State and local lockdowns did not work. Church lockdowns did not work. This entire concoction served as a testament to the spirit of the age. Many needed care, many died, many needed to stay home, but millions and millions did not and should not have erased their humanity for an entire year. I have been alerting to this for some time, but Peter Leithart summarized it rather cogently:
“We’ve sacrificed all the social and cultural activities that lend beauty and richness to life, things that make life more than bare biological survival. We sacrificed life to preserve life. In the name of love, we canceled love.”
In entirely new ways, we have learned to be creative about not doing those things we are called to do as humans. We have altered the divine engineering of humanity to fit our own fears and the end result has been the eradication of social rituals for the sake of non-productive ones.
This struck me recently when someone mentioned how proud they were of our church for gathering to celebrate an event with singing. It took me a second to realize just what precisely the individual meant. We have been doing the same sorts of things with incessant praise and fortitude for a really long time. We have been living life for the entire year, while many have been surviving life. That’s no way to live. I am proud of our community and so many others who chose to do the same, whether in Florida or Alberta, Canada.
The tragedy is exemplified further when you consider these past twelve months that the world has consolidated all of its sicknesses and diseases into one. COVID has served as the substitutionary atonement for every other ailment in civilization. While prior, we had a diversity of sicknesses to choose from and to mourn, and to add to the arsenal of post-fall catastrophes, now the entire world focused on one single virus. Our attention was laser-focused, and the experts told us to hold on to whatever we thought was wrong with our bodies to concentrate exclusively on one thing. We traded the normalcy of pain and suffering in diverse ways for the overwhelming mechanism and movements of a virus. It’s almost as if we forgot the suffering of cancer patients or the winter flu. We adjusted our expectations and in the process, we gave COVID a preeminent place in our sickness calendar and the hierarchy of life. What should we expect from a society that had twelve months to pour all their fears into one solitary thing? We can expect widespread panic and fear of living. Our present obesity, cancer treatments, and more served the higher goal of avoiding one viral invasion.
The process was enlightening in a hundred ways. It opened my eyes as a cultural observer to the things that matter in society; to the fascinations of human beings; to what people really treasure at the end of the day; to the lengths of incalculable hours someone will go to avoid living. But that is not the end of the story. In this process, a lot of people woke up to the reality that reality itself is worth living in the direst of circumstance. Many, however, treated this entire season as a way of revealing their self-righteousness. Double-masked: check. Shaming others for not masking: check. Wearing a mask alone in my car: check. Avoiding family: check.
We need to admit that this entire charade of propaganda that drew even the most conservative in our midst to their cause won the cultural battle in 2020. They succeeded in revealing that our deepest fears are ready to emerge at the first sight of a confrontation to our convictions. We have been tested instead of the spirits and we have failed as a Christian society. We have willingly given over our spheres to the nice man. He took it and is eagerly making plans to give it back to you one piece at a time for the next 100-years. Of course, by then, we will all be dead. What have we done?
And this leads me to my final observations: the survival rate now is determined by those who say, “Hell No!” out loud. If you have seen the light, your time to test your renewed commitment will come. James Coates and others understood the cause. Will we understand what is actually at stake? We may be seeing a new Christendom emerge from the ashes of COVIDom. My hope is that this Christendom is valiant and refuses to give an ounce to the nice man.
