How Wrong Can Ann Coulter Be?
Though the MDJ gave a somewhat milder title to Ann Coulter’s recent hit job on Dr. Kent Brantly, her website proclaims “Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded to ‘Idiotic’”. To which the proper rejoinder might be, “Ms. Coulter, it takes one to know one.”
The two key questions she raises are, first, “Why did Dr. Brantly have to go to Africa”, and second, “Can’t anyone serve Christ in America anymore?” To answer the first, she manages to dance around the issues entirely, jump to conclusions heretofore unimagined, and resort to hermeneutical gymnastics with regard to the Bible. One might wish that her intellectual dexterity translated to Olympic talent, for she’d be a shoo-in for gold. According to Ms. Coulter, Dr. Brantly joined those who go on mission trips as people who are “tired of fighting the culture war” and thus “slink off to Third World countries”. Though she quotes Christ’s Great Commission, she doesn’t let Jesus’ last words stop her from blathering her incessantly banal ones about “Christian narcissism” and essentially saying, “to hell with the rest of the world”, all the while positing herself as a Christian.
Really, you can’t make this stuff up…
As to the second, the idea that no one can “serve Christ in America anymore”, Ms. Coulter is apparently blissfully ignorant of the fact that the vast majority of Christian churches, pastors, workers, Bible colleges, seminaries, bookstores, radio stations, publishing houses, etc., reside right here in the good old USA. Forget her misquoting of the Bible, her needlessly-cruel rhetoric, her misplaced motive-judging; has she no understanding of the need for at least a modicum of fact-gathering as an integral part of good journalism?
Ironically, by placing love of country as a higher good than obeying God regardless of cost, Ms. Coulter unwittingly undermines the very cause she holds dear. Those who will serve Christ best are those whose first allegiance is not to any nation, but to the Kingdom of God, and thus those who place love of country above love of God are precisely those who will be of little help in solving the problems she enumerates.
Speaking personally as a Reagan conservative and frequent Tea Party sympathizer, I certainly share some of Ms. Coulter’s political beliefs, but I refuse to sit quietly and allow others to believe that her position represents anything remotely Biblical. May God raise up legions of true heroes like Dr. Kent Brantly.