Pandemic Rights

I started drafting this a couple of months ago and never got around to finishing it. It’s a bit outdated and a bit political, but I still wanted to share it.

Over the past few months, as society has debated the proper response to the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve heard two very different viewpoints expressed for churches. At the national level, I’ve heard arguments that churches are essential, that they should be permitted to stay open or to reopen, that it’s an infringement of our rights and an infringement of religious freedom to close them. At the local level, though, I’m hearing a much simpler and more direct tone, such as my local church’s announcement in March to not meet in person: “This decision was made out of a desire to love our neighbors and protect those who are vulnerable to this virus.” Later, they decided to continue meeting online “simply out of love. We believe that the best way to love our neighbors is to continue meeting online, to continue doing what we can to keep people safe… The final reason is our witness… We’re convinced that our collective belief, our collective stance as a church is to focus on our witness as a community, and we know that there are a lot of people who are anxious about this and are immunocompromised or who are worried about their family members, and we want to be honest and true and caring for that concern.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that we’ve had such debates on our rights as Christians in America. Much of the contemporary debate traces back to the 1980s, with the creation of the Moral Majority and the rise of the religious right, supported by people like Jerry Falwell Sr., Pat Robertson, and Cal Thomas. Thomas’s views later shifted, though. He wrote a newspaper column that stuck with me ever since I read it in 1996:

[Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin] Scalia urged the 650 present [at a prayer breakfast] to ignore the scorn of the “worldly wise” and merely stand up for their beliefs. Such advice is in contrast to much of what we hear in some religious circles: There are demands for respect. There are calls for the “Christian equivalent” of the ACLU to force secularists to treat believers fairly. There is an attitude that says “how can they do this to us,” as if a servant is greater than his Master.

There is nothing in Scripture that commands those who seek to follow God to demand their rights. There is much about the benefits of obedience to what the Bible teaches. Rewards for enduring persecutions are promised, but, like an individual retirement account, they are delayed.

And there is a good deal of teaching about persecution. When experienced because of “righteousness’ sake,” persecution is to be welcomed as a sign (though not the only sign) that the person being persecuted is thinking, behaving and worshiping in a way that pleases God.

There are many Christians in other parts of the world who might gladly change places with American believers. In other nations they face torture, discrimination and murder. Here, their “suffering” is limited to occasional slights from reporters and cartoonists.

According to Christian Solidarity International, the National Islamic Front is torturing Christians in Sudan with whips and then inserting hot chili peppers into their wounds. Do American Christians think critical words and occasional discrimination hurt more than this? They should focus their outrage at the ones guilty of practicing real persecution…

When the Apostles stood before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem and were ordered flogged for preaching the Gospel, they didn’t whine about being persecuted. They “rejoiced because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.” That’s the right attitude. It is far preferable to complaining about the way one is treated. It is, I think, what Scalia was getting at. And he is a man practicing what he preaches.

Early in the pandemic, I read a few articles from a Christian perspective arguing that it was medically wise and spiritually acceptable to not meet in person. I’ll admit that I found these unconvincing; I’m a firm believer in the importance of the local church. Even though I work with technology for a living, I don’t think that Zoom calls and live-streamed church services can fully replace meeting in person; after all, God gave us bodies for a reason. But I can’t argue with my local church’s decision to prioritize loving their community, or with Cal Thomas’s injunction to not focus on our rights. Even though I think that meeting in person is important, or even if I think that the risks of COVID-19 are being exaggerated, the fact is that many of the broader public are or were convinced that it was deadly serious, and so temporarily sacrificing in-person gatherings became a way to show love to those with those fears and concerns. I’d much rather that we as the church be known as the folks who, out of love for and a desire to help others, paused something we consider vitally important, rather than being known as the folks who insisted on our right to gather in spite of others’ objections.

Wearing masks is similar. I know there are strong disagreements over how effective they are. Personally, I’m convinced they’re worth wearing. But, even if you don’t think they’re helpful, many others do; wearing a mask becomes a way to show love to them. This was brought home for me when I was talking during the height of the pandemic shutdowns with a coworker who (to the best of my knowledge) was not a believer; while I sat cocooned in my home office doing my well-paid fully remote software development job, her partner went to a grocery story where she constantly worried about what he might bring home because of constant contact with shoppers and other employees who often weren’t careful. How could I convince her of Christians’ love if I insisted that my rights were more important than her fears?

I don’t want to overstate my case here. The Bible tells us to be good citizens (Rom 13:1-7, 1 Pe 2:13-17), and in a democracy, that means being part of the democratic process and participating (as far as we can without compromising our mission) in society’s discussions on how to balance the rights of individuals and groups. We’re blessed to live in a country that promises religious freedom; that’s a gift, and it’s not wrong to try to hold on to it. And, for what it’s worth, I think that modern American culture is more hostile to traditional Christian beliefs than it was when Thomas wrote in 1996 - but masks and lockdowns still fall far short of the torture that Thomas’s Sudanese Christians face, and they’re no worse than what many people in the world are going through. Instead of fighting even harder for our rights, I’d rather we work even harder to show love and spread the Gospel. After all, laying aside one’s rights out of love for others is what Jesus himself did,

who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself
by taking on the form of a slave,
by looking like other men,
and by sharing in human nature.
He humbled himself
by becoming obedient to the point of death
—even death on a cross!
As a result God highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee will bow
—in heaven and on earth and under the earth—
and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:6-11)