When President Trump directed his vice president to lead a group of officials tasked with addressing the nation’s looming coronavirus crisis, Mike Pence commenced the group’s first meeting in a most appropriate manner: He began with prayer.
A photo surfaced of the February 26 meeting, showing the task force meeting in Pence’s office, with their heads bowed and the vice president leading the group in prayer. And the Left, which has spared no effort in the past to ridicule the Pence’s well-documented Christian faith, was right on top of it.
“We are so screwed,” wrote Thomas Chatterton Williams, a columnist for Harper’s Magazine, in his lead-off tweet. “They’re treating this disease with the seriousness and urgency they bring to gun violence,” Williams wrote in a followup Twitter post. “While some are taking solace in the thought that this administration — which disbanded the CDC pandemic team in 2018 — performatively prays for the camera, this is a chilling window into their actual epidemiological unpreparedness and incompetence.”
Williams was followed by Hemant Mehta, a columnist for Patheos.com’s “Friendly Atheist” blog, who mockingly accused Pence and his team of “Attempting to Pray Away” the coronavirus. “What else did anyone expect?” wrote Mehta asked. “Science? Reason? Something sensible? Of course not. If this virus truly becomes a pandemic, we’re at the mercy of people delusional enough to think their pleas to God will fix the problem. The same God who presumably created the virus, at least in their minds, will somehow make sure it hurts only a handful of Americans … and a ton of Chinese people.”
Democrat-Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders weighed in, responding with the word “disgusting,” along with the opportunistic — and wildly inaccurate — tweet: “Trump’s plan for the coronavirus so far: — Cut winter heating assistance for the poor — Have VP Pence, who wanted to ‘pray away’ HIV epidemic, oversee the response — Let ex-pharma lobbyist Alex Azar refuse to guarantee affordable vaccines to all.”
By contrast, Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at New York University, affirmed the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus. “I’ve been handling these emerging contagions for about twenty years now, and I have to tell you, I’ve never seen one handled better,” Siegel told Breitbart News. He emphasized that the task force is composed of “really top players,” and praised the administration’s actions thus far, including “restricting travel, isolating patients who are sick, and trying to cut down on contact. It’s a very hard thing to do when people are pouring in from all over the world.”
Evangelist Franklin Graham, whose humanitarian — and Christian — outreach Samaritan’s Purse regularly responds to epidemics and disasters around the world, called the photo “touching & powerful,” and tweeted the challenge: “Let’s join them in asking God for His wisdom, direction, & help in the response to this virus.”
Dr. Richard Land, an evangelical theologian and past president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, observed that “America’s political leaders have a long tradition of praying and calling the nation to pray in times of crisis and national peril.”
Land recalled that throughout history Americans and their leaders “have been a religious people, and we have been a praying people,” and reflected that past national leaders turned to prayer “not by government mandate or coercion, but because they were religious people speaking to their God and their fellow Americans in times of great crisis. These leaders prayed according to the dictates of their own consciences, and the people were free to heed and follow the example of their elected leaders or not, according to the dictates of their own consciences.”
Concluded Land: “When America’s elected political leaders pray and seek divine guidance, and when their fellow Americans follow their example and similarly pray according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are doing something which is very, very American. Disagree with them if you wish. Don’t pray if you don’t feel so inclined.”
However, he added, “mocking our elected leaders who do pray and your fellow Americans who do as well seems ill-advised, ill-mannered, counter-productive, and unkind. It also ignores an American tradition that pre-dates the Republic and harkens back to the earliest days of Puritan settlement in North America in the 17th century.”
