Jerry Falwell Jr Type Clery Don’t Speak for Christianity.

I got up this morning to another story about a showboat preacher and his ignorant followers holding a church service during this pandemic. 

This time, the preacher directed members of his flock to hug one another, give each other fist bumps and otherwise do all they could to spread COVID-19 among themselves. 

According to the news story, the preacher’s sermon was — predictably — short of actual Scripture and long on made-up miracle stories and talk about the devil. The preacher told the reporter that his flock wasn’t afraid of death. 

No day goes by without another story like this. It’s clear to me that the newsboys and girls are searching for sensation-seeking, heretical, pretend Christian preachers in local churches to highlight supposed Christian stupidity. 

I am grateful to this reporter for at least  saying that what this preacher was “teaching” didn’t use the legitimate teachings of the Gospels, but was all about his fanciful oogiddity-boogiddity made-up nonsense. It doesn’t sound like this guy is teaching Christ at all. He’s just showboating and doesn’t care if he gets people killed.

Meanwhile, genuine Christian clergy are doing all they can to cooperate with those who want to protect us from COVID-19. My own archbishop is extending the temporary closing of public mass indefinitely due to information he received from our governor about the spread of the virus here in Oklahoma. I would guess that the heads of all the denominations I listed in an earlier post are doing the same. 

I am indignant about the way that Christians have been portrayed during this pandemic. I realize that stories about the crazy poseurs among Christian clergy make good clickbait. I also know that sensation sells. It’s news of a type. 

But it is wrong to single out a group of people who are on the whole behaving with genuine responsibility and rationality and inaccurately portray them as nothing more than snake-handling nuts. We live in a world where demonization of people and groups has become the coin in which we trade. That sinful behavior has led us to the mess that we are in right now. 

I don’t have any problems criticizing Christian clergy when I feel they are doing wrong. But I also think we need to give them kudos when they do right. 

Of course, there are certain religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, Jr, who deserve all the condemnation we can heap on them and their actions. He is not a small-time preacher with a bad haircut and a low IQ. He’s the president of a university and a national figure. 

Jerry Fallwell, Jr kept an entire university open. I think he did this in order to “support” the right wing hype that COVID-19 is a hoax. He directly and without conscience that I can see endangered the lives of the students whose care he was entrusted with in order to suck up to Trump and be a good right-wing water boy. 

I’m not going to spend a lot of time discussing the tuition-paying parents of those students who let him get away with this. I will only say that they are, if possible, even more derelict in their responsibilities as parents than Fallwell was in his as a university president and religious leader. 

Jerry Falwell, Jr, national figure and president of Liberty University, showed a lack of responsibility that set the stage for the craziest little religious leaders out there.

Their “god” is not Jesus Christ. The Gospels teach us to treasure human life, not wantonly endanger it in order to put on a really big show. If you follow Jesus, you can’t kill people. 

Let me repeat that: If you follow Jesus, you can’t kill people. 

You. Can’t. Kill. People.

Almost all Christian religious leaders seem to understand that, at least to the point that they are cooperating completely in the efforts to flatten the curve of this plague. I want to emphasize that fact. Christians are doing their part to save lives in this pandemic. We have nothing to be ashamed of about the response of legitimate Christian religious leaders to this threat to human life. 

The stories about the unwashed, ignorant sensation seekers who are deliberately doing things to spread this virus in the name of some phoney-baloney, no-Gospel-zone, Jesus-free made up, sensation seeking faux christianity, do not represent us.