Are Christians Failing the Coronavirus Test?
If the coronavirus is a test of our collective character, some American Christians are flat-out flunking.
Consider the popular pastor John Piper, who was asked what he would say to pastors who claim that the pandemic is God’s judgment on sinful cities and arrogant nations. “God sometimes uses disease to bring particular judgments upon those who reject him and give themselves over to sin,” Piper responded. Or perhaps look to R. R. Reno, the editor of the conservative Christian journal First Things, who argued that it’s not worth a “mass shutdown of society” just to fight the virus. “There is a demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost,” Reno wrote, decrying the “ill-conceived crusade against human finitude and the dolorous reality of death.”
COVID-19 has claimed nearly 50,000 lives in America thus far. Most of those casualties died alone, without so much as the dignity of a familiar face as they drifted into eternal rest. Most of those who have died are grandparents and the immunocompromised—the weakest among us. We are a grief-stricken and disillusioned people. Like many others, I’m struggling to make sense of how those who follow the teachings of Jesus, known for healing the sick, could shrug their shoulders at mass death and heap pain on the grieving.