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Monday, April 06, 2020

The pornographic church

1. In my observation, evangelical leaders who support the suspension of public worship during the pandemic use three arguments.

i) All things being equal, Christians have a duty to obey civil authorities. This prima facie civic duty can be overridden, but the pandemic is not one of the exceptions to the norm.

ii) It's permissible to temporarily suspend public worship to avoid gratuitous risk of infecting others with a life-threatening pathogen. 

iii) We're under obligation not to expose others to a life-threatening pathogen.

(ii)-(iii) are independent of (i). Some churches suspended public worship voluntarily.

2. One problem is that (ii) and (iii) are contradictory. (iii) is an argument from principle. It's intrinsically wrong to put others at gratuitous risk of contracting a potentially life-threatening pathogen. In this case, social events of a particular size. 

But if that's the argument, then the logic of the principle is open-ended. That demands an indefinite suspension of public worship. Christians are obligated to forgo church for the duration of the pandemic. The obligation is not that it's permissible to expose the public to the pathogen so long as you temporarily practice social distancing, then discontinue social distancing after a specified time regardless of whether the pandemic has subsided. 

So (iii) is an open-ended commitment that obviates (ii). The suspension of public worship will only be as temporary as the pandemic. 

3. Another complication is that if you subscribe to (i), then you ceded to civil authorities the determination of when it's safe to return to church. Civil authorities determine when it's no longer too risky.

4. A further complication is that if public worship remains in abeyance beyond a certain duration, churches will be permanently closed because they weren't taking in enough revenue to pay the overhead. 

5. So (ii) is based on luck. Maybe we'll get lucky and the pandemic will shortly subside. 

6. An additional problem is the precedent which (i) & (iii) establish. I'm no expert, but from what I've read, medical authorities have been warning for years that we may be on the bring of reentering the age of pandemics due to the increasing emergence of superbugs. Even if we develop a vaccine for COVID-19, it may evolve a resistant strain that outsmarts the vaccine. And there are other pathogens hovering in the wings. Other superbugs which may spawn pandemics.  

If pandemics become intermittent, have evangelical denominations acquiesced to a policy of the chronic, indefinite suspension of public worship for the duration of the pandemic du jour? To be determined by civil authorities? Maybe we'll get lucky. If not, what kind of paint thinner will they use to extricate themselves from the corner they painted themselves into?

7. On a related note, there's a striking parallel between virtual worship and virtual sex. Evangelicals condemn pornography and sexbots as an unacceptable substitute for real sex. Sex is supposed to be an essentially social dynamic between real people, face-to-face. A personal encounter. But that's what's missing in virtual worship, too.

Yet during the pandemic, evangelical critics of pornography and sexbots are using the electronic church as a substitute for public worship. This is justified on the grounds of minimizing the risk of disease transmission.

But why is risk-free worship obligatory while risk-free sex is prohibitory? Pornography and sexbots eliminate the risk of transmitting STDs, unplanned pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and the treacherous emotional entanglements of intimacy between real men and women. 

BTW, although I'm no expert, I don't think Christian marriage precludes the possibility of STDs. That's because many Christians are converts who had a sexual history before their conversion. So they can bring STDs into a marriage from a priori history of premarital sex and promiscuity. 

If the argument is that we have a duty not to risk infecting other people, why is virtual sex impermissible while virtual worship is permissible? Isn't a steady diet of electronic worship ecclesiastical pornography? There are exceptions, like the situation of shut-ins, but I'm not referring to special cases. 

7. Evangelicals need to develop a theology of risk. Humans constantly make risk-benefit assessments. As I recently noted:

i) Due to human mortality, men and women routinely assume calculated gratuitous risks. Playing many sports carries the risk of permanent injury, sometimes physical or mental incapacitation, or even death. Because they know that death is inevitable, they gamble the future on the present. 

ii) Having kids is risky. Your kid might die of cancer. Or your teenager might become a hopeless drug addict, die from an overdose or commit suicide? Or your child might be damned. Or your wife might have a miscarriage. Why take that risk if you don't have to?

iii) Childbearing used to be very hazardous for mothers. Many died in childbirth. Should wives before the advent of modern medical science refuse sex with their husband after child #3? 

iv) As I explained in my post on Jas 5:14-15, it was hazardous to elders to anoint the sick. Are the elders in Jas 5:14-15 foolish because they didn't practice social distancing? They exposed themselves to the sick through direct physical contact. They could infect the sick (in their already weakened condition) with their own diseases. And they could infect their families when they went back home after doing visitation ministry with the sick. 

iv) This is in part about freedom. Freedom to attend church or freedom to boycott church. The problem is when we create a society that revolves around hypochondriacs. 

6 comments:

  1. "medical authorities have been warning for years that we may be on the bring of reentering the age of pandemics due to the increasing emergence of superbugs...And there are other pathogens hovering in the wings. Other superbugs which may spawn pandemics."

    Just to support this:

    1. Of course this 21st century has given us no less than three epidemic/pandemic-causing coronaviruses, viz. SARS-1, MERS, and our current SARS-2. Not to mention others like the Ebola virus.

    2. Fauci himself warned about potentially pandemic-causing pathogens approximately 3 years ago. Some liberals are taking his speech out of context to attack Trump, but Fauci's warning wasn't politically partisan. It would have applied to any administration, conservative or liberal.

    3. Likewise other medical experts like Michael Osterholm, Peter Hotez, and Ian Lipkin have warned about potential pandemics. And Osterholm is far from alone in arguing the flu (influenza) is one of the biggest threats to humanity in his book Deadliest Enemy. Osterholm argues about the need to invest in a "universal" flu vaccine.

    4. Hotez has warned about several emerging pathogens from socioeconomically disadvantaged areas of the world that could cause epidemics or pandemics and to which we have no vaccines for. Hotez's team was working on a vaccine for the SARS-1 virus, which is very similar to our SARS-2 virus, but they ran out of funding, and they couldn't get more. He has also talked about the need for a "universal" coronavirus vaccine.

    5. And these are just viruses. We haven't even mentioned other pathogens like bacteria. As well as the fact that R&D on antibiotics has been depressed over the years.

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    1. A couple more thoughts:

      1. By the way, if suspending church is about risk assessment, then we take a risk each flu season. After all, there's still a certain percentage of people who die every flu season from the flu.

      Of course, the percentage of deaths due to the seasonal flu is a lot lower than the percentage of deaths due to the coronavirus. Or so it seems so far, but we are still in the middle of the pandemic, so we can't say for sure.

      At best, that means churches are willing to tolerate a certain percentage of deaths each flu season, and the flu is a pandemic every season. So where do churches draw the line? And why?

      2. According to Mt 8:3, Jesus healed a leper in this manner: "Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!' Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy."

      Jesus could have simply spoken a word and healed the leper. Yet Jesus "reached out his hand and touched the man".

      Presumably Jesus could have gotten sick too (e.g. it looks like Isa 53:3-4 could be translated as "sickness" as in the CSB). If so, Jesus took a risk by reaching out and touching the leper.

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  2. Steve this is the best article I have read so far for suspending services. Any thoughts on where it breaks down?

    https://mereorthodoxy.com/moral-reasoning-coronavirus-pandemic/

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    1. Here is a direct response:
      https://sovereignnations.com/2020/04/01/littlejohn-stop-worrying-love-tyranny/

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    2. I read Littlejohn's article a few days ago. It's a hard article to respond to because it's so loaded with caveats that I don't know what his ultimate position amounts to. I suspect he doesn't know, either. He makes statements I disagree with, but later on he qualifies some of his statements, so he's like a ballet dancer who's either in midair or landing in different places.

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  3. An interesting and provacative analogy.

    Without exploring it I'll just add that I've often thought and wondered about this point myself over the past few weeks:

    "If pandemics become intermittent, have evangelical denominations acquiesced to a policy of the chronic, indefinite suspension of public worship for the duration of the pandemic du jour? To be determined by civil authorities? Maybe we'll get lucky. If not, what kind of paint thinner will they use to extricate themselves from the corner they painted themselves into?"

    And the risk is not only attached to pandemics. Now that the genie is out of the bottle and the gub'mint understands it can suspend swaths of the constitution at will with the quiet acquiesence of the sheeple (which they have certainly noticed mind you) then why restrict using this power? Why not deploy it "as necessary", however ephemerally "necessary" may be defined at any given point in time?

    It's a frightening concept.

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