Greater love hath no one...

Every week, in the Evangelical churches where I was raised, I heard the story of a man who willingly lay down his own life for the sake of others. It was the most important story in the world. It had to be told over and over, every Sunday morning and every Wednesday evening, in all the grisly detail about exactly how much he had suffered in the process of giving up his own life and safety for the sake of others. One of the most powerful and central verses in the Bible is John 15:13, which says “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” And every Evangelical – people who spent the 1990s wearing WWJD bracelets – knows that they should emulate Jesus in everything they do.

I’ll get back to that in a bit.

An atheist friend of mine is one of those rare people for whom vaccines actually ARE dangerous. Not “One in a million people get Guillain Barre Syndrome” levels of risk, and still less “I saw on YouTube how some guy says the government’s hushing up the real number of deaths from the vaccine”, but “I’m allergic to the ingredients and 100% of the vaccines I get send me into anaphylaxis”. She’s young, strong, and healthy apart from the allergies, so she’s at low risk of being harmed by COVID-19, but at high risk of death by suffocation from the vaccine. AND YET, she chose to get the shot anyway. Not to protect herself, but to protect others. She chose to face the 100% certainty that her body would try to kill her within minutes of getting the shot and only emergency medical intervention would save her, rather than face the possibility that she might catch the virus and spread it to someone else who had a 1% chance of dying from it.

She’s an atheist, but she is a far more Christlike person than all the Evangelicals who refuse to get vaccinated. They refuse to take the miniscule risk that they might be that rare person who gets dangerous side effects from the vaccine, in order to avoid the much greater risk that they might infect someone who will die.

Let’s be honest: The vaccine is not 100% free of risk. But the risks from the vaccine are SO MUCH LOWER than the risks from the disease, and everyone who actually understands how these things work keeps telling us so. And yet, a number of Evangelicals hear “There is a non-zero risk” and decide they would rather “trust their immune system” or even say “If I die, that’s God’s will” (and I guess if someone else dies because of their choice that was ALSO God’s will?)

“Lay down his life for his friends”? Sadly, a high percentage of Evangelicals have demonstrated that they will never follow in their Master’s footsteps on that point. They won’t even wear a mask (zero risk to themselves) or endure a half-second needle prick (statistically insignificant risk to themselves) for their grandma. And yet they somehow are still convinced that they are “pro-life”.

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