This is a job for the Church

This article by Nicole Penn in today's Bulwark is solid gold. This is stuff the religious right and the secularist left both get wrong. And the article raises some important questions about the failure of the Church to confess its faith in the face of a burgeoning and destructive heresy.

Three takeaways:  first, the Republic's founding philosophy in religious matters is not secularism but pluralism.  These are not the same. The Founders' vision was of a nation in which a variety of religions and belief-systems (including secularism) flourished side-by-side, not one in which any were suppressed, discouraged, or banned from the public square.  

"Separation of church and state" is no separation of religion and state, but rather a situation in which no belief-system is favored over another or is allowed as such to become a basis for public policy. It's worth noting that the abolitionist movement, the movement against child labor, the civil rights movement, and most of the significant social reform movements in our history have originated in religious conviction, though not in sectarian religious belief.

A corollary: the problem with "evangelical" Trumpism is not that it is religious,  but that it ignores that distinction and is based on badly-reasoned and historically aberrant theology.  "Christian Nationalism" is, first and foremost, a heresy, and orthodox Christians not only must address it firmly and decisively but have no more choice about it than they had in dealing with Arianism or Pelagianism. The integrity of the Faith is at stake.

I'll be blunt about this: even the refusal to wear masks or practice proper social distancing is neither merely a political issue nor only a social one. It is a spiritual problem, and the Church has no choice but to treat it as such. While it is true that the evidence regarding the protection masks give their wearers from COVID is mixed, there is absolutely no doubt about their effectiveness in preventing the wearer from infecting others- and a majority of cases are non-symptomatic.

Leave aside the political point that there is no "right" to spread a potentially deadly virus. The most charitable thing that can be said about a selfish insistence on going maskless in public or refusing to cooperate with reasonable public health practices during a pandemic is that it is immoral and irresponsible. Not only are churches that flaunt public health measures and discourage masks in error, but no biblically faithful church has any choice but to confront this behavior as sinful and un-Christian.

If one is inclined to be franker and less charitable, one might call it depraved and perverse.

Secondly, Trump's support among professing Christians has always been most robust among those who don't go to church, read the Bible at home and are the least informed theologically.  These folks are low-hanging fruit for crazy conspiracy theorists and quasi-religious politico-religious fanatics.

And third, religiously-driven conspiracy theories thrive most strongly in the absence of guidance and foul-lines drew by organized churches and historic theological traditions. 

Trump-worship, theonomy (the idea that the Bible should be the source of civil law and that the state should be the servant of the Church), "Christian Nationalism," and the other manifestations of the false teaching endemic on the religious right can be fought most effectively from within the Church- and must be. Attempts to fight them in the political realm will only result in the distortion of the Founders' vision and the espousal of secularism as a de facto established belief system- as exactly what the Founders sought to prevent.