“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Rahm Emanuel

Emanuel uttered this Machiavellian quote in in the midst of the chaos of the Financial Crisis of 2008, and he’s never been able to live it down.

Donald Trump has never read Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli or any other philosopher, but he intuitively understands Emanuel’s devious machinations.

The stable genius is using the coronavirus to cement his support with his evangelical base. Polls show that his support with white evangelicals is slipping and that’s what motivated him last week to proclaim:

“I call on governors to allow our churches and places of worship to open now. These are places that hold our society together and keep our people united. The people are demanding to go to church and synagogue and to their mosque.”

Actually, that’s not correct. I’m more familiar with Christian theology, so I’ll speak from that perspective. Most Christians realize that the Church isn’t a physical structure, but the body of Christ, that is to say believers. And true Christians don’t’ need to meet in a church building to carry out their evangelical imperative: to preach the Gospel and to minister to the physical and spiritual needs of the world.

It’s only white evangelicals who meet in huge megachurches that equate financial prosperity and their magnificent cathedrals with the blessing of God, who have been clamoring for churches to be reopened.

The vast majority of leaders of mainline Protestant denominations have supported church closures and some pastors have even locked their churches to halt the spread of the virus.

Faithful shepherds tend to the spiritual and physical needs of their congregations, and the last thing they want is for Christians to become infected with the coronavirus by meeting in crowded buildings.

Trump is speaking to his racist evangelical choir, and the rest of us do well to disregard almost everything he says. We will survive this pandemic in spit of Trump and his sick and demented white evangelical followers.