Imagine that a shark has a fish literally inside its jaws, but cannot bite down. Prayer is like that. It is like a “toxin” that makes you “invisible” to coronavirus.
So I learned yesterday in a sermon by Joel Osteen, one of the most influential preachers in the country, broadcast in the midst of the pandemic.
As I sometimes do to keep tabs on the US religious/political scene, last Sunday I channel-surfed all the televangelists available in my basic cable package while I drank my morning coffee. I wanted to know if they were social distancing and what they were saying about the virus. Most were airing reruns or refusing to social distance, although this was not always easy to discern.
Osteen was by far the most interesting case. Broadcasting from the stage of an empty church, he came remarkably close to assuring listeners that his combination of Christian prayer and New Age positive thinking gives them immunity to the virus.
He stated, “You don’t have to be afraid of the virus, God has a shield around you.” Also, “God can make you invisible to the virus.”
It was not all virus all the time—he spoke about jobs, families, and divine protection from an all-purpose “the enemy.” LIkely he has legal deniability if people die because of his inspirational message. Nor would I say that his advice to cultivate a hopeful outlook is always wrong in all contexts—for example, it may help some people stay healthy in a pandemic or flourish in their everyday routines.
Still, Osteen started and ended with God protecting people from the virus. The implication seemed 90 percent clear, with only 10 percent wiggle room for blaming possible attacks from “the enemy.”
Osteen's Schtick: Sermon Illustrations of the Week
If you think a sermon should have one unifying image, Osteen is not for you. The unity comes at the abstract conceptual level-- his never-ending list of wonderful benefits of faith-- whilea the specific images from week to week spray out like a blender without the top on. This week's set featured God and/or prayer and/or positivity manifesting all these effects.
defending Osteen against murderers by making him invisible,
defending the prophet Elijah against his enemies by blinding them,
dovetailing with M.C. Hammer’s rap song “You Can’t Touch This,”
defending listeners against smoke and bombs that cannot disturb them,
creating a “hedge of protection” behind which “all you have to do is stay in the secret place.”
The climax was a story, its imagery conflated with all the above, that led back to COVID. It was about a sort of fish which a shark cannot eat (supposedly, who knows if this is true?) because it releases a toxin that freezes the shark’s jaw and literally makes it impossible to bite down. Osteen explained that prayer is like this toxin, allowing the fish to be fearless and carefree. “Verbalizing your fears” does the opposite: “negative thought is like bait.”
Did He Really Say Something Concrete This Week?
Week after week, Osteen’s sermons are tediously similar: relentlessly chipper, individualistic, and vague, with the same logic. This one did not break much with the formula.
Nevertheless this was the first time—out of a perhaps a dozen times checking in on him—that his rhetorical promises had such a high degree of specificity and concreteness in relation to the news cycle.
Presumably, by this same degree of concrete focus, his listeners are now more concretely tempted to risk their lives with“invisibility to coronavirus” as their defense.
I've often argued that self-styled “positive thinking” is largely toxic in practice. Thus, hearing Osteen overtly promote prayer as a “toxin” that paralyzes someone, or walls someone off behind a hedge, or stops them from “verbalizing” legitimate fears-- all this strikes me as fascinatingly and revealingly evocative. It might be amusing, too, if not for the grave implications of this application.
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