So, today’s shocking/not shocking blockbuster is that evangelical Christian and former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx is coming forward a year too late to tell us that if only we had actually followed the science rather than followed Trump’s calls to “liberate” states last year, we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives:
“I look at it this way. The first time we have an excuse,” Birx says. “There were about a hundred thousand deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”
Now, this post is not primarily intended as a political rant. Wearing masks and not congregating indoors and temporarily suspending church services to save lives should never have been political issues. But the pandemic made it clear to me that you can’t rely on anyone in this country. There is no sense of the common good. And the church is more guilty than any other segment of the population of leaving people to fend for themselves. Deborah Birx is only a smart part of the problem.
The bigger issue is that there is no Church in this country. In its place, we have the Cult of Religious Freedom. We have the Cult of Christian Nationalism. We have the Cult of the Second Amendment (Molech Worship). And, to be honest, most of the local incarnations of this church are just cults of personality revolving around a host of Christian media stars and local pastors trying to become Christian media stars. And false prophets. Lots of false prophets.
The Church was intended to be the body of Christ. The same Christ who laid down his life for his friends and told Christ’s church to deny itself, take up its cross, and follow. It was intended to be a place that served and loved its fellow humanity because in doing so it was serving and loving Christ’s own self. And it did a pretty good job of this… for a couple of centuries.
But then empire took over, and instead of the cross we got the Crusades. We got patriarchy. We got the Doctrine of Discovery. We got settler colonialism. We got slavery. We got Jim Crow and Apartheid. We got homophobia.
So here we are, in 21st century America, and Christ has no Church. And while I do believe that there are groups of followers of the way of Jesus at the margins of whatever it is that is masquerading as the Church today (the black church comes to mind), I’m absolutely convinced that whatever the hell we are doing in those so called church buildings nowadays, it isn’t being the Church.
For me personally, I am still a follower of the way of Jesus, think that there is an ineffable God beyond my understanding, and enjoy being a part of the local church of which I am a part. But make no mistake about it: The Church does not exist in this country. Jesus has left the building.