Following Christ in a Time of Plague

The following essay was inspired by a blog post written by a member of the leadership team in my parish.   Since this man has been a friend for about a decade and his post inspired me to write the exact opposite of what he had written, I shall do him the courtesy of leaving out his name.   

 

My parish, like all other Churches, sectarian congregations, and sacred communities of other religions for that matter, are presently forbidden to meet in person here in the province of Manitoba, in violation of three of what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify as “fundamental freedoms” and, indeed, in violation of the entire Common Law tradition of justice and liberty that has been the bedrock upon which the Dominion of Canada was built since Confederation.   This insane government overreach, which evokes memories of the persecution of religious communities in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and North Vietnam, is called a “Code Red” lockdown, and has been ordered by the public health mandarin, because he and the premier don’t like the fact that the dishonest media concentration on rising numbers of people who test positive for the Wuhan bat flu, regardless of the facts that the tests used are not diagnostic tools and that the majority of the “cases” are people who are not sick in any conventional sense of the term, make them look bad.   Most people are incapable of distinguishing between what the media says and reality and therefore have been duped into thinking that the tearing apart of the fabric of society, dissolving of communities, eroding of social capital, and brainwashing us all into fearing ordinary human contact and distrusting our friends, relatives, and neighbours outside of an extremely small so-called “bubble” of contacts is somehow “necessary.”   The isolation this causes, is not merely an experience we don’t enjoy, something unpleasant, but is downright harmful to our social, moral, spiritual, psychological, and yes, as everyone who knows the meaning of mens sana in corpore sano is aware, physical wellbeing.   Anybody capable of distinguishing between the bare facts and the slant imposed upon them by alarmist adjectives in the news and drawing rational conclusions from the facts will know, regardless of what “most of us” may or may not agree upon, that these measures are by no means precautions necessitated by the spread of a virus which for the portion of the population under 70 and in good health is less dangerous than the seasonal flu and for the portion of the population that is most at risk, that is to say those over 70 and with two or more serious chronic health conditions, these measures are quite evidently not effective at protecting since that portion of the population has been under lockdown since spring.   Furthermore and more importantly, not only are the lockdown measures not necessary, they are not good.   (1)

 

It is not just disappointing, then, but actually rather disgusting, to see so many people, including professing Christians and even Church leaders, so determined to load the burden of these restrictions upon their family, friends, neighbours, strangers and countrymen in general, as if they were not familiar with our Lord’s warning to His disciples about imitating the Pharisees in loading burdens upon others.  

 

For much of the last nine months, but especially since the new lockdown was gradually introduced over October and November, I have struggled to reconcile how professing Christians could so callously disregard not only the civil rights and basic freedoms of their neighbours, but their needs as social and spiritual beings as well.  Jesus told us that to love our neighbours as ourselves was the Second Greatest Commandment after that which tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.   It is one thing to say that the voluntary sacrificing of our personal rights and freedoms in the name of keeping our neighbours “safe” is a fulfilment of this Commandment, it is quite another thing to say that sacrificing the rights and freedoms of our family, friends and neighbours is such a fulfilment.   Supporting public health orders that impose maximal restrictions on everybody’s freedom of association, assembly, and religion is doing the latter.   To mistake sacrificing the rights and freedoms of others, which is what support for these public health orders amounts to, for the voluntary sacrificing of your own rights and freedoms, and patting yourself on the back about how much you love your neighbour, is to give the text of the Second Greatest Commandment merely the most superficial of readings.

 

There is a popular but very wrong and misguided notion that says that to insist upon and stand up for our rights and freedoms is to act selfishly and that to blindly support and obey every rule and restriction that is enacted in the name of public health is to put the common good ahead of our own.   While it is true that at the experiential level rights and freedoms are things that we primarily enjoy on an individual basis it is entirely wrong to say that insisting upon them and standing up for them is selfish.   Once again, voluntarily agreeing to limit the expression of our rights and freedoms for the sake of others may very well be the loving thing to do, but supporting government action that limits those rights and freedoms, not just for us as individuals but for everyone in society, is the very opposite of a loving act.   Our Lord summarized the message of His Sermon on the Mount in the Golden Rule, which states “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you; do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”   That is the rule worded positively, in terms of what we are supposed to do.   It is a coin with a reverse side, which expresses the same thing negatively, in terms of what we are not supposed to do.   Rabbi Hillel the Elder famously gave the negative form of this as “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a in the Babylonian Talmud).   If supporting government measures that restrict to the point of taking away completely the rights and freedoms of all members of our society does not constitute doing to your fellows what is despicable to you, it is difficult to conceive of what would.

 

When, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the most famous student of the said Rabbi Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel who went on to become an Apostle of our Lord, St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth instructed them to be careful in how they exercised their Christian liberty so as not to be as stumbling block to those of weaker conscience and to put the good of others ahead of their own good, he clearly meant that they should voluntarily limit and restrict their freedom for the sake of others, not that they should write Caesar and ask him to do it for them and everybody else, nor that they should become Caesar’s cheering section if he did so of  his own accord.   When it came to limiting the freedom of others, St. Paul’s thoughts on that can be found in his epistle to the Galatians, in which the very first anathema sit (actually anathema esto since St. Paul wrote in Greek not Latin) was pronounced on those who presumed so to do.    It is worth pointing out that in I Corinthians the recommended voluntarily imposed limits on freedom involved eating meat of dubious origins and in Galatians the limitations on others that were condemned involved forcing people to cut off their foreskins and to stop eating bacon.   Locking people away in their own houses for months, even if they are healthy, without even the pretence of a criminal charge, let alone trial and conviction, forbidding them any sort of healthy social contact, ordering the businesses in which their life’s work, and possibly that of several generations of their family, is all tied up, and upon which they depend for their living to close and this sort of thing goes far beyond what St. Paul condemned in the legalists troubling the Galatians.    What would he have thought if he had foreseen that some would take his plea to the Corinthians to exercise their liberty prudently and wisely and seek the good of others as an argument for supporting imposed limitations of this nature?

 

I suspect the answer would be close to what St. Peter had to say about those who misused St. Paul’s epistles in his own day “As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  (II Peter 3:16)

 

That Jesus demonstrated by His own life what love looks like is most certainly true.   Indeed, His life was a demonstration of what a love that goes beyond the love spoken of in the Greatest and the Second Greatest Commandments looks like.   Remember, those Commandments He said, were the summary of the Law, i.e., that which God rightly requires of us.   A self-sacrificial love, such as Jesus demonstrated by allowing Himself to be unjustly condemned, tortured, and brutally killed for the sake of us all, goes far beyond that, and it is Jesus’ example that Christians are commanded to follow.   To suggest, however, that support and obedience for the lockdown measures is what that kind of love looks like today, is to say something that could only be true in some sort of parallel world where everything is the opposite of our own.

 

Think about it.   In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry, the disease that everybody feared, for which everybody who contracted it was excluded from the community and forced to announce themselves as “unclean” lest any unwary traveler come too close, was leprosy.   Jesus encountered several lepers at various points in His ministry, each encounter ending with the healing of the leper.   One particular encounter stands out, however, which is related in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.   In St. Matthew’s Gospel it follows immediately after the Sermon on the Mount.   After He comes down from the mountain a great multitude follows Him and a leper comes to Him, worships Him, and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”   He answered, not just in word but in deed:

 

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

He did not warn the leper to stay a safe distance away.   He did not warn His disciples to stay a safe distance away.   He did not stay a safe distance away Himself.   He “put forth His hand, and touched him.”

 

In 1832, the plague of cholera hit the city that is now called Toronto.   It killed a twelfth of the population.    It was, in other words, a plague that makes the one that has been generating an insane amount of panic this year, look small and pathetic in comparison.   While droves fled the city, John Stachan, the Anglican archdeacon of York who seven years later would become the first Bishop of the Diocese of Toronto, remained, personally attended to the sick, volunteered on the wagons that collected dead bodies, conducted the burials, and arranged for support for those orphaned and widowed by the plague.   He did precisely the same thing when the “second wave” of cholera hit two years later.

 

What does following Jesus’ example of self-sacrificing love for others look like in a time of plague?  Is it what soon-to-be Bishop Strachan did in 1832?   Or is it lecturing other Christians on how abiding by rules that destroy the economy, bankrupt small family businesses and enlarge the market share of big box chains and online corporations like Amazon, tear the fabric of society to pieces, dissolve communities, exhaust social capital, eliminate third places (2), keep families apart, close Churches, encourage distrust of neighbours, and accustom us to accepting severe government limitations on everyone’s basic rights and freedoms, all without accomplishing the stated purpose of saving lives, for the people most at risk and who have been under lockdown much longer are dying anyway and to their number are being added the underreported but rising numbers of suicides, murders, addiction-related deaths and other deaths caused by the lockdowns themselves, somehow serves the “common good”?

 

Go thou and do likewise.

 

(1)   For Christian insights drawn from Plato’s distinction in the Timaeus between “The Good” and “The Necessary” see the Notebooks of Simone Weil.

(2)   Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, 1989.

 

Sinking Our Lifeboats

Imagine that you are on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic. Your pilot is a historical re-enactment fanatic who, in a moment of drunken insanity, decides that the time is ripe for re-creating the sinking of the Titanic and rams the ship into an iceberg. Like everyone else on board you head to the lifeboats. You wait in line, they put you on board a lifeboat, and when it is full lower it onto the sea.

From the safety of your lifeboat you watch the ship go down and realize, to your horror, that something has gone wrong with the evacuation process. A panic has broken out and in the irrational frenzy of that panic several of the remaining lifeboats have been damaged and rendered useless. There are no longer sufficient lifeboats to carry everyone on the ship and people are jumping into the ocean and desperately swimming towards the ones already afloat, including yours.

You are now faced with a dilemma. You know that your lifeboat has a limited carrying capacity. If you let more people onto the lifeboat you risk running out of the lifeboat's resources before being rescued or, worse, capsizing the lifeboat. If that happens, you will have not only have failed to save the people you pulled from the ocean, but will have needlessly killed yourselves in the process.

American biologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin first posed this dilemma in an article for the September 1974 edition of Psychology Today entitled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” the awful subtitle of which, added by the editor without the author's approval, misses the point completely. Wealthy countries, Hardin argued, like lifeboats have limited carrying capacities and therefore taking in masses of immigrants from poorer countries will not solve the problems of poor countries but will only sink our lifeboats, metaphorically speaking.

Hardin’s article is timelier today than when it was first published forty-one years ago. For weeks now the most important international news item has been the horde of migrants evacuating Syria and flooding into Europe claiming to be refugees from the war that has ravaged that country and from the terrorism and tyranny of ISIS. The better informed among us know that this is only part of a much larger wave of migration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe that has been accelerating over the last year or so. The television and newspaper media have manipulated this story in such a way as to make us feel that Western countries are morally obliged to take in these refugees and they have been aided and abetted in this by irresponsible clergymen like the present Pope and by most of our politicians who seem to be competing with each other as to who will sink their country’s lifeboat the fastest. It is as if they were all acting out roles in a script written for them by Jean Raspail forty-two years ago.

In Raspail’s apocalyptic novel, The Camp of the Saints, an armada of one hundred ships carrying a cargo of a million of India’s poorest and most wretched, sets sail from Calcutta en route to the French Riviera. While many in France, including her president, can see the handwriting on the wall and know that if their country and civilization are to survive they must turn these invaders, armed only with their own plight, away, they lack the moral courage to do it, being paralysed by guilt induced by decades of liberalism. With the exception of a small handful of heroes in which the spirit of the old West lingers on, France succumbs to an invasion that is cheered on by her own media, politicians, and church.

When Hardin first used the lifeboat metaphor his concern was a country’s limited supply of material resources. What Raspail’s novel illustrates is that there are more important things at stake in keeping our lifeboats afloat. Our customs, way of life, beliefs, laws, traditions, history, and our very identity are all more important than physical resources. Indeed, it is these things which make possible the conditions that are attracting all of these migrants from other parts of the world.

Laws which protect and secure our persons and property, a respect for personal liberty that allows us to thrive and prosper balanced with a sense of fairness and justice that demands that we collectively look after the weaker and less successful among us, with recognized, established, and, for the most part respected, civil rights do not just come about on their own. Whether these things draw immigrants for their own sake or for the sake of the abundance of material goods that these make widely available in our countries, we tend to think of them as being based upon universal, abstract, principles available through reason to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This liberal assumption, however, does not bear the scrutiny of history in which these things developed slowly within the context of national cultures that claimed the heritage of classical Greco-Roman antiquity and of Christendom as their own. Should those cultures go down with our lifeboats, there is not the slightest shred of evidence that these things would survive, and there is plenty of evidence that they will not do so in the failed states that were once thriving colonies of European empires.

Make no mistake – the sinking of our national lifeboats, and our entire civilization along with them, is the doom that we choose for ourselves if we continue to base our response to the refugee crisis on sentiment and emotion rather than facts and reason. It is not as if the refugees were pouring into a healthy Europe of countries confident in their traditions and identities. They are pouring into a Europe which has experienced decades of low fertility in which governments have relied upon large scale immigration to keep their population levels up, a pattern encouraged by the European Union that has developed over the same period of time. While a healthy country can take in and absorb a certain number of immigrants without harm to itself for a country to rely upon large numbers of immigrants to make up for low fertility as a long-term policy is to adopt a policy of population replacement over reproduction which is to embrace its own death as a nation.

After several decades of this, what Western countries need is a break from immigration, but what our politicians are offering us instead is to inundate us yet further with thousands of migrants who claim to be refugees but are clearly behaving more like a mob of invaders. The British government has offered to resettle 20, 000 Syrian refugees by 2020, with the opposition party and its supporters complaining that this is not enough. The governments of Germany and Austria have opened their borders wide to any and all claiming asylum. Even here in Canada, an ocean and half a world removed from the Middle East, each of the two largest opposition parties are vying to outdo the other in accusing the present government of culpability in the death of the three year old boy whom the media have been dishonestly presenting as a victim of Western heartlessness and in the tens of thousands of refugees they are promising to resettle should they win the upcoming election.

There are those, of course, who will insist that to think about preserving our national identities, cultures, and ways of life while other people are fleeing persecution and war is to show a lack of perspective and wrong priorities. They might further insist that the idea that we should not think only of ourselves but of others as well is the highest ethical principle of the faith at the heart of our traditional cultures and that to abandon that principle is also, in a sense, to lose who we are. While these objections should not be lightly dismissed, we must distinguish between moral principles themselves and the sentimental way in which some would apply them.

The Golden Rule tells us to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but as none of us in our right mind would want another country to take us in if it did so in such numbers that it lost everything that made us want to move there in the first place, this clearly does not contradict the logic of lifeboat ethics, whatever the current pretender to St. Peter's throne has to say about it. Christianity calls upon us to follow the example of Christ, and that example is one of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, but a cross is something that can only be taken up individually, not collectively. It is one thing to throw yourself in front of a bullet to save another person. It is quite another thing to put your child in the way of the bullet and then later try to claim the laurels of a hero. To insist that out of humanitarianism and compassion we resettle this growing flood of migrants in Western countries is to be like the latter person, not the former.

Worse, as is the whole point of the lifeboat metaphor, it is to be like the man who credits himself for heroism for sacrificing his child but failing to stop the bullet.