Lux Lucet

In her recent column Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded to ‘Idiotic’, right wing warrior princess Ann Coulter managed to pen what is perhaps the most virulent anti-Christian column from ever seen by this author. The target of her vitriol is Dr. Kent Brantly, who contracted the deadly Ebola virus while serving as a medical missionary in Liberia. Huffs Coulter,

I wonder how the Ebola doctor feels now that his humanitarian trip has cost a Christian charity much more than any services he rendered.

What was the point?

Whatever good Dr. Kent Brantly did in Liberia has now been overwhelmed by the more than $2 million already paid by the Christian charities Samaritan’s Purse and SIM USA just to fly him and his nurse home in separate Gulfstream jets, specially equipped with medical tents, and to care for them at one of America’s premier hospitals.

So far as this author is aware, Dr. Brantley and his nurse have volunteered for this service and are supported by missionary organizations who agreed to send and support them. This is not a man on the public dole, he is a Christian using his gifts to carry out, not some merely humanitarian mission, but the Great Commission of Christ. Who is Ann Coulter to object to the volunteer work of a Christian missionary? Dr. Brantly, SIM and Samaritan’s purse have asked nothing from her and do not answer to her. I have known one missionary family affiliated with SIM. They served in difficult conditions in Africa to bring both clean water and the Gospel of Christ to those who desperately needed both. Were they wasting their time? In the mind of Coulter, apparently so.

But Coulter doesn’t stop there. She also manages to betray her inner Pharisee when she has the gall to recommend to Dr. Brantly and presumably other Christians the proper object of their evangelistic efforts. No surprise, it’s not the poor. Writes Coulter,

If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could have accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and more decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects all the world.

If he had provided health care for the uninsured editors, writer, videographers and pundits in Gotham and managed to open one set of eyes, he would have done more good than marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.

How Coulter knows any of this, she does not say. In her mind, the Pharisees were right to criticize Jesus for spending so much time with the poor, diseased and downtrodden of Judea. If only he had focused his energies on opening the eyes of a single Sadducee, Pharisee or other member of the ruling elite, he would have done infinitely more good than he did by wasting so much of his time with the sinners, tax gatherers, harlots, crippled, diseased, dying and poor people that he seemed to have so much misplaced compassion for, none of whom had the status or ability to change the corrupt culture of Second Temple Judaism or the larger pagan Greco-Roman world. What a fool Jesus was. If only he had been more like Ann Coulter.

To be fair, Jesus actually did preach the Gospel to the power-elite of his day, and a few, Nicodemus comes to mind, did in fact come to saving faith. But far from having a nation-saving impact, the conversion of a few rich and powerful folks did nothing to stop the rot of unbelief at the heart of 1st Century Judaism. The system continued until it was brought to an end by the Romans in AD 70.

The badly confused Coulter also evidences a severe lack of discernment by implying that Roman Catholicism is, in fact, true Christianity. She comments,

Of course, if Brantly had evangelized in New York City or Los Angeles, The New York Times would get upset and accuse him of anti-Semitism, until he swore – as the pope did – that you don’t have to be a Christian to go to heaven.

Far from being some cowering old man brow beaten by charges of anti-Semitism, the current pope along with this predecessors is a wily fox who will say and do just about anything to ensure the cause of the Roman State-Church is advanced. If this means extending the keys to the kingdom of heaven to the Muslims and Jews, they’re fine with that, so long as it’s them doing the granting. Of course, since scarcely one in a thousand American Evangelicals recognizes Rome for the Anti-Christ, false Gospel preaching, synagogue of Satan that it is, one can’t be so hard on Coulter for missing this point. She has a lot of company.

Coulter continues,

Right there in Texas, near where Dr. Brantly left his wife and children to fly to Liberia and get Ebola, is one of the poorest counties in the nation, Zavala County — where he wouldn’t have risked making his wife a widow and his children fatherless.

But serving the needy in some deadbeat town in Texas wouldn’t have been “heroic.” We wouldn’t hear all the superlatives about Dr. Brantly’s “unusual drive to help the less fortunate” or his membership in the “Gold Humanism Honor Society.” Leaving his family behind in Texas to help the poor 6,000 miles away — that’s the ticket.

If what Coulter’s argument is true, then no one would ever have good reason to become a foreign missionary, for every society at every point in history has had its poor. Or perhaps Coulter is really angling for the job of Missionary Czarina. An all knowing infallible mini-pope, who, after determining with scientific exactitude that the surrounding areas near the home of a potential missionary are sufficiently wealthy, evangelized and possessed of the proper neo-conservative political world view, would then give her nihil obstat and infinitely wise blessing to the foreign missions applicant to go overseas.

Coulter ends with the following remarkable comment,

Today’s Christians are aces at sacrifice, amazing at serving others, but strangely timid for people who have been given eternal life. They need to buck up, serve their own country, and remind themselves every day of Christ’s words: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.”

There may be no reason for panic about the Ebola doctor, but there is reason for annoyance at Christian narcissim.

When it comes to hatred, Coulter needs to get the log out of her own eye. For by her comments she shows herself to be one of those who hate the servants of Christ. And if she hates the servants of Christ, she hates him as well. The words of the Apostle Paul are applicable to Coulter, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand” (Rom.14:4).

As for Coulter, in the view of this writer her condition has been downgraded to clueless.