This would be sad if it weren’t so infuriating:
When famed televangelist Marcus Lamb died this week at 64 after contracting covid-19, a who’s who of conservative Christian leaders sent out regrets. Evangelist Franklin Graham said Lamb is now “experiencing heaven.” National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference head Samuel Rodriguez called him a “faithful follower of Jesus … with a heart for the lost and broken.”
Absent was a painful truth: Lamb had led his global Christian network, Daystar, for months in spreading inaccurate information about coronavirus vaccines and instead promoting treatments that are not proven remedies. The vaccines, a May segment on Daystar said, falsely, are “killing your immune system.”
But the silence and unanswered questions by some Christian leaders, as well as Lamb’s family and network, sit atop what some experts say is a deep base of politics, conspiratorial thinking and a skepticism of anything that appears secular.
And that makes frank discussion of Daystar’s activism against vaccines, even in the face of death, unlikely.
Robert Morris, the Dallas-area pastor whose Gateway Church will host Lamb’s funeral Monday, declined to comment on the topic. He “has not and will not engage in the medical debate or dialogue regarding vaccines,” Morris spokesman Lawrence Swicegood told The Washington Post in an email. “Those are personal choices, and one should consult medical advice from their doctor to make their own choice. As a church pastor his sermons at Gateway Church address spiritual issues and biblical content.”
Daystar for months has hosted conspiracy theorists pressing unproven treatments for the virus, including some who framed vaccines and mandates as ungodly and satanic. Lamb and others featured on Daystar described the virus, vaccines and vaccine mandates as evidence of the devil trying to attack followers of a true God.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy,” Lamb’s son, Jonathan, said on the network last month about his father’s covid-19 bout, Relevant magazine reported this week. “The enemy,” he said, is angered by the promotion of vaccine alternatives. “And he’s doing everything he can to take down my dad.”
Pollsters say the religious group most reluctant to get vaccinated are White evangelicals. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 25 percent of that group said in November that they “definitely won’t” get vaccinated, a number that’s stayed steady since March. However, the percentage who said they have received at least one shot has gone in that period from 35 percent to 63 percent, Kaiser found. About 14.5 percent of Americans are White evangelicals, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
Curtis Chang, a divinity school professor who last year launched the Christians and the Vaccine project, said the repulsion among evangelicals to vaccines is multilayered — and in some ways new.
He goes on to say that evangelicals are naturally rebellious against all institutions. That may be true but you have to wonder about their loyalty to the institution of the Republican party. Still, their love of Trump is way beyond even that which indicates that they see him as some kind of Second Coming. In other words, conservative evangelical Christianity has become a cult. With a lying, libertine, con artist as its leader.