Hold on, I know that you’ve heard this one before, but like a bad joke it bears repeating simply because its bad, and you often have to hear a bad joke in order to appreciate a really good one. And the good joke is coming…at least I hope it is.

Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Big Three digital overlords of the internet–Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube–were aghast at the fact that in spite of their hard work to get Hillary Clinton elected, that the electoral college handed them a big ole “Nope” and handed them the “Bad Orange Man” instead. They were livid and couldn’t understand how their pick lost. YouTube execs were exposed speaking of being “offended” by the election’s results.

Not to mention that there was an attempt to manipulate results by gerrymandering search results, according to Senate testimony:

Now, most people attribute Trump’s win to a Christian, especially and evangelical push because, as candidate Trump courted their vote heavily, promising to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which he did. But big tech has always had a problem with Christians by removing explicitly Christian apps from their app store.

Following the election, the Big Three moved, banning controversial conservative figures like Alex Jones and his InfoWars program and Milo Yiannopoulos. Then came the #Voxadpocalypse that affected numerous popular, conservative and moderate YouTube channels, many of which had been actively courted by the platform in years prior, such as Steven Crowder, Dave Rubin, and Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad).

But that’s the past, what about the present?

Well, that came with Google, in the days of #COVID19, putting the kibosh on Christ Kirk’s app, as the church announced on Twitter,

Pastor Douglas Wilson’s initial response to this event was one laced with his usual acidic wit and grasp of the English language and coined for us a term that I hope will become the means by which we will categorize the past few months: shamdemic. Wilson begins by explaining the use of the term, writing:

I do not mean that the virus is somehow fake, or that there are not places that are severely affected. I do not mean to belittle the suffering of any who have been sick, or the grieving of the thousands of families who have lost loved ones. I know that many have died and, believe it or not, I don’t want people to die. …

…

So what do I mean then? In what way could it be appropriate to call this a shamdemic? What I mean is the vast discrepancy between what has actually happened and what we were assured would happen. That discrepancy is the sham. Draconian actions were taken on the basis of these representations, and that is why the discrepancy is a hot issue. 

And this is true, this is the case: almost everyone, everywhere, at least in the 110 countries that have suffered some effect in this time have imposed severe, even despotic means in order to gain some kind of control, allegedly, over the spread of a highly contagious virus. That being said, I think that Wilson hit the nail squarely in his assessment of the matter. Which brings us to Rod Dreher’s article over at The American Conservative.

Dreher is no fan of Wilson, either theologically or philosophically, however he is honest. He deduces that the cause of the church’s banning comes down to three recent sermons by Wilson and his fellow pastor Toby Sumpter, wherein they cut straight to the heart of the spiritual consequences of the pandemic with the efficiency of a freshly sharpened chainsaw. Dreher observes,

Here’s where I think Wilson’s sermon was radical, in a powerful and prophetic way. Toward the end, after talking about hardness of heart, he mentions that the Japanese did not surrender after seeing one of their cities (Hiroshima) vaporized. It took a second city being obliterated (Nagasaki) before they gave up. Wilson says that we Christians ought not to be praying for relief from the plague, but rather, “We should be asking God to do what it takes” to bring us to repentance.

Wilson gratefully acknowledged Dreher’s reluctance at defending him, but this takes us to something that Wilson hammered down on in his original observations of the “shamdemic”, namely that his church’s expulsion was a test of secular orthodoxy:

This virus is new enough that we don’t even have a vaccine for it yet. We don’t have a vaccine for this pest, but we already have an hardened orthodoxy concerning it. Apparently orthodoxies are easier to come up with than vaccines. The Truth is apparently well known enough that the establishment experts are already submitting a statement of faith on this virus to the college of cardinals, to which all public expressions must heretofore conform. And that’s how you win an argument with an irreverent heretic. (emphasis added)

I take Wilson’s observations as a confirmation of something that I noticed some time ago:

Politics, like religion, has its dogmas and mantras, its moral justifications, many of which only make sense in a normally “religious” sense. Politics, in spite of its denials, is its own religion with its own adherents, orthodoxy, and heretical opinions. The state composed by politics is not free from religion, it is a competing religion. (emphasis original)

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