The two tweets (now deleted, and preserved only in screenshots) are dated just two days apart. On Thursday, November 26th, 2020, a woman identified as Alice Willow declared she thought COVID-19 a mere nuisance, and demanded nobody bar her from attending church. “If I get covid attending mass then I’ll deal with it,” she writes. On Saturday she writes that she’s tested positive and adds: “my husband… has a pre existing condition.”
These two messages are only two days apart and may be among the best pieces of evidence of the Trump cult.
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) November 30, 2020
It comes as no surprise that the messages have now been deleted. pic.twitter.com/yj7bX5Eh28
My goal isn’t to name and shame Mrs. Willow. Anybody following American news realizes she’s frustratingly unremarkable, her desire to avoid change at any cost unmarred until the moment the catastrophe strikes her personally. As I write, we have over 13 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States—I’m one of them—and over a quarter-million dead. And some people still don’t care.
For me, the absolute marzipan topper on Mrs. Willow’s bad-attitude cake comes at the conclusion of her first tweet: “Be mad. Don’t care. [red heart emoji].” That encapsulates everything I’ve witnessed about people protesting against mask mandates, school and church closures, the shuttering of bars, and other attempts to contain the spread of a highly virulent disease. They’re not malicious; they just don’t care.
But Mrs. Willow isn’t demanding autonomy to eat out or breathe on strangers. It strikes me that she specifically wants to attend church. She writes in the immediate wake of a Supreme Court ruling that regulators cannot specifically target houses of worship for closure. This means Mrs. Willow, like millions of Americans, wants to be demonstratively Christian. I can understand that. I, too, miss my church friends and social network.
Christianity, however, sort of requires that you do care about others. It’s right there in the foundational text: you care that somebody’s naked, and you clothe them. You care that somebody’s sick, and you nurse them. You care that somebody’s sleeping rough, and you house them. Caring is foundationally bound to Christianity. Yet caring, or what psychologists call empathy, has become ancillary and optional in American Christianity today.
We keep hearing horror stories about specifically Christian people who die painfully because they deny the reality of COVID-19. From the beginning of the outbreak, several prominent faith leaders, especially from White megachurches, have denied the disease’s existence, right until the moment they contract it. Some have died with denial on their lips. They’re apparently incapable of caring until the outbreak strikes them personally.
That’s exactly what Jesus warned his first-generation followers not to do. Challenged by temple authorities, he said their religious rules only mattered if they promoted justice and defended the powerless. In his Parable of the Samaritan, Jesus said the Priest and the Levite—that is, his society’s publicly religious leaders—walked by, not just heedless, but actively avoiding the wounded man on the roadside.
Unfortunately, that’s what we Christians look like to outsiders today. We’ve become active defenders of a social structure that exploits the poor, oppresses the foreigner, and makes war out of nothing. We’ve become the Priest and the Levite; we’ve become Caiaphas, the temple priest who purchased Jesus for thirty silver pieces. No wonder “no religion” has become America’s second-biggest religious affiliation, and Britain’s biggest.
That’s saying nothing of our largest congregations’ failure to provide food, water, and comfort during a period of widespread suffering. Christianity is failing in its basic mission.
Don’t misunderstand me; gathering for worship is important. Acts of worship are, for many people, the place where we publicly recommit ourselves to living the values we proclaim verbally. But when this commitment crosses the line from building a community, to self-righteously praying on street corners, we become the very pious frauds whom Jesus excoriated angrily. Publicly demanding my rewards isn’t Christian; CEOs and politicians can do that, and do.
May God protect Mrs. Willow and her husband from the consequences of their actions. I don’t believe their actions arose from malice; they’re probably just products of a conservative, mostly White culture which has enjoyed social protections for so long, it doesn’t realize those protections aren’t simply the natural order. Mrs. Willow probably isn’t a bad person, and I wish no harm upon her family.
Instead, I hope that Mrs. Willow’s experience overcomes the empathy barrier that apparently plagues American Christians. We’ve become self-obsessed, turned inward, and uncaring. We value the indoor structural experience above connecting to humans, especially humans we don’t already know. Because of this, we risk becoming irrelevant, or worse, outright harmful. We’re the religion of “Be mad. Don’t care.”
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