Greg Laurie, the pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California, has COVID-19. I like Laurie and I have benefited from his ministry, but he has taken some really strange turns in the last decade or so. When you enter the court it is easy to let the seductive power of political influence blur one’s moral reasoning. He should have worn a mask and social distanced at the Amy Coney Barrett White House event on September 26, 2020.
The above image is also from September 26, 2020. Laurie is wearing a mask.
Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins was present at the Barrett event and contracted COVID-19. In his letter of apology to the Notre Dame community, Jenkins wrote:
When I arrived at the White House, a medical professional took me to an exam room to obtain a nasal swab for a rapid COVID-19 test. I was then directed to a room with others, all fully masked, until we were notified that we had all tested negative and were told that it was safe to remove our masks. We were then escorted to the Rose Garden, where I was seated with others who also had just been tested and received negative results.
I regret my error of judgment in not wearing a mask during the ceremony and by shaking hands with a number of people in the Rose Garden. I failed to lead by example, at a time when I’ve asked everyone else in the Notre Dame community to do so. I especially regret my mistake in light of the sacrifices made on a daily basis by many, particularly our students, in adjusting their lives to observe our health protocols.
Watch Laurie here.
Unlike Jenkins, there is no apology for his failure to wear a mask and social distance during the Barrett event. Laurie tells his audience to avoid politicizing his diagnosis. This assumes that mask-wearing and social-distancing are somehow “political.” Masks and social distancing are not political. They help reduce the spread of the virus. But Laurie’s uncritical support of the president–the reason he was at this event in the first place–is certainly “political.”
This New York Times photo shows Laurie standing in front of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who also has COVID-19. Laurie is standing next to another court evangelical, Texas megachurch pastor Jack Graham. Graham will not quarantine. He claims he is “ridiculously healthy.” Such arrogance.
80-year old court evangelical John Hagee, pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, also has COVID-19. He was not at the Barret event.
allowed him to attend a religious revival at Bay Side, some eight miles from St. Michaels. This classic country Methodist camp meeting left indelible images in Douglass’s fertile memory. People came from all over Talbot County; two steamboat loads of pilgrims also arrived from Baltimore. The gathering lasted a week, and slaves relieved of work for a few days could hardly resist the excitement of hundreds of campfires roasting meat, a veritable tent city with a preacher’s stand in the middle and a “pen” marked off for “mourners” to enter and make their confessions, embrace the Lord, and be saved. A recent convert himself to Christian faith, although now struggling to understand whether God intended any justice on earth, Frederick witnessed the spectacle of master Thomas’s wrenching emotional breakdown and confession in that pen. Blacks were not allowed in the pen, nor in front of the preacher’s performances, but Douglass tells us that he imposed his way close enough to hear Auld “groan,” and to see his reddened face, his disheveled hair, and a “stray tear halting on his cheek.” Here festered the dark heart of the moral bankruptcy of slaveholders that the future abolitionist would make his central subject.
