Religious Nationalism and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Soul-Sucking Evangelicals and Branch Covidians Make America Sick Aga
- PDF / 425,502 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 57 Downloads / 151 Views
Religious Nationalism and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Soul-Sucking Evangelicals and Branch Covidians Make America Sick Again Peter McLaren 1,2 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract This article investigates the response to the coronavirus crisis by Evangelical Christian nationalists in the USA. The article outlines the curious mediaverse of religious nationalism—its post-truth and fake news aspects in particular—links religious nationalism to American exceptionalism, and analyzes conflicts between secular and religious authorities. Drawing upon some lessons from the past, the article addresses the wider implications of Christian nationalism on American politics, and capitalist ideology, as it has been played out virally in the corporate media. The article shows that the ideological underpinnings of evangelical Christianity prevent its proponents from understanding the virus in an historical and materialist manner and points toward more epistemically sound approaches to relationships between science and religion. It concludes that privatization, austerity capitalism, and ‘gig economy’ need to be replaced by socialist alternatives and seeks inspiration in theory and practice of Marxism and South American liberation theology. Keywords Viral media . Religious nationalism . Christian fundamentalism . Evangelical
Christianity . Alt-right . Liberation theology . Marxism . Postdigital
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere * Peter McLaren [email protected]
1
Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA
2
Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China
Postdigital Science and Education
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. William Butler Yeats (1921)
Apoplectic Apocalypticism: Religious Nationalism as Virus Recently, journalist Amanda Marcotte (2020) shared a disturbing story: ‘a train engineer named Eduardo Moreno, apparently with great deliberation, derailed the freight train he was manning in Southern California, nearly killing occupants of three nearby cars. His target? The USNS Mercy, a Navy medical ship that’s been assisting nearby hospitals with COVID-19 patients.’ The rationale given by the train engineer is enough to cause even the most reserved introvert to spit fire. Marcotte elaborates: ‘Apparently, Moreno believes in a conspiracy theory that the coronavirus crisis is a hoax being deployed to cover for a shadowy takeover of the government.’ Will Sommer (2020) reported on an Illinois woman inspired by pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory videos who traveled to New York City armed with more than a dozen knives and who intended to kill former Vice President Joe Biden. She tried to get near to the US Navy Hospital Ship Comfort, the hospital ship that was sent to New York City to help with the coronavirus pandemic, but mistook the Comfort for the USS Intrepid, a
Data Loading...
