Back on January 20, 2003, the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a man now serving as an elder of our congregation was clerking for a judge on the Indiana Court of Appeals. Working in the Statehouse, he noted and grieved the anniversary being celebrated in the Capitol Rotunda by women cheerleading the slaughter of babies. He cried down shame on the women—the grace of shame.
The next year on Roe v. Wade’s anniversary, he reserved the Capitol Rotunda and organized a protest against Roe v. Wade’s slaughter. He and his family had attended a PCA church earlier, so he contacted all the PCA pastors in the Indy area asking them to announce the protest to their people. One pastor got angry with him. A few others showed up, but the protest wasn’t much. Only a few came.
Contrast that with Covid and this one’s got legs!
So some church leaders have spent the past year and a half protesting masks. They say they’d rather die than wear one at worship. Masks are “sacraments.” Masks are “idolatry.” Masks are their “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”
These men are everywhere dividing church after church. Not reforming the church. Deforming the church.
But this Covid division has trivialized the evils that are destroying the rule of law in the Western world. How do we explain to our civil authorities, let alone our Democrat neighbors, that opposing masks is our way of opposing the slaughter of babies downtown across from Kroger and here in our neighborhood supermarket?
If, as these men say, masks are the straw that broke the camel’s back, then sometime over the past eighteen months, we might have seen the protests over masks add protests against the starving to death of our feeble and elderly, the killing of newborns who are handicapped, the ripping apart of our babies in their mother’s womb, and the sloughing off in miscarriage of wee embryos by means of over-the-counter drugs sold in our supermarkets.
But no, the mask fury has not dignified itself by growing serious. It started with Covid and stays there still. The anger is over masks. The blog posts and podcast are mask-resistance. The schisms are Covid schisms.
The men across the country dividing churches today are not doing so over the women in the church who are using abortifacient drugs to murder their unborn children.
Most Christians still disapprove of surgical abortions and mid-term chemical abortions. Texas disapproves of them, too.
Yet the countless abortions of birth control are alive and well within the church of North America today. No preaching against them to speak of. No education against them. No fury against these countless murders being committed by the people of God.
Masks get all the press and all the fury. Add vaccines and
There’s gold in them thar hills.
Churchmen calling for revolution over masks are not leading the masses, but following them. Channelling the masses’ fury has long been one of the better growth strategies and political leaders know mob psychology. There are few veins as productive as the interface of religion and politics.
What will be the cost to these men of hopping onto the mob’s Covid/Trump fury?
At the time of the French Revolution, warning of the danger of riding the fury of mobs and trying to keep up their fury, Edmund Burke wrote:
But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides of the people.
In Scripture, the ones who tried to channell the masses were Miriam and Aaron. Korah. Absalom. The metalworkers of Ephesus.
Meanwhile, the Christians were busy going out on the slopes and picking up the babies exposed there by their pagan parents. Christians picked them up, washed them, took them into their homes, and raised them as their own.
Have nothing to do with all these men splitting the body of Christ over masks. Sure, have your own opinions about Covid, masks, quarantines, and vaccines. But have nothing to do with those dividing Christ over masks.
