In His Steps...

 I attended an Evangelical middle school, and during my eighth grade year we read the book In His Steps by Charles Sheldon (published in 1896) for English class. This book is the origin of the phrase "What Would Jesus Do?", which was once so beloved by Evangelicals that there was a whole line of bracelets and clothing with the logo "WWJD" as a constant reminder to the wearer and their Evangelical peers of how they ought to behave. 

One of the class exercises we did was to pick a character from the book and act in character, without saying the name of the character, to see how long it would take our classmates to guess which character we'd chosen. And, if I could somehow be transported back to that classroom as 13-year-old me and do it over, I'd want to say this:

"The majority of America's Christians, especially the ones in rich conservative churches, are deeply hypocritical. They are far more interested in the pursuit of wealth, power, political gains, and satisfying their own egos than in following the example and commandments of the savior they claim to worship (who lived and died penniless and refused to pursue political power even though he could easily have had it). They are fully invested in maintaining a status quo that grinds people into poverty and homelessness, drives people into alcoholism and political extremism, and is creating a Gilded Age of wealth inequality that is certain to end in global disaster. 

If the church is to have any credibility at all, then church members need to stop trying to change the behavior of other people and start changing their own. They need to stop trying to force other people to follow their religion's principles and start actually following their religion's principles. If the church cannot do that, it has no real purpose at all, and its current functions would be better performed by a country club.

But hey, what do I know, I'm just Charles Sheldon, the author of a book from a century ago. Surely by the time you're reading my book, conservative American Christians will have learned the lessons it teaches, repented and changed their behavior accordingly, right?...

...

Right? ...

...

RIGHT?????

...

..."

*deep sigh*

The real reason aliens have never contacted humans...

 

"So, you have gathered intelligence on the Terrans and their capabilities. Do we have sufficient data to invade?"

"No, sir. We will never successfully invade the Terrans. We could destroy them all from here, but in doing so we would destroy all the useful resources as well. A ground-based invasion, however, would result in inevitable and overwhelming defeat."

"What? I thought you said they were weaker and slower than us, and had inferior technology."

"All true, sir. Their technology is so primitive that they have travelled no further than their own moon, and even that only a few times. Most of their weaponry uses crude projectiles. Their most advanced weapons use the most primitive possible nuclear fission and cannot reach targets beyond their own atmosphere. And as for direct combat, even their most vigorous specimens are so laughably slow that it takes them a full ten seconds to move 100 meters at their top speed for ambulation."

"We can easily sprint three times faster. We have no vehicles that can navigate in the Terran environment, but we could easily disable all of theirs, removing their only technological advantage. And they sound like they would be no challenge in infantry-based combat. Surely a small strike force could kill dozens and then retreat beyond range before they could respond." 

"Yes, sir. But sir, their AVERAGE speed of ambulation is around 5 kilometers per hour. And they can maintain it ALL DAY."

"Impossible! Surely their hearts would explode after attempting to maintain such a pace for over 20 of their minutes."

"No, sir, but ours would. That's what I'm telling you. We evolved to be ambush predators, sir - selected for speed, surprise, and violence of action. The humans know about those things too, sir, though they aren't as good at them as we are. But they evolved to be persistence predators, selected for endurance. They would not be able to beat us in melee combat, sir... but after a brief melee we would have to retreat and rest. They would not. They would simply 'walk', as they call it, hour after hour after hour, and they would never relent once they saw that we had killed some of their own."

"So we will need more soldiers?"

"More than we could possibly bring, sir. There are over 8 BILLION of them, sir. They outnumber our entire species 100 times over, let alone our invasion forces. However many we killed, we would be met with wave after wave of new enemies. And if they do catch us napping when we have run out of endurance... Their capacity for inventive malice is... sir, it's beyond anything you can imagine in any life form. They kill for FUN sometimes, sir. ESPECIALLY ambush predators, most of which they have driven to the brink of extinction on their world. They sometimes preserve and hang the HEADS of ambush predators they've killed inside their dwellings, sir. For DECORATION."

"That's horrifying!"

"That's not the worst of it, sir. When they believe that causing pain will get their desired results, the things they're capable of doing... Sir, none of us could withstand the kinds of torture they would invent to get information from us if any of our forces were captured. And once they have the information... they learn FAST, sir, incredibly fast. If even one of our weapons fell into their hands, they would find out how it works, duplicate it, and produce millions of them. They would learn to build ships like ours, learn where our home world is, and annihilate our entire species without hesitation or remorse."

"Genocide?!?! They would commit such an act?"

"Sir, some of them have attempted it ON EACH OTHER."

"...You know what we need to do? We need to get the fuck out of here right now, is what we need to do."

"Sir, yes sir. Plotting a course to a different galaxy now, sir."

"The further from Terrans, the better."

"My thinking exactly, sir."

You may be pro-life, but the people you support are not.

I unfriended a number of conservative Evangelicals last month. If you are either conservative or Evangelical and are still on my friends list and reading this, it's because I think that you (unlike the ones I unfriended) are still sane enough to know that all is not right with conservatism or Evangelicalism, and might understand why I'm about to say the following...

A month ago a client of mine, a person with a cognitive disability who I've known for 20 years, died from COVID-19.

Now, this person would probably not have had many years left anyway. But they could have had those years, if not for getting COVID. 

And the main reason this person doesn't get to have those years of life? The main reason this person was infected with COVID in the first place? 

Conservative Evangelical Christians. 

They have been the overwhelming majority of the people who from the beginning have resisted any and all efforts to contain the pandemic so it wouldn't infect vulnerable people. Conservative Evangelicals are the ones who have been most likely to refuse vaccines, they are the people who fought tooth and nail against mask mandates, the people who refused to stop having large gatherings during the worst of the pandemic, the people who spread conspiracy theories about how the masks and vaccines are somehow more dangerous than a virus that literally eats human lungs, and the people who supported a president who regularly spouted dangerous misinformation about the virus instead of encouraging his fans to do the things that would have contained the virus.

If not for all that, hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved, and tens of millions of cases might have been prevented.

So if you are a conservative Evangelical, your actions or failures to act contributed to the death of someone I cared about deeply.

Even if you personally did what you were supposed to do - even if you personally masked and stayed at home during lockdown and got the vaccine when it became available - you gave your support to the groups that led the charge against any and all precautions. 

You empowered the churches and politicians who went out of their way to make this plague far worse than it had to be. You voted for Mr. "Why don't we try taking bleach internally" and continued to support him even as he argued for a year against people who actually knew what they were talking about. You gave money to the churches that held weekly superspreader events in defiance of both the law and common sense. 

And most of all, you didn't tell your brethren to do what they needed to do in order to reduce the death toll. They would never have listened to me - they know I'm a liberal and therefore they see me automatically as a liar and an enemy, and my every word as something to be gainsaid. But they would have listened to you, a fellow conservative and a fellow believer, if you had told them that "Love your neighbor as yourself" means sacrificing your own desires in order to protect your neighbor.

But you DIDN'T. 

Because of your actions or failure to act, this thing kept spreading, kept having new hosts in which to mutate into new vaccine-resistant forms, kept infecting and killing more people.

So your intentions, however noble they might have seemed to you, don't matter. The fruit of your actions is that you contributed to the needless death of a sweet, innocent person with a disability, just as surely as you contributed to the needless deaths of 19 children that same week by refusing to vote for sensible gun laws. 

And the most galling thing is that you contributed to these things by giving your time, talent, and treasure to churches and politicians who claimed to be "pro-life". You wanted to save "babies" with "heartbeats". But you know something? My client had a heartbeat, until it was stilled by the plague your churches and politicians helped to spread. Every grandparent in a nursing home who died alone because of COVID - they had heartbeats. Every child gunned down in a classroom by someone who would never have had access to a gun in any sane country - they had heartbeats.

These pastors would have done church via Zoom until the vaccine became available, and encouraged their flocks to wear masks and get vaccinated... if you had told them that's what you wanted, and that they must do so in order to get your tithe. 

But you didn't.

Those friends and family members of yours who kept screaming that asking them to get the vaccine was against their Christian beliefs... you could have talked them out of that nonsense and convinced them to do their part to prevent the spread of the disease.

But you didn't.

The politicians you sent to Congress would pass laws to strengthen background checks, make gun owners liable if a crime is committed with their weapon because it wasn't secured properly, prevent domestic abusers and animal abusers (the biggest red flags that predict potential mass shooters) from owning guns... if you had told them that's what you wanted, and that they must do so in order to get your vote.

But you didn't.

And I seem to remember you saying that you follow Jesus. Well, your master said that it would be better for people like your pastors and politicians to have a millstone tied around their necks and be cast into the sea, than to have offended against these little ones. Your master said that one of the marks of his followers would be that they would care for the sick and vulnerable. Your master said that those who live by the sword will die by it.

If you really want to be pro-life, you need to do what you're always telling everyone else to do: Repent. Change your behavior. Stop going the wrong way, turn around, and start going the right way.

Stop contributing to the death of the innocent and start demanding that your pastors and politicians do actual pro-life things... or drop those pastors and politicians and start supporting people who are actually interested in doing things that could save lives. And tell your fellow conservative Evangelicals to do the same. 

I'm not even asking you to stop being conservative or Evangelical. I'm asking you to stop letting the anti-life politicians and pastors speak for you, and stop letting them go unchallenged by you.

Your movement talks about being pro-life, but continually does pro-death things. Either work within the movement to change that, or stop supporting this movement and find or create a movement that IS pro-life.