What Does a Christian Response to Coronavirus Look Like?

How should we respond to the news of coronavirus as believers? Here are four simple things to do (or not do):

• 1. Don’t Hoard!

The Bible actually has a great deal to say about hoarding. In Luke 12, Jesus tells a parable about a prosperous man who says to his soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.” (Luke 12:19). This is actually where that phrase comes from, and we often use it as a positive: hey, you’ve worked hard, now go and enjoy yourself! But God … doesn’t view things that way. “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:20-21). Instead, Jesus calls us to take a different approach: “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise” (Luke 3:11). When you stockpile instead of sharing (or at least letting other customers buy the things that they actually need), you’re not being a good steward of the resources God’s given you, and you’re hurting your neighbor.

A Polish-American woman, who had grown up under Soviet oppression, was recently expressing her shame and disgust to an acquaintance of mine about the American response to the coronavirus. She and her compatriots knew well what it was to not know what the future held, or what the stores might hold, and she stressed: don’t take more than what you need for the week. When you start hoarding, you’re effectively stealing from the other hungry, needy people who need whatever you’re storing in your basement. It’s the message behind the famous scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, the one woman who wouldn’t contribute to the run on the bank, taking only what she needed:

The bizarre run on toilet paper is a great illustration of this. There is no actual shortage of toilet paper, and nor will there be. Almost all of the toilet paper we use is made in America, and what we do import comes mostly from Canada and Mexico. Coronavirus is a respiratory disease, so there’s no reason to anticipate needing more than usual. No one needed to do anything differently, and everything would have been fine. Literally the only thing people have to worry about is that some other customer is going to freak out and buy a huge stockpile of it that they don’t need when other people actually need it. The shortages we’re seeing in stores aren’t because of coronavirus. They’re because of our greed, our selfishness, and our irrational fear. Not only did this hoarding not help anything, but it’s been harmful to everyone who actually needed their weekly groceries. Worse is when people then start buying up all the baby wipes, depriving not just other customers, but babies. That’s just wrong.

• 2. Don’t Panic!

Of course, the external disorder of chaotic and empty supermarkets is really just a manifestation of an internal disorder. We’re allowing ourselves to be dominated by fear – fear of the disease, fear of how other people might respond to it, etc. – in a way that is unhealthy and unchristian. Someone on Facebook shared a piece of Lewis’ essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” and it’s a good read for the current (or any) situation. He begins this way:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in the Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air-raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.

In 2018 alone, 2,839,205 American residents died. The pre-Christian term for a cemetery was a necropolis, which literally meant a “city of the dead.” If the “necropolis” of 2018 were a literal city, it would be the third largest city in America, surpassing Chicago. None of those people died of coronavirus, and, so far, few of the denizens of 2020’s necropolis have died of it, either. But whether they – or we – go that way, or the statistically-far-more-likely ways of heart disease, cancer, and unintentional injuries, the only thing that we can say for sure is that we’re all going to die.

This isn’t to trivialize the threats of coronavirus, or atomic warfare, or heart disease. It’s just to recognize that there’s no sense (in Lewis’ words) in “whimpering and drawing long faces” about “one more chance of painful and premature death” when we live in “a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.” If we can get up each morning, despite the knowledge that some 647,000 Americans die each year from heart disease (one every 37 seconds!). By all means, take appropriate precautions, but don’t let the specter of 41 American deaths (and about 6,000 so far worldwide) lead us into an irrational panic. And if the TV is causing you to freak out, nobody is forcing you to watch it. In fact, there’s something much better you could be doing instead…

3. Do Pray!

One of the points that C.S. Lewis makes in the essay is that

What the wars and the weather (are we in for another of those periodic ice ages?) and the atomic bomb have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before 1914, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.

It’s not difficult to update this for the modern age, with new threats of war, and climate change, substituting “the atomic bomb” for the coronavirus. Amidst all of the evils of panic and excessive fear, the one great positive that these things have produced is that they remind us of our death. What’s so scary about coronavirus, I think, is exactly this: it reminds us of the simple fact that we’re going to die. Peter Kreeft describes life like this:

We find ourselves locked in a car plunging at breakneck speed down an immense hill toward the edge of a cliff, with the brakes useless and the steering locked. At birth we find ourselves at the top of the hill, coming from nowhere. We fall always in one direction. The hill is time, and life; and we always end by falling over the edge into the abyss.

We spend a lot of our lives avoiding this fact, because we find it unpleasant, even terrifying. But the Bible encourages us to do the opposite: “In all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin” (Sirach 7:36). Once you wake up from the pretty dream that life on this earth will go on with you in it forever, you can start to consider the reality: eventually, you’ll die. And then what? Will you simply rot in the earth? Or is there an afterlife? And if so, are you headed towards eternal joy or eternal pain?

Perhaps needless to say, the result of this “waking up” is that it should drive us to our knees, to pray. Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s day, and I’m reminded of his own journey. Patrick was a Briton, the son of a deacon and the grandson of a married priest. Nevertheless, he admitted that at the time of his captivity at the age of 16,

I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others. We deserved this, because we had gone away from God, and did not keep his commandments. We would not listen to our priests, who advised us about how we could be saved. The Lord brought his strong anger upon us, and scattered us among many nations even to the ends of the earth. It was among foreigners that it was seen how little I was.

It was there that the Lord opened up my awareness of my lack of faith. Even though it came about late, I recognised my failings. So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God, and he looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance.

Forced to tend sheep in Ireland, Patrick experienced “social distancing” in a profound way, stripped of all he had ever known of family, friends, or homeland. He used this time to grow in faith, and to pray:

After I arrived in Ireland, I tended sheep every day, and I prayed frequently during the day. More and more the love of God increased, and my sense of awe before God. Faith grew, and my spirit was moved, so that in one day I would pray up to one hundred times, and at night perhaps the same. I even remained in the woods and on the mountain, and I would rise to pray before dawn in snow and ice and rain. I never felt the worse for it, and I never felt lazy – as I realise now, the spirit was burning in me at that time.

Many of us find ourselves with three things we didn’t have a month ago: (1) free time, (2) social isolation, and (3) a renewed awareness of our own mortality. That is a great recipe for prayer. Like Patrick, we can use our times of hardship to realize our own lowliness and turn back to God.

4. Do Allow Yourself to be inconvenienced for the sake of others!

Some of the restrictions being imposed (or suggested) because of coronavirus seem draconian, and driven by fear. And for some of them, that’s probably true! But the truth is, coronavirus is a pandemic, and we’re at a stage right now in which our actions can either help spread or stop the disease. The problem is twofold: (1) the actions we’re being asked to take are annoying and inconvenient; and (2) the people most at risk of dying aren’t young, healthy people.

The result is that many young, healthy people are refusing to allow their lives to be infringed. There’s an implicit judgment being made here. As some of the comments we’re making reveal, we too often think of the elderly and the immuno-compromised as having less important lives than our own.

The problem with this approach is that it only looks at you, not about the workers you’re making stay on the job, or the people you may be unknowingly spreading the disease to… even if you’re not showing any symptoms. If you’re healthy, great! But that isn’t the only thing that matters.

There’s a line falsely attributed to Mother Teresa that I’ve seen on many a pro-life bumper sticker: “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” But while it’s not a real quotation from the Saint, it is a true statement: one of the pathologies of the modern world is our prioritizing our own convenience over the health and even the life of those people who are inconveniently weak, like the unborn, or infants, or the elderly, or the disabled, or the sick.

Right now, we’re facing (or about to face) this issue once again: will we allow ourselves to be inconvenienced for the sake of those whose immune systems can’t handle coronavirus? Or will we decide that the elderly and immuno-compromised must die so that we may live as we wish?