Pandemics know no politics, and yet President Trump, Republican Party leaders and members of the GOP base have weaponized coronavirus for the culture wars, placing American capitalism over human lives and responding to this disease by presumably asserting a right to die without an oppressive lockdown, all for the sake of capital. It seems misplaced for these individuals, predominantly white conservatives, to demand that everyone return to work and reopen the economy, even as we have yet to reach the height of a deadly outbreak. White Christian nationalism is taking on the plague with potentially disastrous results.

As Democratic governors of the northeast, Midwest and West take COVID-19 seriously, take precautions and form consortia to protect their states in the absence of presidential leadership, the GOP has made coronavirus a political issue. Some Republican governors have taken a lax approach to the pandemic, and in some cases such as South Dakota have not only refused to issue a statewide lockdown-- despite the disease running rampant in meat processing plants and nursing home facilities—but have framed the resistance to stay at home orders as an issue of individual liberty. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested that elders would gladly die to save the American economy, Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina are allowing businesses to reopen in the middle of a pandemic, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reopened the beaches, and even considered reopening schools based on the false belief the virus does not affect children.

Trump ally Jerry Falwell Jr. opened Liberty University after Spring Break, and unsurprisingly, students exhibited symptoms of coronavirus infection. Trump wanted to fill the church pews with worshippers on Easter Sunday, and conservative judges in Wisconsin forced voters to walk through a plague to vote, rather than postpone the state primary election. More recently, protesters—including some sporting guns, waving Confederate flags, blocking ambulances and holding antisemitic signs–have participated in anti-quarantine protests. These Astroturf actions to “open the country” are affiliated with the Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation and billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos--who is also associated with the placement of kidnaped migrant children into “Christian” foster care. Trump adviser Stephen Moore compared the protestors engaged in acts of “civil disobedience”—apparently the right to infect others-- to Rosa Parks. This, as Vice President Pence defends Trump’s tweets fanning the flames of dissent-- and encouraging acts of armed insurrection and terrorism—by calling for the liberation of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia from stay-at-home orders.

While it is possible to chalk up some of this reactionary, irrational and toxic behavior to the peculiarities of the death cult that comprises the Trumpian base--with their unhinged pronouncements of “fake news” and Democratic hoax conspiracy theories--far more is at play here.

Red states--which include the former states of the Confederacy, the ideological successors to the Dixiecrats--have a long legacy of disregarding human rights and the well-being of people, a legacy of slavery, segregation and lynching. These states, for all their "pro-life" rhetoric, have high rates of poverty and other negative health and socioeconomic outcomes. Racism and fundamentalism breed phony science and science denial, whether climate change denial and the belief Jesus rode on dinosaurs, or pseudoscience to justify slavery by claiming Blacks were inferior to whites, or that slaves suffered from a mental illness that made them run away.

Remember that white supremacy—of which the Trump administration is an adherent—always ends in death. White Christian fundamentalists do not follow the theology of a Palestinian Jewish refugee of color who healed the sick and cared for the least among us. Rather, theirs is the religion of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus of fiction, the religion of the slave master—reminiscent of the redacted Slave Bible that omitted 90 percent of the Old Testament and half of the New Testament--including passages related to the liberation of the Israelites, rebellion and equality--and taught enslaved Africans to obey their masters.

For centuries, “get back to work!” has been the clarion call of white Christian capitalists who cared little about the health and welfare of human beings, and were concerned foremost with amassing wealth for a small group of white men.

In the name of Jesus, white Christians committed genocide against indigenous people, and kidnaped millions of Africans in the Transatlantic slave trade—with 40 Africans dying in the Middle Passage of infectious disease, malnourishment and brutality for every 100 who made it to the New World. White Christian slave masters who murdered their slaves and worked them to death were concerned with profit, not the lives of black people, as death was baked into the cake and part of the business model. This, as hundreds of thousands of poor white Christian men died for the Confederacy to preserve an economic system that rendered their labor superfluous, and filled the coffers of the Southern aristocracy.

Similarly, there was no concern for the health of black prison laborers of the Jim Crow convict lease system--who were imprisoned under the Black Codes for bogus offenses such as vagrancy and rented out to plantations, corporations, mines and railroads--and the forced laborers who toiled in Ford and General Motors plants in Nazi Germany.

Even today, as the racial, class and demographic implications of the coronavirus are in full view, eugenics dictates that the elderly, prisoners, people of color, immigrants and poor and working folks who are vulnerable and unable to work at home via Zoom are expendable. Once again, white Christian nationalists prioritize profits over lives. This time, they worship an unholy triumvirate of the Golden Calf, White Jesus and Donald Trump.