The positive report is that local governments are trying to protect public health by limiting public gatherings.
The negative, conspiracy-minded report is that they’re using this as an opportunity to bankrupt organizations they don’t like — like churches.
Discuss.
Who might “they” be? Jim Bakker and those other con-artists on TV would certainly profit from making religion a purely electronic affair.
I explicitly mentioned local governments, but it would be easy to imagine a movement / ideology lying behind their decisions.
It wasn’t clear to me that the “they” in second paragraph was a reference to “local governments” in the first one. Be that as it may, the way I think about human motivation is that people usually (though not absolutely always) do things because they expect to profit from them in some way. In the case that you mentioned, the people who would profit the most from the closing of local churches would be your Jim Bakkers, Kenneth Copelands, Paula Whites, etc. Those are the grotesquely money-hungry people who want you to connect with their virtual churches and leach off of your finances. The local churches are no doubt an obstacle to this end.
I think you’re right that the Jim Bakker types would profit from the closure of churches. Turning religion into a “watch TV and send money” affair would help them.
I think you’re wrong to assume that people think things out that way — i.e., they consider motivations and benefits and goals and act accordingly.
Rather, I would imagine the thinking goes more like this.
1. We must close down non-essential gatherings to stop the virus.
2. Churches are non-essential.
3. These non-essential businesses and organizations (like churches) are pushing back, asking to open anyway. They say they’ll go out of business.
4. Who cares if churches go out of business? They’re antiquated annoyances. If the virus knocks them out, what’s the loss?
I didn’t say that people always consider motivations and benefits and goals and act accordingly. But when they plainly see that they have something to gain they do in fact move in that direction. I am not one to espouse folksy wisdom, but we must realize that MONEY TALKS. Of course they want other things in life, but on the whole they still want financial gain (for themselves, for their families and sometimes larger social unites, which are from their standpoint often extensions of themselves). I doubt very much that local governments would want to destroy religion because there is simply nothing in it for them. There are of course your odd ideological purists here and there, but they usually just wind up getting drunk in their mobile home and preaching to other “losers.” In the meanwhile the preachers of the prosperity gospel know damned well what motivates them and how they can get it. Anti-religious ideologies may float around, but on the whole they just don’t sell, whereas the ones that promise great financial gain with a spiritual kick on the side most certainly do. Instead of postulating dark ideological forces for a hypothesis without empirical support, I am much more prone to highlight the unfathomable vulgarity of humanity as quite extensive – not without exception of course, but prevalent enough to be a decisive social force.
“They” might be “trying,” and if so, on their heads be it. But any church worth its salt can set up an alternate system, and if they can’t generate the loyalty from their members and provide them with a reason to continue giving, that’s on them. Even our little church with non-technologically minded people in the positions that matter, figured out we can just put checks in the mail to a treasurer during the time we were completely remote (and those who are still not choosing to join us in person have continued to do so).
If there’s a church of such a nature that it can’t survive without being able to manipulate people into giving via physical presence, and/or give them a 100% effort free way of doing so, we might be better off without such institutions going in the guise of churches.
There are, however, other negative angles that might be in play. And maybe this “negative angle” is actually accurate from the point of view of “they”, it’s just that it should not be a very effective strategy in the long run. If churches *are* a threat to something, the ones that can’t get people to mail a check or log on to Paypal or can’t get their people to think there’s a reason to do either because they’re not meeting, aren’t among the ones that are much of a threat to anything.
You sound as if you’re suffering from a bit of something I will call “onward Christian soldiers” syndrome. 🙂
There’s no question but there are people out there who want to close down churches and make Christianity a thing of the past. (Local governments may or may not be influenced by such motivations.)
If we were to say that the only effective counterweight to that ideology is from churches that are aware of the fight and fighting it — i.e., by active, intentional churches that can collect money, rouse foot soldiers, create True Believers, etc. — then you would be right.
But I think we misunderestimate the power of people quietly doing their thing, and not even knowing why. I suspect that the person who goes to church from time to time, who hardly ever even lays a five in the plate, and who, if church were closed down, would just stop going and not raise a fuss, is — in some important way — an ideological threat to the anti-church movement.
Now … don’t get me wrong. I am not in any way assuming that the knuckleheads who are closing down churches are consciously aware of some Great Ideological Battle and are drawing up their battle plans in secret. I think the mystery of iniquity is much more mysterious than that.
The older I get, the more I’m convinced that people have very little conscious apprehension of their own motivations. Things aren’t nearly as intentional and thought out as we like to believe. There are strange currents that move through the culture. Most people are hardly aware of them, and almost nobody knows how to change them.
[Warning: rambling follows.]
Re: strange currents– I think ideas and practices are connected at many levels, from individuals to organizations from bowling leagues to nations. I think there are things you can do which affect the way you think, and things you can think which affect the way you act, and unexpected connections between different actions and between different thoughts.
Random example: it’s a known bug in human behaviour that introducing certain safety features (whether in cars or in spreadsheets) can increase mistakes, because people don’t respond rationally to the existence of the protection measures, but instead take it as a license to be less careful. Does that make sense? Both not at all, and also perfect sense.
And it might be that ideas are more connected than we might think, independent of whether or not you can draw logical distinctions between things. It might be that the Catholics are right that widespread support of birth control really does break the culture, that it instrumentalizes family life in ways that will inevitably cause damage, and that perfectly reasonable Protestant objections to the seemingly arbitrary Catholic distinctions don’t matter. It’s not even that their points are wrong, just that it’s not the success or failure of a logical argument which decides how societies live and change. It’s like shouting about Bernoulli’s theorem at someone to cure his vascular problems; it’s the wrong category of response.
I mean, any two things which aren’t the same thing differ in some way, and so with sufficient cleverness someone can distinguish the one you like from the one you don’t with respect to some principle which seems reasonable. If someone’s rhetorically slick enough, he can make that distinction seem plausible even if five minutes later you realize it doesn’t make much sense on the way to the fridge.
So there’s a limit to how much we should trust clever arguments, which I guess is one reason I’m a conservative, and defer to tradition, instead of joining my libertarian friends. I like them, but when a conservative argument leads to a manifestly silly conclusion I assume something’s gone wrong, and that I’ve tried to extend a principle beyond its natural limits. When a libertarian argument leads to a silly conclusion, they tend to embrace said conclusion as a badge of honour, a swashbuckling demonstration of their intellectual consistency. It makes me smile, like a kid wearing a pirate costume, but it’s hard to take seriously.
To loop back: when you want other people to do something because you think it’s a good idea, and you won’t be affected that much, and it happens to hurt people you don’t like anyway– what’s not to like?
A lot of the people who recommend lockdown get affected by it themselves, but think that it is the only way to deal with spread of the disease.
Yes, the idea that we can treat procreation — something fundamental to our nature — as a button that we just switch on and off at a whim, and suffer no unforeseen consequences, betrays something along the lines of a very technocratic understanding of the world.
There are a lot of issues — contraception being one — where I am unconvinced by the arguments, but have great sympathy for the conclusion, and many of the sociological claims.
The existence of the devil might be another one. When you try to get specific about it, and define what exactly you mean, it gets …. silly is not the right word, but it’s something like that. However, the idea that some super intelligence is cleverly manipulating all these weird currents of human behavior in a destructive direction sometimes seems pretty realistic. As does the idea that we’re sometimes saved by forces we don’t understand. Maybe that’s part of why I like That Hideous Strength.
It would be interesting to hear how Jordan Peterson, or someone from that general perspective, would explain the devil.
Reptilians.
Not so much that. I’m not one of those types who is saying “and so good riddance to them.”
I’m thinking more along the lines of, churches like that weren’t going to be around in another decade or so anyway. An institution that depends on the giving of its members but can’t get them to give without constant *in-person* appeals (that pretty much no other donation-dependent institutions require) or without the effort of mailing a check or signing on to an electronic payment platform, just doesn’t pose a threat to anyone or anything. I don’t think they’re a counter-weight to much even in the “people quietly going about their normal business” sense because they’re teetering on the edge of people not doing that anymore anyway, external restrictions or no.
Let me be clearer, because I just figured out the disconnect here: I have little objection to the possibility that the powers that be would be quiet happy enough to weaken churches and make them go away, and that some of their worst actors might actually be actively seeking that. I really do think that is part of some of what is going. What I don’t think is that the primary stress point is financial. Long term restrictions will weaken churches, but I don’t think financially is really the weak point. In my experience with my own church, financial concerns related to the lockdowns are absolutely the least of the problems. It’s the lack of personal interaction, plus some spiritual realities that come into play.
Okay, then I have two additional thoughts.
In terms of churches “going away,” there’s a huge difference between, say, the independent Evangelical church, or the barely above water and rapidly hemorrhaging members tiny denomination, and something like the Catholic church. The pandemic might close the former two, but it would have to go on for a very long time to close the Catholic church.
In that respect, you could see this as a ploy by evil Catholics to get rid of those pesky Protestants. And I’m sure some Truly Reformed somewhere has proposed that! 🙂
Your latter point reminds me of the importance of habit, and different types of habits.
If going to church is a recently acquired and somewhat unstable habit, then the pandemic might end it.
If going to church is a deep part of the culture, then a decade of pandemic might not end it.
Let us not forget that the RC Church is the Great Whore of Bablyon. At least that is what Jack Chick used to say, and that idea has certainly not died among your lower-order Protestants.