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.
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