In the Middle Ages scientific discovery was heresy and those trying to understand how the world worked were seen as heretics. Things were easier to explain if everything was under the control of a deity, and people were easier to keep under control if what they were told about the deity was not questioned. The messengers controlled the message, and the message controlled the people.

Francis Bacon hadn’t established the scientific method yet, and if he had been around then to promote it, he probably would have been put to death because of it, and not die of the pneumonia he eventually got from trying to prove frozen meat would stay fresh enough to eat later. Something he surmised from the corpses of animals that died in winter and thawed in the spring.

In the Middle Ages all disasters were assumed to be an act of an angry deity, so there was no need to figure out what caused them or how they could be prevented.

With no knowledge of microbes any pestilence was seen as a punishment from God meted out because of the sins of the people, but, so as not to have to share in that blame, those in charge put the blame on those most unlike them, the Jew, the poor, the foreigner, the gypsy, and anyone on the fringes of society. The populace would be so distracted ridding the world of those sinners, they would not see the real sins of those in charge using society for personal gain.

After the Black Plague when society had been decimated and power structure broken down, while science could come out of the shadows and used for the benefit of mankind without the largesse of the ruling class, those wanting to preserve and increase their power kept to promoting religions control over people and condemned science while promoting their religion among the more gullible.

That approach still exists as preventable disasters still happen because of lack of action, and that which could have prevented them are ignored while thoughts and prayers, days of prayer, and scapegoating the “other” are used before and after.

And those in charge, basing their power on the past and the desire to keep things as they were while ignoring the maturing of civilization, still, to varying degrees of success, keep applying the old methods putting those of the same mind in positions to apply them.

The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Trump’s administration since 2018,  Robert Redfield, as an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute in the early days of the AIDS pandemic,  designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military which involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers with AIDS faced societal and family rejection as they were involuntarily discharged under his policies with no safety nets to rely on. They had no homes, most likely having been rejected by family, no jobs, as society turned its back on them, and no insurance, as no company would enroll them with a pre-existing condition.

Their discharges were death sentences.

In his dealings with AIDS in those early years he worked closely with the Christian organization Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP) that maintained that AIDS was “God’s judgment” against homosexuals.

Nine years after the first case was reported and five years after the government got around to doing anything, he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of “false prophets” in a 1990 book, “Christians in the Age of AIDS”.   

He supported a House bill that would have subjected HIV positive individuals to “testing, loss of professional licenses, and quarantine”.

That would have included anyone with a state license, like teachers, who would have most likely suffered the same fate as the involuntarily discharged military personnel.

He advocated abstinence before marriage to stop HIV, but opposed providing free condoms.

Under the program he designed, soldiers were summoned to meet with a chaplain, not a doctor, and informed that they had tested positive for HIV. While being counseled by the chaplain, military police went through their barracks searching for evidence of homosexuality and the names of possible sex partners. 

By 1989 about 5 million soldiers and recruits were tested with 6,000 of them proving HIV positive with many committing suicide, and the rest discharged without medical coverage, and dying impoverished.

In the beginning decade of this century, Redfield advocated for the so-called “ABCs of AIDS” in Africa which promoted sexual abstinence and monogamy, with the use of condoms only as a last resort.

To him, science was not the best way to prevent HIV, a faith-based program built around abstinence and Jesus was.

And now he is in charge of addressing the present virus crisis.

Who is to blame for this crisis?

Ralph Drollinger, the pastor who leads a weekly bible study group for members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet wrote a post titled “Is God Judging America Today?” on his Capitol Ministries blog in which he laid blame for the COVID-19 crisis on Gays and Lesbians.

We are not alone this time, though, because he throws in environmentalists and those who deny the existence of God.

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It is, again, a punishment from God as these people engender “God’s wrath.”

God seems to be getting a bit crotchety because Drollinger claims that when it comes to God there is a “panoply of wraths.” Homosexuality causes the wrath of abandonment, while when it comes to COVID-19, it is the sowing and reaping wrath variety.

Either type, it is still “the consequential wrath of God.”

In the past Drollinger has written a 2018 blog post, “Understanding the Book of Leviticus Today” where he compared same-sex relationships to a woman who “loves her cat” and that accepting Gay marriage would be choosing “a path toward extinction.”

Members of the Bible study group include Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, House and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Health Secretary Alex Azar who is a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force.

How much of what comes out of the White House will be based on science, and how much on medieval thinking?

Worse, how much science has already been pushed aside.

A week ago, Trump and Pence joined over 700 pastors on a conference call to pray for strength and stamina amid the Gay caused, Democratic hoax corona virus outbreak. It was organized by the Christian conservative Family Research Council, which has been declared a ant-GLBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Trump first praised himself for a great pre=hoax economy before telling the pastors, 

“I want to thank you for praying for our country and for those who are sick. You do such an incredible job. You’re very inspirational people. And I’m with you all the way. You know that you see what we’ve done for right to life and all of the things that we’ve been working so hard together. I’ve been working with many of the people on the call. Many, many of the people. We’ve had tremendous support. But we are going to get over this.”

Then he got back to himself.

“We have a very, very big election coming up, especially if you’re evangelical – if you’re evangelical, if you’re Christian, if you’re, frankly, almost any faith. We have people on the other side that are against a lot of the things we all stand for. It’s just going to be, it’s a big date, Nov. 3 — that’s going to be one of the biggest dates in the history of religion, as far as I’m concerned.”

Apparently that means Christmas and Easter, Which is very special to him, are second to it.

Pence told the pastors,

“When I told the president I was going to be speaking to all of you, [he was] in the midst of an extraordinarily busy day. [But] he looked at me and said, ‘I have to find time. I need to find time.’ [T]he prayers of the people on this call mean

[everything]

to him.”

Ben Carson was on in the call, and told the pastors that “God is merciful.” 

“And we will get through this. God still has His hand on this nation. And He has His hand on all of us.”

A divine ignoring of Trump’s precautions.

At a press conference after the conference call, Pence told the American people,

“The chorus of prayers that is coming up from communities of faith around the country is making the difference that it always has in the life of this nation.” 

When Trump put Pence in charge of the corona virus response team, he said it was because he was

 “very good on health care. When Mike was governor of Indiana, they’ve established great health care. They have a great system there, a system that a lot of the other states have really looked to to change their systems. He’s really very expert at the field.”

Pence’s only experience in the area was actually his slow response to the quick spread of HIV in Scott County, Indiana in 2015, When a needle exchange program to slow the infection rate of the illness based on effectiveness elsewhere, his response had been, “I’m going to go home and pray on it,” and the delay led to the infection of over 200 people.

We may need more than prayers these days, and we need someone who recognizes this.