Color me shocked. The NYT has come out with a hit piece on those "evil" white evangelicals, blaming them for whatever liberties may be destroyed next if they don't take the 'Rona vaccine.
What's even better is that they changed the headline to make it seem like they're not actually taking shots at said white Christians (while still taking shots at white Christians).
Before:
After:
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With that utter stupidity aside, here's what the article said:
"Across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity. The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories."
Glad to see the Times is starting off on its usual left-of-Marx footing.
"The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country's ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans."
What a sentence. It's almost beautiful in the way it weaves 1) latent distain for the successful integration of the Gospel in American life and 2) numbers meant to scare the reader into submission (without the wider context of who died, what age they were, what comorbidities they had, dying with vs. of COVID, and the lack of change between 2020's death totals and preceding years).
But the next sentence is even better:
"And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally."
Basically, the NTY thinks it's funny how the good news of Jesus keeps "spreading" to every tribe, nation, and tongue!
Doesn't that read like something the USSR would have published though?
"There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center."
This is the Times' attempted kill shot. They want you to think about those 20 million or so evangelicals that won't get the vaccine, without clicking on the Pew Research link and looking at the other stats.
If you do, you'll see that 33% of black Protestants aren't going to get the vaccine (notice they don't mention black evangelicals as a separate category even though there's plenty out there). In addition, 39% of the "religious nones" say they won't get a vaccine.
Like many other surveys, the poll also doesn't differentiate between the snake-handling word-of-faith church down the road and a church based on sound doctrine and exegesis.
Also note that the poll doesn't include Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu adherents, despite ongoing issues with the vaccines in those communities. Muslims, for example, are leery of the Rona vaccines since many others use pork gelatin as a stabilizer (even though the approved ones for the Rona reportedly don't).
But those numbers aren't important. Tearing down the Judeo-Christian Western Patriarchy is.
"White evangelicals present unique challenges because of their complex web of moral, medical, and political objections. The challenge is further complicated by longstanding distrust between evangelicals and the scientific community."
Ah, we're all anti-science now. Again to my note about the snake handlers.
Contrary to the narrative the the Times is selling, Christians throughout history have been dedicated to the pursuit of scientific truth. In fact, one might argue given the total abandonment of objective truth by today's Wokism that Christians have actually been the guardians of a rational, objective worldview throughout the centuries. But if you're wary of an untested mRNA vaccine meant to protect against a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, you're a "science denier" (unless you're Mark Zuckerberg, then you can have all the doubts you want!).
"No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white churches."
Note again the use of the word "spread." I hate invoking the Third Reich, but my goodness if the use of that word doesn't remind me of the Hitler speeches I watched in the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. I can't wait for a few years from now when the Times is referring to white Christians as "vermin!"
NYT then meanders through a long discussion on more of the same, putting TV "prophets" in the same basket as run-of-the-mill Christian commentators. It even mentions the "Mark of the Beast" as an "apocalyptic theory" in passing.
But then the Times gets to the main point again: the spread of ideas it sees as toxic to the rest of the world.
"[Curtis Chang of Duke Divinity] said he recently spoke with a colleague in Uganda whose hospital had received 5,000 vaccine doses, but had only been able to administer about 400, because of the hesitancy of the heavily evangelical population.
'How American evangelicals think, write, feel about issues quickly replicates throughout the entire world,' he said."
Do you see it? The logical framework writes itself:
- Premise A: The vaccine is society's only hope of freedom.
- Premise B: White Christians are refusing the vaccine and their ideas are spreading everywhere.
- Conclusion: White Christians must be stopped in order to save society.
The Times then connects this to conservative media, which the Left so badly wants to destroy:
"Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals, rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors' influence on their churches is decreasing. 'They get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20,' [Pastor Joel Rainey] said."
See how that shift happened? There's no counterargument here: just the same narrative of "radicalization" the Left has been pushing for months.
Since you're reading such an "extremist" platform at the moment, let me ask: does your politics inform your faith, or does your faith inform your politics?
It seems to me that the increasing number of Christians holding onto biblical truths about inherent rights, marriage, family, sexuality, governance, and behavior are doing so because of their faith, and they are actually holding their politicians accountable to those standards for the first time in my life.
Here's a novel thought: perhaps if the entirety of the Left – which controls Washington, Wall Street, Hollywood, and education – hadn't politicized the pandemic while ramping up Wokism in every corner of the nation, Christians might trust those in power a little bit more.
I'll leave you with this statement from a leader at Wheaton College that shows how Christian education has become infused with the toxic rot of our sociopolitical wokeness:
"If we can't get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to." – Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton
Can you imagine this balloonheaded statement by Aten talking about how Muslims, Hindus, or Native American animists need to get on board?
What about the NYT? Can you imagine them running with any other demographic for such a story? Can you imagine them sending such a story about Muslim hesitancy as a push notification to those with their app (yep, they did that for this one).
