Ann Coulter’s no voice for Christian conservatism

The big news this week had to do with the two missionaries hospitalized in Atlanta after coming down with Ebola in Liberia. They are SIM missionary Nancy Writebol and Samaritan’s Purse physician Kent Brantly. The two are receiving an experimental treatment that has never before been tested on humans.

But their illnesses have sparked a side controversy. Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator tried to make the case that American missionaries ought not to go to Africa. She said Brantly would’ve done better evangelizing Americans than “marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.” Coulter says outrageous things for effect, and I don’t want to suggest she is the tip of an iceberg of conservative opinion on this topic. But then there’s Donald Trump, another conservative provocateur, who tweeted: “Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S. Treat them, at the highest level, over there. THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS! The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to faraway places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences.”

Coulter isn’t a spokesperson for any brand of Christian conservatism. Her statement directly contradicts one of the things that Christians think is most important—the inherent dignity of all people. We believe that every single human person is made in the image of God, is worthy of dignity, and has an eternal soul. That eternal soul has a destination, and the message of Jesus is for them.

Those beliefs are allegiances we must pay first and foremost to God, not to our conservative taskmasters. Christians have to walk very carefully around the political illusion, the idea that all problems are political and all solutions are, therefore, political. Christians, having bought into that illusion, sometimes feel obligated to buy into Republicanism whole-hog, as if to be Christian is to be Republican on every single level. The call of Christ to go to all nations is something the earliest Christians took seriously, and it has nothing to do with whether there’s an Ebola virus in a particular country.

Trump’s comment is a little more interesting because it’s about mechanism. What’s the best way to help these patients without putting other people at risk? Those calculations were made as part of the decision to bring the two patients back to the United States. If this virus is going to enter into our society, it’s not going to come because we transported patients back under extreme medical care.

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