{"id":48266,"date":"2020-05-04T12:53:36","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T16:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=48266"},"modified":"2020-05-05T10:31:26","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T14:31:26","slug":"evangelicals-view-of-covid-19-more-shaped-by-politics-than-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2020\/05\/evangelicals-view-of-covid-19-more-shaped-by-politics-than-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"Evangelicals&#8217; View of COVID-19 More Shaped by Politics than Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>Y\u2019all. Y\u2019all. Here\u2019s some real truth:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Fundamentalists over here saying this pandemic is all hype and missing that there\u2019s never been a better moment than right now to peddle some hardcore pre trib rapture theology.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Joshua Pease (@joshuadpease) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/joshuadpease\/status\/1256771910228008962?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">May 3, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>\u201cFundamentalists over here saying this pandemic is all hype and missing that there\u2019s never been a better moment than right now to peddle some hard-core pre trib rapture theology\u201d is the most real thing I\u2019ve read all week.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a good point. A really good point.<\/p>\n<p>I grew up in an evangelical home and church community in the 1990s. I\u2019ve often felt, today, that Trump\u2019s election upset the eschatology I was taught as a child. The whole central idea of evangelical eschatology in the 1990s was that the world was going to get worse and worse until the rapture and the tribulation, no exceptions.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, this teaching was so pervasive that I once asked my dad why we were involved in right-wing political causes\u2014if the world was just going to get worse and worse, what was the point of trying to peddle against the current? Why try to bail out a boat we already knew was going to sink? I found that somewhat confusing. My dad\u2019s response was that God calls us to try. Note what an impression these \u201cit\u2019s just going to get worse until the end\u201d teachings had on me\u2014they were laid on so heavily I was genuinely confused as to why we were even <em>trying<\/em> to make things better.<\/p>\n<p>And then evangelicals voted en masse for Donald Trump, with Mike Pence as his vice president, and evangelicals control the levers of power. Whatever happened to things getting worse and <em>worse<\/em> until the rapture comes?<\/p>\n<p>You know something? I don\u2019t have stats to back this up, but I bet evangelicals talk less about the rapture and the end times today than they did when I was a kid. Times have changed, and it suddenly seems less relevant!<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s a passage I remember hearing a lot, which is probably still quite familiar to most evangelicals, <a href=\"https:\/\/biblehub.com\/niv\/matthew\/24.htm\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">from Matthew<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span class=\"red\">You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.<\/span> <span class=\"red\">Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.<\/span> <span class=\"red\">All these are the beginning of birth pains.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>True, this passage does not specifically associate plague or disease with the end times. But if you\u2019re spinning a story of hard-core pre trib rapture theory\u2014as one does\u2014what\u2019s happening now seems perfect fodder. This pandemic has thrown our world into tremendous insecurity. It\u2019s not hard to go from supply chain disruptions to famine, or from closing borders to war. I\u2019m not saying that I want these things or necessarily think they\u2019ll happen, but from a telling stories about the end times perspective, it\u2019s easy to see ways this could all be made to fit together.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I mean I\u2019m kind of mad! What was the point of making me watch A Thief In The Night as a 7 year old if you were just gonna bail right when it makes sense?!?!<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Joshua Pease (@joshuadpease) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/joshuadpease\/status\/1256778237096517632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">May 3, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Ah,\u00a0<i><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Thief_in_the_Night_(film)\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">A\u00a0Thief in the Night<\/a>.\u00a0<\/i>I watched that at a sleepover when I was 12. Fun times!<\/p>\n<p>And it\u2019s not just that those evangelicals usually interested in the end times aren\u2019t integrating this pandemic into their predictions and stories. It\u2019s also that they\u2019re\u00a0<em>denying that this pandemic is a real thing.\u00a0<\/em>This tells me that, in forming their understanding of this pandemic, these normally rapture-happy evangelicals are more motivated by their politics\u2014i.e. by Donald Trump\u2019s insistence that Democrats are unfairly using this pandemic to take him down\u2014than they are by their deeply held religious beliefs about the rapture.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve long felt that conservative politics co-oped a large swath of evangelicals some decades ago, such that their politics shape their religion rather than the other way around. This is yet more evidence that this is the case.<\/p>\n<p><b>I have a <\/b><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/lovejoyfeminism\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"><b>Patreon<\/b><\/a><b>! Please support my writing!<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Fundamentalists over here saying this pandemic is all hype and missing that there&#8217;s never been a better moment than right now to peddle some hard-core pre trib rapture theory&#8221; is the most real thing I&#8217;ve read all week.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":48271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-48266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-end-times"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Evangelicals&#039; View of COVID-19 More Shaped by Politics than Religion<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&quot;Fundamentalists over here saying this pandemic is all hype and missing that there&#039;s never been a better moment than right now to peddle some hard-core pre trib rapture theory&quot; 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