-day, under the oppression of a government that would just as soon have seen them dead. He was teaching them how to set themselves apart, not with force, but by living a radically different life of love, in the face of extreme opposition and oppression.

I don’t know the exact history of when the shift occurred, but I can attest to what I live alongside now — a SAC that has become the oppressor. The SAC preaches a thinly disguised gospel of “me first,” “don’t tread on me,” and “screw you.” It regularly twists the scriptures to condone and support a message that no longer cares for the hurt, the infirmed, the poor, the widow, or the orphan. Instead, it lines its own coffers so that it can create huge buildings of comfort for the white masses (did I mention that I live in Oregon?) who gather there to self-righteously perpetuate their own interests. It’s why the church no longer represents the underdog. The church has become the oppressor. Correction, it’s been the oppressor for generations, but since I can’t speak to when that shift occurred, I’m just speaking to what I see now. There is no time or interest in helping out those when there is no direct personal benefit for doing so. That’s why we don’t care about Black Lives Mattering, it’s why we respond with “ALL lives matter, or “Unborn lives matter” or anything else to take the spotlight off of the fact that as a white church, we are miserably failing our BIPOC brothers and sisters by not insisting on social justice and the dismantling of systemic racism. Why? Because we BENEFIT from the status quo. Here we are deep in the throes of a pandemic, and the rhetoric from the church is “We should get to choose. Masks strip us of our freedom! If we can’t gather, the government is taking our religious freedoms! If it negatively affects you, then just stay home!” And my heart breaks to hear this from believers who, I have no doubt, believe that they are following Christ.

The problems with this situation are so varied and so great that we are suffocating as we lie buried underneath them. We are killing off the church because the church has divorced itself from the Gospel. And sadly, right now, that also means killing off people in the process. We are killing off people because the church won’t take a stand on racial justice. We won’t undermine the pro-choice/pro-life political argument by using church resources to provide free reproductive healthcare to all women while simultaneously subsidizing and marketing the benefits of adoption to reduce abortions by reducing the need for abortion. If no one needed an abortion, there would be no abortions. See how that works? See how the church could change that narrative but won’t?

Now we are killing off members of our church body by insisting that it’s our “right” to gather, unmasked, in the face of a pandemic that is effectively killing off known populations of people — the aging, those with compromised health, those with brown skin, and those that are low-income. Why? Because we no longer care if our actions hurt the “others” that we have been called to protect. We are more worried about what we want than we are the health and welfare of others. Instead of putting our heads down and quietly doing the right things, we are protesting in some of the loudest, most obnoxious, opinionated and judgmental voices in this narrative that is destroying America, all while bemoaning our “loss of freedom.” What a load of bullshit.

I obviously do not have a crystal ball so I have no idea where this will all end — except that a lot more people are undoubtedly going to die — but so far it seems to me that we, as a nation, are committing our own form of genocide. Of course we aren’t calling it that, that would be quite politically incorrect. But on an individual, case-by-case basis, that is exactly what those who are in opposition to the measures to control a deadly virus based on the statistical likelihood that it won’t negatively affect them are doing. They are calling it a lot of different things, governmental overreach, oppression, violation of individual freedoms, personal choice, but the outcomes are the same. As of today, the number of people in the US who have died from COVID or COVID-related complications stands at 637,439. Today there are known measures of mitigation that drastically reduce the likelihood of further death — vaccination, mask wearing, and limiting the various spreader gatherings — but there are millions of Americans who continue to refuse those measures. Many are Christians, many are not. I can’t speak to the unchurched, but I can speak to the churched (because I am one of you), and the questions that I have are many. We are called love people with the same love that we have for ourselves. Why then don’t you love your brothers and sisters in Christ (and those outside the body that we are called to minister to) enough to sacrifice some of your own personal freedoms (such as they are) for their benefit? Are we not called to do so? Where in the Bible, Old Testament or New, does God or Jesus call us to ignore those in need? To place ourselves, our wants, our comfort and happiness, before the needs of others? To be a champion of our “rights?” Because I can’t find that passage…and believe me, I have looked. I’m trying to make sense of what I see in the church these days and I’m coming up confused. As much as I love the New Testament and Jesus, I can’t help but think about Old Testament God, who said in Micah 6:8. “No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” Even before Jesus came on the scene to tell us specifically what this verse means using actual, real-life examples, God was telling his people how to live:

Do what is right.

Love mercy.

Be humble.

No one in the church seems to think those commands apply to them today, and it breaks my Jesus-lovin’ heart.