Scapegoating Brooks Pentecostal

Since the COVID outbreak began, 146 people in Maine have had their deaths attributed to the virus. As of today, October 28, the last chart put out by the Maine CDC records 12 present hospitalizations, throughout the state, five of which are in critical care, and zero of which are ventilated. If we look at the death-rate, in comparison with influenza, COVID is 2-3 times as deadly as the flu. Cases cannot be used in this comparison because the flu has manifold iterations and a vast, vast majority of flu cases are not reported. Still, a death rate of 2-3 times that of influenza is significant. Every life matters. The way the story is being told, however, is that a plague is raging through the state and no one is safe. Stacks of bodies are lining the streets and nothing we can do we slow down the slaughter. In order for the story to have a scarier soundtrack, the directors have to use case numbers, since the death toll has not been as loud and foreboding as once promised. Every good story needs a Judas character, a traitor, someone who is sleeping with the enemy. And this is where churches come in. Since it is a political impossibility to locate the #BLM hordes, the looting events, ACB protests, or the women’s marches and rallies as super-spreaders, that lot falls to the churches. 

Brooks Pentecostal, a small church in rural Maine, is the most recent example in of what is happening between churches and the politicization of COVID at a national level. Apparently, the church had a fellowship event in which between 100-150 people from around the state were in attendance. Since the outbreak, roughly 27 people not connected to the church have tested positive for the virus while the remaining positive counts have some form of direct relationship to the church and/or connected school.

When a society, and here I am primarily criticizing the society of Christians, when a society loses its origin story of where law comes from, the resulting willingness to accept law as a product of the consensus is inevitable. Churches in Maine and around the nation must remember one single fact, our law ought to be either directly cut and pasted from the Scriptures or derived from them by way of general equity. Here is the heart of this entire narrative. The Bible is clear. When a disease is destructive to the group, the contaminated are quarantined, not the healthy. Leviticus 13-15 sets the precedent that should be the framework for quarantine because this is God’s Word in relation to quarantine. Principally, if the disease only affects a small percentage and it is easier to isolate the margin of the most-vulnerable, then that is what is to be done. Dog wags tail. Christians who either think this is void because it is the Old Testament or because modern science knows better need to be told that their higher criticism is showing. 

COVID is not deadly to most people, any more than the flu. The principle in relation to both would be that if someone is sick, they stay home. The less deadly the contagion, the less inclined the person should be to stay away from the assembly. After all, yawning is contagious. If every person with a sniffle stayed home from church during cold and flu season, two dangers greater than a cold have the potential to infiltrate the church: a growing autism amongst the congregants that trends towards erring in the direction of amputating members from the body for any number of “justified” reasons. One's own membership in the local congregation of Christ's Body becomes substituted with a self-centeredness, self-sufficiency, and ultimately, a self-expression that does not require “the other.” Secondly, there is a tendency in these cultures to work on a hermeneutic of suspicion. There is no way to prove that if a person goes home from church and two days later starts sneezing, that they got sick from the little kid who sneezed during prayer meeting; however, the little kid who sneezed is unfortunately designated the scapegoat, despite the fact that the virus may have come from the can of tomatoes picked up during one’s trip to the grocery store. We are not even discussing herd immunity which adds another crucial component to the story. And this leads us back to the issue of scapegoating and Brooks Pentecostal. Listen to the words of Rene Girard, from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning:

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner themselves. In the symbolic language of the New Testament, we would say that in our world Satan, trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims.

I am not a Pentecostal. I disagree with much of the theology; however, if another person bears Christian baptism and professes the Gospel, I’m obliged to own them as kin in a very real way. I don’t know the folks at Brooks Pentecostal; but I know their reputation. I have met people who either were taken in and loved during times of crisis or who related to me the accounts of folks who were. A number of people from a spectrum of worldview positions have attested to the fact that this church has been a good neighbor to the citizens in Waldo County. They have shown the love of God with hands and feet. But these days, all around me, is this chatter about how stupid and foolish and how redneck and hateful these folks are. I’ve heard Christians accuse Brooks Pentecostal of everything from not ‘being Christian’ to ‘hating their neighbors.’ The rhetoric is spewed as though they had messed about with gasoline and matches and were then surprised that the police station burned to the ground. No, that would the radical left playgroups being formed in Seattle and elsewhere around the country. And why aren't these groups dubbed with the appellation super-spreaders? Because this cast of characters represent the place-holders of victims and, according to Girard, they hold a sacred position and so deference is made to them rather than criticism. The need for a scapegoat must be dealt with and if people reject the atonement of Christ, then their own sin is not dealt with and a scapegoat is a monumental necessity. 

When it comes to the question of why churches seem to be targeted, the character of the priest in Walker Percy's novel The Thanatos Syndrome offers a helpful framing of the plot. The fuel for the true battle is anti-semitism. By that, he does not mean that Jews are demonized and attacked but that the principle of anti-semitism is that if God has a people, then the war of the seed of the serpent will be against God’s covenant people. In Percy’s novel, the targeted attack was on the children, both born and yet-to-be-born, because God has warned in His Word that they are to be reverenced as marked out by God for special care. Their angels always face Him. The derailing of their faith should be avoided even by suicide if need be. These are serious warnings. Whenever God has a people marked out for reverence (Israel, the Church, the young, the aged, magistrates, clergy), they become public enemy number one in reverse dimensions. Eusebius tells us that when Peter was crucified upside down, he remarked that it all made sense. The world was upside down, not him.

Christians should understand the plot better than most. Brooks Pentecostal offered masks and made room for social distancing. They didn’t go into nursing homes and throw contaminants on the vulnerable and innocent. For examples of what this would look like, research the treatment of conservatives present at any of the victim-marches who fail to submit to the catechism of the  new mythology.

In the same book Girard said, “The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.” Christians who have isolated the pandemic to being about ‘following the science or not’ fail to see the thematic correlations that exist between almost every other consequent outbreak. The election, the courts, the sexual revolution, racism, etc . . . who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist? Is there a single genre in the above list that does not have a plot-line of the tail wagging the dog? In the election, if the majority decide “wrongly”, come November 3, then it will not be accepted by the minority. In the courts, in light of the majority getting its way regarding ACB, the minority has promised payback. The sexual revolution has proven over and over that a small percentage will only be satisfied when the majority own the identity of the margins and praise the margins for their “rightness”. On and on. Tail wag dog. 

Follow the plot. Watch and see if the next epicenter of hostility in Maine won't be the Treworgy Farm in Levant. Not because they are reckless in light of the pandemic. They aren’t. They haven’t even endorsed Trump; but they were honored by the fact that they were visited by the President of the United States and they have a stalwart and principled reputation of being a Christian business that has a long-standing legacy of honoring tradition and family values . . . all things presently being attacked as part of the axis of evil. Why would Maine’s main-stream journalists be concerned about the Treworgy visit? It can’t possibly be the number of people in close proximity to one another. If that was the case, they would be as nervous about the nearly 500 anti-ACB rallies that took place around the country, including in Maine, during which the Santa’s handmaids had no reservations about breaking CDC guidelines. And as seen in the duplicity both mainstream media outlets and supposed health experts exhibited this summer when protests were defended as being a greater societal essential than protection from COVID, the meta-narrative becomes more important than consistency in the micro-narratives. The plot is allowed to shape-shift and professional opinions are allowed to play musical chairs, but don’t expect a different scapegoat to emerge. When the Shepherd is hated, so will be the sheep. 

Christians have to be careful to recognize the real emergency in all of this. We are not in danger of wiping out the human race. The greatest danger the Church is facing in this paradigmatic transition is the threat of discord and fracturing and of resorting to self-injuring of the Body of Christ. We are not to be victims of an ecclesiastical form of body dysmorphia disorder. We must neither tolerate nor join in the scourging of Brooks Pentecostal, Treworgy Farm, or anyone else who shelters under Christ’s banner simply because the wolves panic in their scapegoat deficiency. This is not the Spanish Flu, the Bubonic Plague, or even SARS. Christians need to stop fearing the shaming of the crowd. Christ was stripped and paraded in front of the crowd on our behalf, partly in order that societal shame might not be a tactic that works on us. We are not dealing with science. We are dealing with governance detached from Biblical Law. Free the churches.