If you don't think it's a good idea for others to go to church in a pandemic, then don't go to a demonstration yourself
Yes, religious folks- Christians in particular- do sometimes get the short end of the stick. Our increasingly secular society is one in which fewer and fewer people take their spiritual lives seriously, especially in any traditional (or particularly formal) way. And believers are quite properly irked at being treated like second-class citizens. Sometimes our irritation is justified. Sometimes it's not.
I've chided conservatives for complaining about being discriminated against by blue state governors who are quicker to allow Walmarts and other non-essential places where people gather to open up for business than they are churches, mosques, and synagogues. There are reasonable justifications for doing that. For one thing, houses of worship can stream their services or record them and put them on YouTube, and many- mine included- have done just that. Several congregations I know post their pastors' sermons to Facebook every week, sometimes live and sometimes later in the day, on video.
It's possible to shop online, of course, but when your lightbulb unexpectedly burns out, waiting for Amazon isn't necessarily a practical way to go. Everybody understands that people have to eat, and trips to the grocery store are necessary even in a pandemic.
Guess what? A whole lot of Walmarts sell groceries! Lots of drug and medicine departments in Walmarts, too. Not too many people object to drug stores being open, especially ones with pharmacies. There are a whole lot of other stuff which, if not absolutely necessary in the way that food and medicine are, can be bad to run out of or to discover a need for with no practical way of addressing it. It 's nice to have a mop and pail. You can never tell when you might need- dare I say it?- toilet paper or paper towels. Granted, there are a lot of things on sale at Walmart that aren't exactly critical. But neither is having them available as large a public health problem as people gathering together in a relatively small place to sing hymns and cough during the sermon and breathe on each other. Alcohol and gold are a rough combination for germs to cope with, but Holy Communion can also be problematic in times of pandemic. There are perfectly reasonable justifications for discouraging church services while keeping Walmart open.
I have to question, though, whether the strange pattern we've been seeing on Twitter and elsewhere of justifying attending a demonstration while frowning on churchgoing is the same thing. But believe it or not, folks are actually arguing that the problem of systemic racism is a problem serious enough to risk giving somebody else COVID over. Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not minimizing the problem of systemic racism or the outrage every reasonable person should feel about the death of George Floyd. But is coming down with a potentially fatal illness, or transmitting the virus to someone else, going to end systemic racism? I rather doubt it. And I'm pretty sure that other people dying because, like George Floyd, they can't breathe is going to redeem his death somehow or make it less of an outrage. It will just make somebody else potentially also dead. And that is not a net gain.
Systemic racism needs to be protested. But the argument that public worship is a no-no while demonstrations in support of a cause of which one approves are fine despite an equal or greater chance of spreading SARS-Cov-2 is a dog that, as the saying goes, just ain't gonna hunt. It's simply not possible to tell people that they need to be watching their pastor deliver his sermon on YouTube while taking exactly the same sort of risk- or even greater ones- in support of some other cause which is prioritized by a different group of people (and even by some of the same people) without some reasonable questions being raised about one's sincerity.
Call in during a talk show. Write a letter to the editor or to your mayor or police chief or member of Congress. If you want to display a sign, put one in your window. But don't be a hypocrite. Irresponsible behavior doesn't become responsible because it's undertaken for a reason of which you approve. You're only making things harder for those of us who are trying to uphold the wisdom of taking reasonable precautions in a public health emergency.
ADDENDUM: The same observation is being made across the pond, in the pages of The Guardian. "Gaslighting" seems exactly the term for a suddenly-changing narrative in which responsible public health measures are of paramount importance in a pandemic- except when it's suddenly politically convenient for them suddenly not to be.
And public health will be the primary loser. Though the credibility of those responsible for the shifting narrative won't come out of this looking good, either.
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