“An enemy hath done this”

From Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis:

“The rightful king has landed . . . in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.”

Early in the pandemic I wrote to an Anglican priest in London to say that I thought the massive overreaction by government and the resulting worldwide level of public fear relating to the virus was demonic. He wrote back to say that yes, he too thought “the virus” was demonic—and that it was our duty to stay away from church to show “support” for the government until the demon virus was defeated. He mistook my point.

The virus is not the tool of the enemy. Viruses come and go, and by all accounts Covid-19 is historically unimpressive, ranking near the bottom in lethality among all pandemics since the year 150. Fear is the enemy’s weapon, and irrational fear his trademark.

Below the C. S. Lewis quote is a graph published by www.gov.uk of the daily hospitalisation count from Covid-19 since the start of lockdown to yesterday, September 9. In observing this graph you might notice the conspicuous absence of a “second wave.” For several weeks running this summer, more people have died in the UK of influenza than of Covid-19. Yet from the constant fear-mongering by the government, which is dutifully repeated by the teachers union, the media and the clergy, you would think Covid-19 was the Black Death reborn.

How truly low the death count from Covid-19 is will never be known, because UK politicians eager to justify their panicked response and appease an increasingly fearful public weakened the standards for reporting medical causes of death that apply to other diseases, resulting in a system in which, literally, someone with a history of a cough or fever who was later hit by a bus was recorded as a “Covid death.” At the same time, Ofcom released “guidance” to UK broadcasters against reporting information that deviated from official government advice regarding the virus on grounds that to allow such information to reach the public would be “dangerous.”

But wait—aren’t “dangerous” ideas the whole point of free speech? Isn’t the point to allow supposedly “dangerous” ideas (just as freedom and democracy itself were once regarded) to be debated in the marketplace of ideas so that the best ideas become the best social policies? Stalin and Mao certainly didn’t think so, and neither apparently does Boris Johnson’s government.

With bishops and many clergy cheering from the sidelines, others unthinkingly falling into line, and others too frightened to speak, the government closed the churches in March without a fig leaf of resistance from the officer corps in Christ’s regular army. Just let those words flow over you again, slowly: the government closed the churches. Not the grocery stores, not the liquor stores, not the garden centres, but the churches. Could you have imagined it? For fear of a disease that 99.6 percent of the world’s population experiences as a brief and mild respiratory illness, they closed the church that Christ endured torture, suffering and death to purchase for us and that his early followers defended with their lives. And the bishops scolded us for objecting while they handed over the keys.

The shepherds frightened the sheep, and the sheep remain frightened. Church attendance that was already dropping like a rock has been decimated since the easing of restrictions. Is it any wonder? And won’t Satan be so pleased? Churches now look like the scene of some terrible disaster, strewn from one end to another with police tape and manned by citizen-gendarmes threatening to chuck us out if our mask slips or we dare to sing to or touch each other. The altars of our eternal salvation have become temples to our mortal terror. Christ warned us not to fear the enemy who could destroy our bodies but instead to fear the enemy who could destroy both body and soul in hell, but now it’s rubbish to all that. The new mantra is that we live or die by coronavirus alone.

This is fascism. This is groupthink. This is public hysteria. This is Evil with a capital “E.” And it has done incalculable damage to the Church. But the one thing it is not, is new or unexpected.

Growing up in the America of the 1960s and 70s, when most of us went to churches led by people who could still tell good from evil and weren’t afraid to say so out loud, it seemed to me that the church would be ever thus. I struggled to comprehend how the end times that Christ described in the 24th chapter of Matthew could ever come to pass, when “shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” Surely we would be too smart for that. Surely our faith would be too strong. Surely the zeal of our bishops and priests would never waver. Surely they would see the enemy coming.

I was wrong. Christ was right. No news there.

Today most of the bishops and clergy of the Church of England and many in the Catholic Church stand at the barricades, but they are the wrong barricades in the wrong fight. They have become footsoldiers in battles of political expediency, marching shoulder to shoulder with like-minded useful idiots who are oblivious or indifferent to the real danger. From their tufted battlements they snarl menacingly in readiness to fight—not for Christ’s gospel, but for the lunatic policies of climate alarmism or in political proxy wars alongside the armies of Neo-Marxism against the straw man of systemic racial oppression in modern Britain, by every measure the most racially tolerant country in Europe if not the world. And all the while the real enemy slips in unnoticed, literally stealing the flock out from underneath them. God help us.

And He will. Which is the Good News, and very good news it is, indeed.

In the parable of the sower, Christ’s servants plant the seeds of faith but wake the next day to find them overgrown with weeds. The servants ask whether they should rip out the weeds, so that the seeds might grow unimpeded. But Christ tells them no, let the weeds and the wheat grow amongst each other, until the harvest.

What we are experiencing now, with the government’s incomprehensible reaction to this virus, the public’s resulting hysteria, and the abject cowardice of our clergy, are “the weeds.” If you’re like me, you find your faith being choked off and struggling for nourishment by the banality of Zoom liturgies or masked, socially distanced and intimacy-free church services led by clergy that pretend to gaze at heaven while casting an ever-watchful eye at their treasure here on earth. But to despair over this would give the enemy the victory he most desires.

Let us return to the 24th chapter of Matthew and reassure ourselves with these words from the Son of God: “But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” In other words, now is not the time to lose faith, but to strengthen it. I know of no better tool fit for purpose than the Rosary.

Regarded by a long line of saints as a powerful weapon of spiritual warfare, the Rosary is a way for small groups of the faithful to defy the prevailing culture of fear by meeting in each other’s homes to pray communally for strength and faith to “endure unto the end.” Anyone who would like to pray in person with me is welcome to contact me at mike@mchurley.com. I encourage you to make the same invitation to others.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was right about one thing: the church is not a building. But it’s not an act of performance theater for spectators on a Zoom call, either. It’s wherever two or more are gathered in Christ’s name. Let us then gather—and touch one another, and kiss one another, and embrace one another, and feed each other bread and wine, and pray and laugh and cry and question together.

They can lock the churches, but they cannot shut the Kingdom of Heaven, for as Christ teaches us, “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Boris Johnson has no jurisdiction there. Thank God for that, and be of good cheer. The victory has been won. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

(C) 2020 by Michael C. Hurley

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