Trump and His Christian Nationalists Impeded Government’s Handling of COVID-19

April 10th 2020

Trump campaign rally in Phoenix (GPA Photo Archive)

By Bill Berkowitz 

It would be too facile to write off the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus as simply bungling, inept, and ham-fisted. Informed they were; prepared they were not! But, the administration’s failures may run deeper then mere incompetence. As Katherine Stewart wrote recently in The New York Times, Trump’s response to the pandemic has been strongly influenced by “a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise.” In addition, that movement has been on an anti-government tear since its inception. Welcome to the world of Christian Nationalism, aided and abetted by Team Trump.

The rejection of science is not the only cause motivating Christian nationalists. As Stewart told The Gist podcast host Mike Pesca, Christian nationalists are now seeded into many government entities, spreading an “anti-science culture that rejects the evidence of science, rejects expertise, rejects critical thinking, and that has obviously contributed to our inability collectively to address this crisis in an evidence-based fashion.”

“This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis,” Stewart wrote in The New York Times.  The dangerous actions by several conservative Christian preachers provide evidence of science denialism, as they have called on their parishioners to show up to church during the COVID-19 pandemic. And this practice which flaunts social distancing recommendations has not been condemned by the Trump administration.

“Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” claimed Guillermo Maldonado, who hosted Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch.

Tampa, Florida’s Rodney Howard-Browne, the pastor of The River at Tampa Bay Church, hosted hundreds for services at his church, was arrested, and is now claiming that banning mass gatherings at his church is a violation of his religious freedom.

In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”

These cases may be extreme, but they are all too representative of a movement that helped elect Trump, and is deeply entrenched within the Trump administration, and is now seemingly exercising an undue influence on policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Ralph Drollinger, the homophobic, climate change denying former athlete, who leads Bible study for Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers, are of particular interest, Katherine Stewart told The Gist’s Mike Pesca.

Alex Azar “has had a prominent role in mismanaging the crisis,” Stewart wrote on The New York Times. “It seems likely at this point that [his] signature achievement will have been to rebrand his department as the ‘Department of Life.’ Or maybe he will be remembered for establishing a division of Conscience and Religious Freedom, designed to permit health care providers to deny legal and often medically indicated health care services to certain patients as a matter of religious conscience.”

Azar brought to the job a loyalty to Trump and “a commitment to anti-abortion politics, abstinence education and other causes of the religious right.” But these qualifications have not prepared him to develop effective and wide-scale testing capability or to insure availability of critical protective gear to doctors, nurses, house cleaners and other frontline workers.

Ralph Drollinger, Trump’s Bible study leader, “advocates an incredible wide range of policy positions, economic policies, foreign policy and domestic policies,” Stewart told The Gist’s Mike Pesca. Through his multiple Bible study gatherings, he is “arguably one of the most critically influential actors in America.” Drollinger’s ideology is extreme and his webpage lists a bunch of White House sponsors including vice president Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVoss, Secretary Azar and several others.

Mike Pesca asked Stewart about how the predilections of Christian nationalists are “having an impact” on the federal government’s response to the pandemic.

Stewart pointed out that the theology or political theory Drollinger is promoting includes “the idea that social programs have no basis in scripture; he is against progressive income tax; he doesn’t think that government should be in charge of providing direct aid to the poor; … he believe that God believes in deregulation and laborers in the workforce should submit to their bosses.”

This thinking, which rejects the role of “big government,” is congruent with the conservative republican belief in small government and that solutions to the crisis should come out of the private sector. Ergo, the slow and lackluster performance by the Trump administration.

Stewart, the author of the recently published The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, March 2020), wrote in The Times that “By all accounts, President Trump’s tendency to trust his gut over the experts on issues like vaccines and climate change does not come from any deep-seated religious conviction. But he is perfectly in tune with the religious nationalists who form the core of his base.”

“Religious nationalism has brought to American politics the conviction that our political differences are a battle between absolute evil and absolute good,” Stewart wrote in The Times. “When you’re engaged in a struggle between the ‘party of life’ and the ‘party of death,’ as some religious nationalists now frame our political divisions, you don’t need to worry about crafting careful policy based on expert opinion and analysis. Only a heroic leader, free from the scruples of political correctness, can save the righteous from the damned. Fealty to the cause is everything; fidelity to the facts means nothing. Perhaps this is why many Christian nationalist leaders greeted the news of the coronavirus as an insult to their chosen leader.”