How Church Leaders Aligned With Fauci To Discredit Experts Opposed To COVID Mandates

Conservative News DailyOctober 17, 2022

In late February of 2022, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford, delivered a sermon to his Silicon Valley church on the theme of “clean and unclean.” As he spoke of Christ’s revolutionary compassion in physically touching lepers and other diseased outcasts of the ancient world, he paused to reflect on how our society — in which 64 percent of the population professes to follow Jesus — conducted itself over the last two years.

“I started receiving emails almost immediately after the pandemic started from doctors and nurses asking me if it was okay to hug their wives and their husbands,” Bhattacharya shared from the metal music stand serving as his pulpit. “Because they worked in the hospital, they were unclean. Your COVID patients, they were unclean.”

He described seeing pedestrians swerve wide to avoid an unmasked person on the sidewalk, though it was known early on that coronavirus is very unlikely to spread outdoors. Then he asked the congregation, “When someone comes down with COVID, what’s the first question we all ask? ‘Where did you get it? Who gave it to you?’ We treat contracting the virus as a sin. As punishment for not being careful and doing all the right things.”

The point was clear — throughout the pandemic, Americans treated one another as if they were unclean.

Bhattacharya rose to national prominence after he and a group of colleagues from Harvard and Oxford released The Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, an open letter that opposed pandemic policies like lockdowns and instead advocated focused protection for the most vulnerable. Since then, he has spoken out against mask and vaccine mandates and called for more serious attention to vaccine injuries and risk.

But few are aware of the religious convictions that also help frame Bhattacharya’s scientific outlook.

Born to a Hindu family in Kolkata, India, he became Christian at age 18 after he arriving in the U.S. for college. He’s been a member of First Presbyterian Church in Mountain View, California, where he has served as both a deacon and elder, for 27 years.

Perhaps if they had known this, fewer prominent evangelical pastors, theologians, and seminary heads would have been so willing to follow the lead of another famous scientist and Christian — former NIH Director Francis Collins — in labeling Bhattacharya’s medical opinions “fringe” and “conspiracy theories.”

‘Love Your Neighbor, Get the Shot’

From the beginning of the pandemic, Collins leveraged his relationships with church leaders like Purpose Driven Life-author Rick Warren and apologist Tim Keller to convince Christians across the nation that submitting to lockdowns and mandates was a matter of obedience to God. Collins and his personal friends Christianity Today theologian Russell Moore and Billy Graham Center director Ed Stetzer also argued that Christians had a responsibility to tamp down on “conspiracy theories” like the notion that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab or that masks were ineffective.

But a public statement that was unearthed on social media last week from BioLogos, an organization Collins founded in 2007 to create bridges between scientists and Christians, reveals further spiritual manipulation to discredit medical experts like Bhattacharya who disputed the establishment narrative.

Titled “Love Your Neighbor, Get the Shot,” it was published in late August of 2020, as Bhattacharya was publishing widely-circulated op-eds in outlets like The Wall Street Journal and sitting down for interviews warning that COVID risks were being inflated and lockdown harms were being minimized.

The signatories (which included celebrated theologian N.T. Wright, best-selling Christian authors Philip Yancey and Lisa Sharon Harper, Christianity Today CEO Timothy Dalrymple and several seminary presidents) promised to “actively promote accurate scientific and public health information from trustworthy, consensus sources.” They also promised to counter “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” from non-“consensus” sources wherever they found them.

“When Dr. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, tells us what scientists have learned about this infectious disease,” the Christian intelligentsia exhorted their followers, “he should be listened to.”

Who should not be listened to? Scientists outside the “consensus” who were only providing “one person’s theory on YouTube.” In other words, scientists like Bhattacharya and his fellow medical dissidents.

In the closing section of the Love Your Neighbor statement, the signers pledged that, “because of their faith in Jesus Christ,” they would:

“Wear Masks” because “Mask rules are not experts taking away our freedom, but an opportunity to follow Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 6:31).” “Get vaccinated” because “Vaccination is a provision from God” and the vaccines are “safe and effective.” “Correct misinformation and conspiracy theories when we encounter them in our social media and communities.” Because “Christians are called to love the truth; we should not be swayed by falsehoods (1 Corinthians 13:6).”

In the end, more than 8,000 people, many of whom were pastors and ministry leaders, promised to work against the evidence