The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response

Under-statement of the year: 

"We are all reaping what that [anti-science] movement has sown."

Humanity's been through the Dark Ages already.  Now we have to evolve lest we get another four years with this walking disaster and his minions.

Get involved, my friends.  Be bold.  Vote.  

-Angela Valenzuela

The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response

Trump’s response to the pandemic has been haunted by the science denialism of his ultraconservative religious allies.

By Katherine Stewart

Ms. Stewart is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”

·       March 27, 2020

President Trump participated in a prayer before speaking at the Evangelicals for Trump kick-off rally at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami in January.Credit...Tom Brenner/Reuters

Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise. In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.

At least since the 19th century, when the proslavery theologian Robert Lewis Dabney attacked the physical sciences as “theories of unbelief,” hostility to science has characterized the more extreme forms of religious nationalism in the United States. Today, the hard core of climate deniers is concentrated among people who identify as religiously conservative Republicans. And some leaders of the Christian nationalist movement, like those allied with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has denounced environmental science as a “Cult of the Green Dragon,” cast environmentalism as an alternative — and false — theology.

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”  
By all accounts, President Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base. In his daily briefings from the White House, Mr. Trump actively disdains and contradicts the messages coming from his own experts and touts as yet unproven cures.

Not every pastor is behaving recklessly, of course, and not every churchgoer in these uncertain times is showing up for services out of disregard for the scientific evidence. Far from it. Yet none of the benign uses of religion in this time of crisis have anything to do with Mr. Trump’s expressed hope that the country would be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” He could, of course, have said, “by mid-April.” But Mr. Trump did not invoke Easter by accident, and many of his evangelical allies were pleased by his vision of “packed churches all over our country.”

“I think it would be a beautiful time,” the president said.  

Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good. When you’re engaged in a struggle between the “party of life” and the “party of death,” as some religious nationalists now frame our political divisions, you don’t need to worry about crafting careful policy based on expert opinion and analysis. Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.

In an interview on March 13 on “Fox & Friends,” Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, called the response to Coronavirus “hype” and “overreacting.” “You know, impeachment didn’t work, and the Mueller report didn’t work, and Article 25 didn’t work, and so maybe now this is their next, ah, their next attempt to get Trump,” he said.

When Rev. Spell in Louisiana defied an order from Gov. John Bel Edwards and hosted in-person services for over 1,000 congregants, he asserted the ban was “politically motivated.” Figures like the anti-L.G.B.T. activist Steve Hotze added to the chorus, denouncing the concern as — you guessed it — “fake news.”

One of the first casualties of fact-free hyper-partisanship is competence in government. The incompetence of the Trump administration in grappling with this crisis is by now well known, at least among those who receive actual news. February 2020 will go down in history as the month in which the United States, in painful contrast with countries like South Korea and Germany, failed to develop the mass testing capability that might have saved many lives. Less well known is the contribution of the Christian nationalist movement in ensuring that our government is in the hands of people who appear to be incapable of running it well.

Consider the case of Alex Azar, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis. It seems likely at this point that Mr. Azar’s signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the “Department of Life.” Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience.

I shudder as I read this piece by Marilynne Robinson published in The Guardian.  She aptly characterizes religion as profoundly caught up with partisanship politics—even to the point of taking a blind eye to the otherwise obvious cruelty of U.S. border policy that involves the ripping away of children from their parents' bodies if they cross the U.S.-Mexico border and attempt to seek asylum or try to enter the country without papers.

Christianity that has spread through the culture on the strength of the old American habit of church-going, and which propounds a stark vision, the embattled faction of “the saved” surrounded by continuous threats to their souls – otherwise known as the American population at large.

This is a very arrogant and destructive kind of Christianity that needs to open its eyes to its own interest in preserving existing hierarchies of privilege and power even if at the expense of their own humanity as so-called Christians. 

While this may get rationalized by some on the right as "nation building" or "making America great," this is nothing short of a pact with the devil that magically and mysteriously never presents itself lucidly in this way.  

Given that the devil is the master of deception, masquerading as an angel of light, what may seem righteous and good is actually woefully and horribly wrong. Take it from the Bible itself in 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, verses 13-15 as follows:

13For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. 14And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their actions.

Nothing good, my friends, can possibly come out of a policy that brutally tears families apart—either for us as a country or those who are directly affected.  

Speak up, everybody!  Get woke!  Do something!  Call all of those that represent you and speak against this tragedy that is already of unspeakable proportions. 

We are truly in the grips of a profound, moral crisis to which we are all obliged to respond if we ourselves, by our silence or inaction, are not to be complicit. 

And for Christians, please don't let your brand of Christianity fall prey to the lies and distortions of the evil one.  And let's all disavow policies that would make Jesus cry. 

Angela Valenzuela

A moral crisis grips the US border. Yet the religious right is shamefully silent

Marilynne RobinsonThe Christian right is allowing Trump to escape responsibility for the immoral policy of separating children from their parents. Have they no shame?

As a matter of recent policy, agents of the American government take children from their parents’ arms at our southern border. They are kept at separate facilities for indeterminate periods of time. The parents are jailed and the children are put in the care of non-governmental agencies, sometimes in other states. It is hard to imagine that the higher rate of incarceration and the new system of calculated injury to children would not soon overwhelm existing arrangements no matter how many shelters and beds are provided for a frightened, heartbroken population of the very young, whose miseries are intended as a disincentive to future potential border-crossers.

The only nod to shared humanity in this policy is an obvious understanding that a child’s grief is a particularly wrenching experience for a parent, powerful enough – so the designers of the policy clearly believe – to weigh against the threats to that same child’s safety and health and prospects for a better life that bring parents and children to the American border. This effect would be much heightened by any parent’s knowing that the one sufficient comfort for any child in almost all circumstances, and especially one like this, is to be taken into his mother’s or his father’s arms.

I am sure that, among these non-governmental caregivers, good-hearted people can be found at more or less the same rate as in the general population. But the policy in question is new, and the demands it entails are special and grave. The child grief they try to deal with must include mourning, feelings of abandonment, a kind of visceral knowledge of loss that can be quieted sometimes but never dispelled. Especially in the case of the small children, their parents’ arms would have been home and comfort through the whole length of their journey to our border.

What have we become? America is not alone in struggling with the flow of refugees from actual and virtual wars. Desperation and destitution obscure the dignity and worthiness of people when they are dealt with in such numbers. Given the will, some can see them as alien in the most negative sense, and threatening. Nothing is excused by the fact that this is predictable, perhaps inevitable.

But there is nothing inevitable about this recent change in American policy, this “zero tolerance” that separates families by jailing all adults who try to enter the country illegally, as well as some of those who come seeking asylum. Donald Trump, who has called the policy a “horrible law”, though his own administration put it in place, pretends that the Democrats must be forced to change it, when the Democrats are very much out of power, and when he could reverse the policy as readily as it was put in place. By speaking as if it were a political issue he suggests stalemate, deadlock, precluding any thought that the policy will be changed.

It should be obvious that without politics there can be no such thing as representative government, and equally obvious that politics as now understood and practiced is a great threat to our democracy. Partisanship has hardened into empowered irrationality. I read from time to time that liberals are offensively self-righteous, perhaps because we say this kind of thing: people on the right are so utterly certain they own the moral high ground that for them Trump’s lie can have the ring of truth. After all, who but Democrats would do something so patently horrible? Sometimes at least Trump does find just the right word.

 

Partisanship has hardened into empowered irrationality

Party identification at present aligns with important asymmetries in the American population. Relatively speaking, it is Republicans who own guns, who claim to be religious, who resent immigration. This list only hints at the profound differences of worldview that lie behind these partisan divides. There is a generalized fearfulness on the right that makes many people feel they need guns. Their fears are stoked when they are told that immigrants are criminals, rapists and animals. Behind much of this is a spurious Christianity that has spread through the culture on the strength of the old American habit of church-going, and which propounds a stark vision, the embattled faction of “the saved” surrounded by continuous threats to their souls – otherwise known as the American population at large.

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Insinuating an element of demonism into the interpretation of ordinary life justifies the word and the concept “horrible”, and retaliation in kind, whence all those guns. We have patriots who hate the country, Christians who insult and deprive the poor and the stranger. We have a president who, with the decisive support of self-declared conservativeness, acts with contempt for law and custom, and for decency. He has a degree of latitude, where his base is concerned, that is incomprehensible to those whose mental landscape is not demon-haunted. His moral shabbiness is a minor thing, they say, over against the forces of evil that assail him.

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Can a movement that defines itself by its vehement rejection of American culture ever really wish or work for civility and accommodation? Might not such a movement resist solutions to social problems, for example gun violence and poverty, because these things confirm a view of the culture that is central to their rejection of it? Do they place any value on America’s good name? Questions like these arise from the social and political consequences of the years in power of the so-called Christian right. They are uniquely Trump’s prop and stay. Will they let him escape his responsibility for a policy that even he denounces in moral terms, and allow him to keep it in place? The question cannot be avoided – have they no shame?

• Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist.

According to this piece authored by R. G. Ratcliffe in the Texas Monthly, here's what's happening in Texas right now within the Republican Party: "a loose coalition of educators, business people and moderate Republicans are attempting to challenge this Empire—mostly Patrick—in the Republican primaries."

And the Empire headed by Gov. Abbott strikes back...  Read on.

-Angela

The Empire Strikes Back, Texas Republican Style

By

R.G. Ratcliffe

Date

Feb 9, 2018

Abbott and Patrick are bringing the power of incumbency to bear against a Rebellion of educators, business leaders and moderate Republicans.

The battle for Republican power in Texas is taking a familiar story line as the primary elections draw near. Think of the religious fundamentalists and no-tax tea partiers as the Empire in control of a state government, helmed by Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and advised by Attorney General Ken Paxton. But recently, a Rebellion formed, and a loose coalition of educators, business people and moderate Republicans are attempting to challenge this Empire—mostly Patrick—in the Republican primaries.

Now, it is a dark time for the Rebellion. Although the Bathroom Bill was destroyed last year, voting in the primaries begins February 20. Fueled by a Death Star of money, the Empire is striking back.
One group in the Rebellion has been the Texas Association of Business, which played a key role in defeating legislation to limit public bathroom access to the gender listed on a person’s birth certificate. The bill was a swipe at transgender people, and business leaders across Texas worried that such discrimination would dissuade corporations and their employees from relocating to Texas. Patrick pushed the bathroom bill, and Abbott added it to the agenda of a special session. Both were thwarted. 

During a speech at a Texas Public Policy Foundation gathering on Thursday, Patrick lashed out at the Texas Association of Business. Without specifically naming the group, he said, “Just because a business group has a business title in front of it doesn’t necessarily mean they were being run by conservative Republicans.”

Patrick also sniped at moderate Republicans who are pushing primary voters to elect “responsible Republicans.” He said a responsible Republican is a conservative Republican. “When I hear people today who criticize the conservatives who led this state for the last fifteen years, it’s one thing when they’re on the other side, but sometimes when it comes from our own team, I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t want the state to be in the hands of moderates, liberals, progressives, because if it is, we’ll be California and the country will be in trouble.”

Along with the saber-rattling, Patrick is spending money like a man who is worried about the Rebellion. Patrick is facing a primary opponent, Rockwall city council member Scott Milder, who in any other set of circumstances would be considered an also-ran. But the education community has rallied behind Milder as a supporter of public education and an opponent of private school vouchers. Patrick is countering by spending $5 million on television advertising when Milder has just $40,000 in the bank.

Meanwhile, Abbott has tossed aside Ronald Reagan’s 11^th Commandment to never speak ill of another Republican. Abbott so far has endorsed challengers to incumbent Republican House members Sarah Davis of Houston, Lyle Larson of San Antonio, and Wayne Faircloth of Galveston. Abbott promised last year to work against any legislator who thwarted his agenda, and his endorsements are making good on that promise. Susanna Dokupil, who has Abbott’s endorsement in her race against Davis, worked as an assistant solicitor general for Abbott when he was state attorney general. Abbott is spending $161,000 on television commercials against Davis and on behalf of Dokupil.

And in an apparent attempt to suppress the vote of educators through intimidation, Paul Bettencourt, a state senator and Patrick ally, asked Paxton to rule that school district spending to bolster voter turnout was a violation of state law and the state Constitution. Paxton, in a non-binding opinion, wrote that using school buses to shuttle people to polling places, unless there was an educational purpose, would likely violate the law because it would serve “no public purpose.”

Empower Texans is using Paxton’s ruling in a letter sent out statewide to school district employees, seeking “whistleblowers” to report districts, principals or teachers who use public resources to help anyone vote. “Some school districts across the State of Texas are vowing to illegally misuse school district recourses [sic] to electioneer for liberal candidates in upcoming elections,” said the letter by Empower Texans general counsel Tony McDonald.

Although Empower Texans portrays itself as a grassroots organization, it is a right wing advocacy group. It’s primary funding since January 2017 has come from just four families: Midland oilman Tim Dunn ($1.2 million); Cisco fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks ($1.2 million); Midland oilman Kyle Stallings ($278,000); and Chambers County oilman Mayes Middleton ($200,000). All are religious conservatives. Middleton, with Abbott’s endorsement, is the Republican challenging Faircloth.

Educators across Texas are responding to the McDonald letter by creating their own whistle blowing Twitter hashtag: #blowingthewhistle. Former State Board of Education member Thomas Ratliff is among those sharing the hashtag.

There are approximately 705,000 public school employees in the state, and if they turn out in the Republican primary, they can impact the results. Because the Texas Democratic Party has been unable to win a statewide election in more than two decades, many elections in the state are decided in the Republican primary. House Speaker Joe Straus, a moderate, business-oriented Republican, recently wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle urging people to vote in the Republican primary.

In fact, less than half the people who voted Republican for governor that November had cast a ballot in the GOP primary just eight months earlier. In other words, about 1.4 million Texans who felt compelled to vote Republican in the general election did not take part in choosing the Republican nominees.

Small primary turnout creates a disconnect between the 28 million people who live in Texas and the small number of us entrusted with its leadership. Low turnout in primaries gives elected officials an excuse to focus on pleasing a narrow set of voters, interest groups and priorities. In fact, at the end of last year’s legislative session, I lamented the fact that there had been more urgency surrounding so-called bathroom bills (which were not a priority of mine) than fixing our school finance system (which was a priority of mine). But many in the state Capitol felt greater pressure from primary voters to act on misguided bathroom proposals than on the more difficult work of improving the way we fund public education.

Straus is helping to raise money for a political committee called the Associated Republicans of Texas (ART), a group founded in the seventies with the goal of turning the Legislature Republican. But the group always has focused more on fiscal concerns than social issues.

In one of those strange bedfellows of politics, Empower Texans is criticizing one of ART’s leading donors—Houston beer distributor John Nau—for donating $5,000 to the reelection campaigns of both Davis and Faircloth. Nau is Abbott’s campaign treasurer and gave $100,000 to ART. “While Gov. Greg Abbott has taken the extraordinary action of endorsing against liberal Republican incumbent lawmakers in the March 6th primary, his campaign treasurer is working to undermine his efforts behind the scenes,” wrote Empower Texans capitol writer Brandon Waltens.

It also is notable that the Republican Party of Texas executive committee last month voted to censure Straus for blocking Patrick’s bathroom bill from being considered in the House. Straus had said the bill was bad for business and that he did not want to have on his conscience the possible suicide of a teenager having a sexual identity crisis. Because Straus already has announced his plans to retire, the censure measure looked like the party was kicking him on his way out the door. But as Scott Braddock, editor of the political newsletter Quorum Report noted:

Yes, censuring Straus was about more than just a farewell kick by the right wing. It was about freezing Straus to limit the aid he could provide the Rebellion. Think Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. To be continued….