This is from Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s press conference on December 22nd, 2021:
JOURNALIST: Not everyone can afford rapid antigen tests.
PRIME MINISTER: Some people can, and some can’t.
How on Earth can you make sense of this, when it comes out of the mouth of someone who loudly and frequently professes to be “Christian”?
Though I have been an agnostic ex-Catholic for the last 50 years, I learnt my ethics from good Catholic parents, and moral Marist Brothers and Priests (though I knew some of both who weren’t). So, when I hear someone describe themselves as “Christian”, my mind still goes to the “Good Samaritan“: the type of person who helps someone in need, with no judgment of them, and expectation of reward in return.
But “some people can, and some can’t”, as an answer to a question about the availability of testing kits during a pandemic? In what remote sense is that “Christian”?
This conundrum enabled me to finally appreciate what this so called “Prosperity Gospel ” of the church Morrison belongs to really means:
Other doubts would surface. What about unsuccessful healing attempts? I learned that it was the sick person’s fault for doubting God. (Costi Hinn ,”Benny Hinn Is My Uncle, but Prosperity Preaching Isn’t for Me“)
In the context of this pandemic, it means that if you’re a good person, you’ll be rich and able to afford a Rapid Antigen Test. If you’re a bad person, you’ll be poor and won’t be able to. The righteous survive the pandemic, the unworthy die of it. The righteous can find a chemist (or a Harvey Norman store!) stocking the test, and can afford the asking price.
It justifies government inaction, because that is doing God’s work.
This is even more of a distortion of what “Christian” used to mean than the current Liberal Party of Australia is a distortion of the original meaning of the word “Liberal”. The Liberal Party’s own history page highlights this quote from its founder Robert Menzies:
…what we must look for, and it is a matter of desperate importance to our society, is a true revival of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security, for national power and national progress, and for the full development of the individual citizen, though not through the dull and deadening process of socialism.
So, where’s the “social justice” in “some people can, and some can’t”? It’s in the belief that society is a (God-given) meritocracy where those who deserve have already acquired wealth and power, and those who are unworthy are deservedly dying by the roadside.
Not only is this sickeningly inhumane, it’s sickeningly stupid during a pandemic. A rich person won’t necessarily go to the chemist who hasn’t run out of RATs—though maybe the rich person calls his rich mate who’s cornered the market and gets some anyway…
In his tome of an article The Politics of Cultural Despair, US journalist Chris Hedges posits that the social decay that’s happening in his country is resulting in the rise of Christian fascism, which he describes as “an emotional life raft for millions”, underpinned by the prosperity gospel.
“Capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralised in the form of the prosperity gospel, the belief that Jesus came to minister to our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power,” the journalist proclaims.
“The prosperity gospel is an ideological cover for the slow-motion corporate coup d’état.”
Hedges explains that the corporate oligarchy doesn’t pay heed to the prosperity gospel, but it’s glad the Christian right does. He further states that while the corporates consider the Christian fascists “buffoons”, their doctrine of belief allows for greater profits and the erosion of workers’ rights.
The former war correspondent lays the prosperity gospel bare, when stating its major implication is that if a person is poor, they lack medical care, they’re paid low wages or they’re a victim of police violence, this can all be explained away as them not being “a good Christian”. (“Morrison and the Prosperity Gospel: License to Torture Refugees and Damn the Poor“)
You can’t just reduce this to Morrison though. The Liberal Party selected this guy to be its leader—even if it was in a Steven Bradbury kind of way. The Party itself is rotten, and deserves not only to be turfed out at the next election, but to go extinct.
That’s the ambition of The New Liberals, for whom I am the lead Senate candidate for NSW. We’re only running in Liberal-held electorates, and we’ll put the Liberal-National Coalition last in every electorate. This sort of Christianity belongs in the gutter, not in Parliament.