Q Toon: Hallelujah Virus

At his press conference on May 22, Donald Berzelius Trump declared, "I’m identifying houses of worship—churches, synagogues and mosques—as essential places that provide essential services," and threatened to — somehow — "override" any governor who refused to exempt houses of worship from stay-at-home measures.

Every congregation I know of has discussed having parishioners space each family six feet apart from the other families when their church reopens, which sounds fine in theory. In practice, somebody is going to have to give up the pew their family has sat in since 1925. Someone is bound to leave in a huff.

Neither Lutheran church where I work plans to return to in-person worship services for at least a month, and are still discussing what worship will look like whenever we do. A suggestion at one is to limit attendance by having families take turns which weeks they come in to worship, and having people carry their own hymnals back and forth from church to home. The other expects to avoid congregational singing altogether, among other changes.

Local churches that have reopened include more conservative Missouri and Wisconsin synod Lutheran congregations; fundamentalist, charismatic, and independent denominations have also been eager to bring their congregations back together. It will be a few weeks before we learn how successfully they all manage to safeguard their members' health.

I suspect that the crowds jostling each other in the Lake of the Ozarks pool over the weekend and the party animals crowding the bars in Wisconsin  — QED —  are more at risk than congregations that avoid singing, sharing communion, having coffee hour, laying on of hands, passing the peace, passing the plate — oh, that's going to hurt! But few congregations are likely to settle for just a psalm, a sermon, and skedaddle every Sunday, so the omens aren't promising.

Two California churches that defied state and local health guidelines to hold special Mothers' Day worship services appear two weeks later to be linked to spikes in COVID-19 cases in their respective counties. Assembly of God in Redwood Valley has seen nine cases among parishioners who attended its May 10 service. Local authorities in Butte County are hesitant to blame their spike in the virus to the Palermo Bible Family Church service attended by over 180 persons, but

"We are seeing a pretty dramatic increase in cases," Dr. Andy Miller, the county public health officer, said Friday. "We thought we would see an uptick in cases when we started to open up, but in the last two days, we have seen seven new cases in Oroville alone."

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HBO's Avenue Five is a satire set a decade or so in the future, about a luxury tourist spaceship that gets knocked a little off course. (Stay with me here; I'm coming back to my main topic shortly.) As a result, the ship may take years to get everybody back home, and the passengers are upset. It then turns out that the captain and crew are merely actors employed for show, and eventually several passengers become convinced that the whole cruise is a fake and that they're not in outer space at all.

A bunch of them rush the airlock and out into space where they are instantly freeze dried, in full view of the rest of the passengers. A dozen or so passengers remain unconvinced that leaving the ship is fatal; they, too, rush the airlock and become desiccated ice sculptures floating in space.

When I saw that episode, I thought, well, that's absolutely ridiculous. Nobody is that stupid. It couldn't possibly happen.

Now that we've seen how many hard-core covidiots we have in this country, I know that it definitely would.