Recently heard on the floor of the House of Representatives: “Amen, and A-women”. There was more to the opening prayer than that, but that was the coup-de-gras (literally). Yes, it’s a sound-bite, click-bait, throw-away line.
But it was also uttered in the House of Representatives. So, what does it represent?
Spiritual Herd Immunity
The definition of herd immunity from WebMD is illuminating:
Herd immunity, or community immunity, is when a large part of the population of an area is immune to a specific disease. If enough people are resistant to the cause of a disease, such as a virus or bacteria, it has nowhere to go.
While not every single individual may be immune, the group as a whole has protection. This is because there are fewer high-risk people overall. The infection rates drop, and the disease peters out.
I invite you to reread that definition and have in mind the “disease” being ideologies such as communism, transgenderism, and transhumanism.
These ideologies fly in the face of spiritual reality – which is to say, God’s Truth. Communism is a societal arrangement that is completely opposed to Christianity (and human flourishing in general) – just read Engel, Marx and all that follow. Transgenderism and transhumanism deny the Truth of how we were created by God and in His image.
In a healthy society these ideologies, and many more besides, should “peter out”. Instead, they have taken root and advanced through every institution. What’s more, we are swimming in lies about public health, about the election, about which lives matter. Vast swaths of the population mindlessly gobble up the soul-crushing flow of error, misinformation, manipulation, and censorship from Big Tech and all the others without a second thought.
Seriously, can you picture your grandparents buying into any of this?
Amen and A-women.
We have lost our spiritual herd immunity.
The Spiritual Herd Immunity that Built Our Country
As the first Constitutional Convention was mired in indecision, Benjamin Franklin admonished the President of the Congress that
we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understanding. At the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. — Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered.
And there is John Adams’ famous statement: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
To what “Father” was Mr. Franklin appealing? What “religion” did Mr. Adams deem necessary? They were pointing to the Christian God and the Christian religion.
To those that say most of the founders were deists – what of it? Some of them were (though not as many or to the degree as some would claim). But they clearly realized that the people of the nation – those who did the living, working, fighting, and dying – were a monolithically Christian people.
Christianity was the unifying principle of the Union. We possessed a Christian Herd Immunity.
Why was that? In large part because times were tough. People naturally turned to God to sustain them as “their rock, their fortress, their deliverer” (Ps 18:2). The first of the three ages of the interior life is the purgative age and it is marked by asceticism – we must die to ourselves so that we live in God. In that sense, most everyone was a mystic in the early days of the Union. There was no big-daddy government to “provide”; there was only “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
For many years, over a century, in fact, Christianity was a firm bulwark against the dark side of the “enlightenment” ideas that were eroding Europe. Yes, germinations of pathogens would be released into the air. The endless ‘isms (humanism, scientism, etc.) and immorality that laid the groundwork for, say, Weimar Germany crept across to our shores and caused pockets of infection in the big cities, but the Christian herd immunity kept it all at bay. The great majority were resistant to infection.
For a while.
Venerable Fulton Sheen, writing in the 1960s and 1970s, commented even then how hard it was to be a Christian. He noted that it used to be easy (i.e. in the 1920s, 30s, and ’40s), because all of society was Christian. Christianity was the social and moral current. So long as your boat was in the water, even if you didn’t work the oars, the current would draw you toward Truth and away from error. However, he noted, it had become difficult because all of society was now pushing against Christianity.
And that was Bishop Sheen speaking 50 years ago; we know which direction society has slid since. In most cases, more than 2/3 of a population must be resistant to establish herd immunity. We’ve fallen below that threshold. Too many no longer know Christ. Too many no longer know the Truth when they see and hear it. Too many yearn for the false security of big government and conformity to a secular society.
Restoring Herd Immunity
How does a society achieve herd immunity? There are two mechanisms – individuals can develop resistance naturally or through a vaccine. Since there is no magic injection to instill faith in God, ours must be the natural option (which is, in fact, a supernatural option.)
To naturally develop resistance, a person is exposed to the disease, and if their body is strong enough, it builds antibodies, overcomes the disease, and is then able to defend against future exposure.
We’re all exposed to the disease of secularism these days. But too many are succumbing to it instead of building up a resistance. Our job is to help lead people to Christ so that through Him they can develop an immunity to the disease of secularism in all its forms and with all its errors.
A State of Emergency
Yes, Christ has already won the victory. He is our source of spiritual joy, peace, hope, and fortitude. But souls remain in the balance. He calls us to act because the enemy is tireless in claiming as many as he still can.
Here’s how WebMD words it:
“Herd immunity protects at-risk populations. These include babies and those whose immune systems are weak and can’t get resistance on their own.”
This is why we must have a renewed sense of urgency. We are in a new spiritual season. There is no more business-as-usual. In Truth there never was. We were lulled into a business-as-usual mindset and that is what brought us to our present circumstances. And so, now comes a season of reparation, of sackcloth and ashes, of renewed zeal for personal holiness and mental prayer, of small Christian communities, and fearlessly going out into the vineyard.
Yes, we are an Easter people, and there will be times of celebration even amidst the coming storms, but life will be different from here on.
It turns out there really is a pandemic raging all around us.
A spiritual one.
3 thoughts on “The Loss of Spiritual Herd Immunity”
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Thanks, Bob. That’s a fair point – no I’m not white-washing the long struggle of resolving the implicit Christianity, explicit anti-Catholicsm and ambiguous pluralism. But as those forces were playing out, the unifying principle was an organic Christian ethos. It is regrettable that secularization and moral relativism, as you point out, were chosen as the easy way out of dealing with the tension between Protestantism and the cultural juggernaut of Catholicism. Of course, there’s that whole business of the infiltration of the Catholic Church that also played into the cultural nose dive. “Kennedy was going. Biden is gone.” Indeed. If the US turns around it will have to be bottom up not top down. Long, hard (but glorious) road of evangelizing the culture.
From one perspective, Christianity may be viewed as a unifying principle of the American revolution and its later history of a federal union of the colonies. The text of the Declaration of Independence is fully a Christian document. This perspective, however can be a rewriting of history, if it ignores the record of sectarian strife and persecution within and between the thirteen colonies. Nine of the thirteen had established Churches at some point in their history. The first amendment against the establishment of a national Church was pragmatic. From our perspective in the twenty first century, we can see that the diminishing of sectarian animosity was achieved through secularization and through the adoption of moral relativism. Thus, the unity of our nation has been achieved through the demise of Christianity. Just look at the roster of prominent Catholic politicians, including two presidents. In principle, Kennedy was going. Biden is gone.