I’ll jump right in here… the first is especially for people who lead institutions, but the rest are for anyone.
You want inertia and the status quo on your side if you can have it. From a man who almost never tweets (in fact this is his most recent tweet, from March of 2020!), Dan Doriani (who was senior pastor of Central Presbyterian in St. Louis when we attended there):
Pastors if you move services online, have it at church. Use a podium and gather a few people. It's almost impossible to speak well to an empty room. Ask Colbert. 2nd, think twice before announcing the end of public worship. It may be easier to stay open than to reopen.“It may be easier to stay open than to reopen”. Inasmuch as most of us, at the time, were thinking churches might be shuttered for two weeks, it is a prophetic comment from him. Many churches discovered it was true. We could also expand it, “it might be easier to never require masks, than to stop requiring them once you think the danger has passed”. And so on. Some churches never stopped meeting normally, maintained a sense of normalcy the whole time… it’s easiest to keep people doing whatever they are doing.
More on my mind lately, this is true on an individual level too, right? Even if their churches were meeting, some families stopped attending. And if they’ve been gone for a year, finally getting their vaccines now (and what would they have done if vaccines were two, or five years away, as seemed quite possible?), they face the problem of coming back. It will feel weird for them. And people will judge them, and they know people will judge them. And maybe they deserve it but, of course, you’d rather have them back. There is forgiveness for this too. But it is a hump they have to overcome. (I think people would “get over it” very quickly, but it’s still a hump for them.)
And finally, we saw this in the legal arena. I do think that some judges intentionally dragged their feet on COVID-related rulings knowing that just being slower about things helped the state. I think we all realize that if you can get an injunction against, say, a mask mandate for children the day after it is implemented, you’ve got a much better chance than if the case isn’t even heard for six months, after people have had six months to get used to it. Just being slow to act put the status quo on the side of the state instead of against the state.
“Humans are terrible at learning from history” is now illustrated. We had these pre-written pandemic plans, composed when emotions were calm, there was no urgency about anything, and you could take your time reviewing what worked and didn’t work last time. That’s exactly when you want to write such plans. And in basically all cases, those plans said that even in the most severe of pandemics (which we weren’t even close to), we were not supposed to do a lot of the stuff we did. The very moment the plans were written for arrived, and we threw them out the window and acted like nobody had ever seen a virus before and we had to make everything up as if for the first time. Just one motivating tweet from Alberta last week for you:
In nearby Forestburg, armoured police cars and approximately 6 empty buses stand ready, presumable to transport arrested protestors.WATCH: 1,500 defy no-protest order as armoured cars & empty buses stand by in Mirror, AB https://t.co/f2z41TyjgM #bcpoli #ableg #abpoli #skpoli #mbpoli #onpoli #cdnpoliWestern Standard @WSOnlineNewsAs I wrote on Twitter, maybe at some point we could have a “huh, maybe that’s why every pandemic plan written pre-2020 stressed the importance of making public health measures voluntary and striving to disrupt life as little as possible” moment.
If you ever wondered “golly, how could people in the past have cheered on while the state did that bad thing?”, now you know - you just lived through such a moment. And you can probably point to the people who would’ve done the cheering. You can see many examples if you read the replies to a tweet like this, about the recent arrest of Polish pastor Artur Pawlowski in Canada. A good number of people are just thrilled about it.
Earlier today, police arrested two organizers of a church service who were in violation of a new court order obtained by Alberta Health Services in relation to mandatory compliance of public health orders for gatherings.Tribalize people much as you can. Ideally, give them an enemy group they already didn't like anyway, and Christians now serve that purpose well for many on the Left. Tell them that cheering on the state shows that they're the good virtuous people. Voila, people who will cheer the police throwing up barbed wire around your church and arresting your pastor. It really doesn’t take much. Someone sent me a quotation of Aldous Huxley almost sounding like C.S. Lewis (someone said it could be a quotation from The Screwtape Letters).
Denny Burk still has this tweet pinned:
I’ve seen a meme going around (I can’t find it now), that first has the picture above, and says “who most people say they will be in a moment of mass hysteria”. And then it has the picture again, but now everyone else is circled, “who most people actually are in a moment of mass hysteria”.
Many people are after a sense of superiority. Are people out there trying to make the world a better place? Well some are, but most people live their life with more personal interests, and one of those interests is a desire to feel like one of the superior people - really, the sin of pride. A lot of our public discourse today is driven by the sin of pride. Here is one particularly stark example from last week:
‘Grow the f*ck up and get the vaccine’ — These health care workers shared their honest thoughts about anti-vaxxers in this hilarious PSA on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’Someone wrote me and said that if they weren’t already vaccinated, the smug elitism in that video might have persuaded them not to get the shot. And indeed, while presented as something to encourage vaccination, that isn’t really the point at all. The real and entire point is to tell you that if you have been vaccinated you’re one of the superior people. (And this is one reason people will intentionally stoke division, intentionally tribalize good ideas that would otherwise have near-universal appeal. They want a group of “behaving badly” people out there so they can feel superior to them.)
Many people are after a sense of moral validation. I won’t link anything here, but having read comments where people either brag about the fact that they always follow the advice of “health experts”, or boast that they’re going to keep wearing a mask forever man… what is going on here? You could say virtue signaling, and sometimes it is virtue signaling, but just as often I think it’s the desire for an internal sense of moral validation, an internal sort of “I am a good person” feeling. The fact that people are literally willing to dehumanize their face and restrict for breathing indefinitely for “this means I am a good person” shows you how incredibly strong that desire is.
Re #1: Nuts, similar to a spoiler alert, I actually didn't think about people judging me when I go back to church, or when I attended the men's breakfast.
I'm a cowardly sinner and won't justify myself. Let God be glorified in right judgments of me. I shouldn't get the credit other folks who did keep up attendance, so I don't feel tempted to make an excuse or generate an equivalency for my online attendance.
Aaron Renn had a newsletter last month explaining how cultural power is winning arguments instead of facts and reasoning. He used a church example with Keller, bit I can't recall the issue, but Keller was leveraging power to win. He also mentioned TGC as a party holding cultural power.
I think of cultural power in reaction to Edward Hamilton's fine comment. That is, folks can love the vaccine because of the cultural power strengthens their in-group identity and so counter-facts aren't seen as creating a paradox because the facts are coming from powerless people conducting studies.
The amount of information we have about every aspect of COVID is vastly greater than it was a year ago, and yet from the way it's talked about (in both public and private) shows little awareness of that vast body of information. It's now an identity badge, and its resistance to being updated by new evidence is part of the point.
It's a curious form of integrity, hating COVID so much that you're willing to embrace the paradox that vaccines both work so well that anyone who refuses one is insane, but also so poorly that we'll never be safe enough to stop wearing masks. Questioning the paradox is a flag for weak faith in "The Science"; embracing it is an unusually strong signal of orthodoxy, of the sort that could never be generated by any views with a deeper sense of internal coherence.