The Priests of Plague

I'm I'm getting used to a new way of living, to put it mildly, but you know, it's taking a lot. I'm actually learning a lot about myself through this quarantine, and I'm trying to use that part to be empowering rather than fucking frightening. Well, we're all learning a lot during this new period of quarantine, and some of the people who are learning the most are America's religious leaders, particularly the leaders of large churches that make their money by having a lot of people uh cram in the

door every Sunday and and drop out donations. Um. Yeah. And today, Miles, we're going to talk about how organized religion historically response to plagues. Uh and that's gonna be a fun topic for you to discuss. Are you a big fan of plagues or organized religion? I'm plagues, not as much, not as much as I used to be. Not as much plagues around When that game Plague Inc. Came out and I was just sucking laughing my ass off, I'm like, here, come to London Olympics, get ready for

global spread um. Anyway, but organized religion. I went to Lutheran school until eighth grade, and then I went to Catholic High school, so I know a little bit of out of all sides of the crucifix, of the crucifix? Interesting, Oh right, because religion? Yeah that makes sense. Okay, well Miles, let's let's let's let's let's let's shove our intellectual probost guy into this subject and uh excrete saliva in order to dissolve it so that we can suck it back

up and gain nourishment. Wow, who what flies? What insect was a fad? Okay? Yeah, they like squirt goop out and it dissolves stuff and then they suck it back up. I'm pretty sure that's how flies work. Can you now? This is the natural extension of knowing something like that is, can you make a big barrel of whatever they spit out and just kill somebody with that? Uh? Probably not. I mean maybe if the flies are carrying a disease, but they aren't always. You know, you have to think

you need a lot of flies. You need a lot of flies now miles outside of your planes to murder people with flies. Um, let's talk about let's get into the subject. So on a video posted nearly February eighteen, Texas evangelical preacher and member of Donald Trump's Faith Advisory Council, Gloria Copeland said this to her parishioners in a Facebook live video. And I wanna I wanna have you play that and and play the start too, about a minute in four seconds. Well, listen, partners, we don't have a

flu season. We've got a duck season, the dear season, but we don't have a flu season. And don't receive it when somebody threatens you with everybody's getting the flu, we've already had our shot. He bore our sicknesses and carried our diseason. That's what we send though, and by his stripes we were healed. If you've already got the flu, I'm gonna pray for you right now. Father, I pray

for every person that has symptoms of flu. I'm asking your Lord, but your supernatural power to heal them now from the top of their into the souls of their feet. Flu I bind you off of the people. And Jesus, Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of flu. And we receive it, and we take it, and we are healed by his strips. Amen. You know, the Bible says he himself bore our sicknesses and carried our diseases, and by his strips were goodness. Yeah,

that's pretty great, isn't it. Who he Dude, her energy is like someone at a bar who has been lying about everything they've been telling you the whole time, but it's ultimately trying to get free drinks. Like he's like, yeah, you know, because basically, like the way I look at it is everybody's blessing to how like it's just very fast, very smooth. But she sounds fucked up though too, in a weird way, like yeah, she does sound like she's she's she's doing all of this to like get you

to give her a pack of cigarettes. Right, Yeah, you know you want to, but you know, the people who do that get a lot of free shots and a lot of cigarettes. Uh. And she has made a lot of money and is now advising President Donald Trump. Yeah, it's it's pretty cool, Gloria. And that video went on to note that um, uh, pete listeners should just keep saying, I'll never have the flu. I'll never have the flu.

Inoculate yourself with the word of God. Flu I bind you off of the people in the name of Jesus. It's good stuff. Yeah. Again. That was February of two thousand, eighteen miles and that year's flu season was, according to the CDC, responsible for more hospitalizations than any previous season

in the CDC's records. Uh. And the fact that Copeland had the ear of the President while she was advising her more than a million listeners to not get flu shots, um may have had an impact on why that season was so bad, and may also have been a message of things to come. As I write this in March, we or well, actually yeah I wrote this in March.

It's now April. Um. But we're at a place where the president very recently voiced his desire to reopen the country well before medical officials advised him to do so so that he could have it open in time for Easter. It looks like we've moved past that particular bad idea. Um, but my guy, it was like right on the fucking edge there for a little while. I don't even Yeah, I mean, I get it. That would have been great thematically, it would have been awesome like that would it would

have been while everyone was dying around me. I would have at least been able to like envision the scene in the movie made seventy years later, where like they film a bunch of tow like increasingly unsettling like music builds as all these different congregants, you know, file in and shake each other's hands, and yeah, you could, you could, you could, you could make that that four minutes scene is amazing, And then switched to the mass graves, you know,

I mean, it's would be a great meme though, where Jesus Capitalist Christ uh you know, is being crucified by COVID nineteen right now and then resurrected on Easter to come back with massive sales with thirty percent off some of your most favorite items. Yeah, yes, um, and you know, speaking of capitalist Jesus Christ. Um. Uh yeah. So I wound up like interested in all this, and I went down this rabbit hole of like digging into the reactions

specifically Christian churches to horrible plagues all throughout history. Um. And I as a little bit of a I don't know, content warning here. Um, this whole episode is just because I was drunk at on Google at midnight a couple of days ago, and and now this exists. So you're it's just gonna have to It's gonna happen to you now, Miles,

and there's no there's no escaping it. So we'll start with the Black Plague because it killed about a third of the world, and it's like, you know, kind of the gold standard of plagues, you know, if we're comparing plagues to like terrorist manifestos, it's like the plague equivalent of the Uni Bomber's book. You know, It's like it's like the top of the fucking pillar. You know. Is this album? As in terms of albums, it depends on

your taste, But for you, what's you? I think? I think The Who's Tommy is the greatest album of all times. So I would say the Black Plague is the Tommy of plagues. Wow, okay, I like that. M hm. I learned about you right now, thank you. Yeah so. Uh. Most of our media tends to focus on the damage the plague did to medieval Europe, and it it fucked

medieval Europe, but pretty bad. But the plague actually started off somewhere in the East, we don't really know where exactly, and it was equally devastating in Asia in the Middle East. And one of the first sources we have for the Black Plague was Abu hafs Umar Ibben al Wardi uh In, a Muslim scholar who himself died of the Black Plague in thirteen nine, and he claimed its origin was somewhere in China, which at that point was a much vaguer

term than it is today. Uh And he described that in the Near East, it quotes sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more and decimating the population, which is a sentiment now that we're losing a thousand Americans a day to this. That reminds me more and more of the president of the country. Yeah. Yeah, hate, you hate when history does that thing of like just showing back up,

like yeah, you thought I was done. So it's the Black plague like rolled probably spread along the Silk Road, you know, through travel and transit and the major arteries of those two things at the time. Um and yeah, by thirteen forty nine it is it hit Limburg, Germany, where one chronicler wrote, there came a great death in Germany that is called the first Great death, and they

died by the dozen. And when that began, on the third day, they died in Limburg more people died, not counting the children because we didn't really count the children back in the day, Like why would we give a shit about the kids? Like funk that noise? How do you what the fun was going on back then when they're doing body counts, like they're just kids die time, Jeremy Iron, you know kids die for no reason. Yeah. Yeah, Like there's kids are just dropping left and right back

in the day. So until somebody's like fifteen, they're not even real. Um. So it's like a bunch of babies die like who gives a ship expects are low? Yeah, Once some like adults start dropping, then it's like okay, now we're losing some. Right, those little those little screaming short people are all quiet. But now there's not as many people to go work the field. Something might be wrong. Yeah. If you can't work, you don't count. Yeah. Yeah, that

was kind of the attitude. Now at this point in history, if you were a Christian, you know, there was no Protestant game in town, right, it was just like Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism, Like that was kind of it for you. Um. And since you know, Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism were like the Christian religions in town, and the Church in Rome was the wealthiest government in Europe and probably the most

powerful government in Europe. The Church was kind of on deck to take action when this horrible plague starts killing everybody. Like there's not really much in the way of organization or unity pan you know European when the plague hits, the church is the closest thing you have, you know, it's your c d C at the time, and it was not great at being the c d C boy that is like oh science, yeah no, no, no, not our strong suit. Um. Now to give that, I mean

to give them a little bit of credit. It wasn't anyone strong suit at the time. Like, it's not like the doctors had a great handle on germ theory in the thirteen forties. Um, so no one really knew what to do. Um So this will actually be the first the only part in the story where like the Church isn't taking any they're taking actions that are endangering and killing huge numbers of people, but they don't mean to be you know, um like they couldn't have really known

how this was all going to work out. It's not really there's a lot like a puppy play with like dynamite or something. You're like, oh, you don't want to I I don't know, because like the Catholic Church is a horrible had done a lot of horrible, horrible things

up to this point in history. It's more like it's more like a serial killer accidentally backing over a puppy, where like that doesn't really like if you're trying to like list list that person's crimes, like, well, they didn't mean to hit the puppy, but it's just a thing that happened. Because they that happens to be a thing that just happened. It's on their resumes towards the bottom. Really yeah, it's like John Wayne Gacy accidentally runs over

a cat. That's the Catholic Church. And this specific instance, like um, so, the Church's first reaction to the outbreakup plague in Europe, authorized by the Pope, was to hold mass processions through the great cities of Europew. Again, they couldn't have known this was a bad idea, but this was a terrible, terrible call um And it came out of a longstanding tradition called Rogation Days, which were enormous multi day processions held by the Church. To quote say,

God's desire for penitence. Uh yeah, so like God's piste and you gotta march through. God's always angry at you, and you gotta Like the ancient Catholic Church, if any of you had parents who had anger management problems or substance abuse issues, and like they come home like really piste off, and it's like everybody's job has to be to calm down, you know, mom or dad or whoever. I'm guessing a lot of people listening have had that experience.

That's kind of the general attitude towards the Catholic Church is like something bad is happening. We've got all like fucking the church, like God is home and drunk and we need to like hill him out. Yeah, that's very much the attitude kind of everyone has towards God in Europe. Um. And so they start these mass exhibitions of faith to honor specific saints. Um. And it also kind of gives you know, it kind of helps reinforce the power of

the church in Rome. Um. So Yeah, as one historian wrote, it is little wonder than that one of the first actions of the Church upon the arrival of the plague was to call special civic masses and processions thought to be useful in quelling the divine rage and sparking repentance in the people. And in some cities these processions lasted as long as three days, and we're attended by thousands

of people penitence. Went barefoot and wore sackcloth. They sprinkled each other in ashes, wept, prayed, tore out their hair, and waved candles as they stumbled through city streets. Um, you may recognize this all is very bad social distancing. This is not not recommend it. It just plague cella in the streets. Yeah, Yeah, it's exactly. It's like all right,

let's let's let's fucking yeah, let's spring break everywhere. But with hair tearing, hair tearing, and you know, like sure, hair tearing though, isn't like a fun calm thing you can say like hair tearing, like you have to really envision what's happening there. People are probably screaming, crying, pie just yeah, get get a hand on your hair right now and just kind of feel how deep it's in there. Yeah, imagine having a list of things where hair tearing is

probably towards like the top. And you started to buy it like okay, ye screaming right, like sobbing right, like crying great, uh like punching. Sure, you have to get through a lot of ship before you're like yeah, hair tearing, yeah, pull my own fucking hair out, put my hair out. It is one of those things like um like tarring and feathering where um, you know we kind of it just kind of gets like, oh yeah, people used to

get tired and feathered. That's sure was a thing, but it's like no, no, people were pouring boiling pitch on each on other people and if it killed them. It's not like in a fucking like Disney like channel show where the kids do a gag where it's like feather. Um, yeah, yeah, well it's not it's not really glue, you know, they're only glue was like as hot as the coffee that burned that woman so bad she needed to be hospitalized because of McDonald's. Anyway, Um, this is yeah, let's roll along.

So yeah, obviously all these processions spread the bubonic plague fucking everywhere, right, like, of course, Um, but you know you can't really the Church didn't know what they were doing. Um. And for a little bit of fairness, the best data we have, which is also very imperfect, and none of it, you know, is numerical data, But the best data we have suggests that non Catholic parts of the world suffered pretty similar death rates to the Catholic parts of the world.

So like, and probably because kind of everyone's reaction was to do similar things when this starts to happen, like it's just this unknown, horrible thing, you know. Um, And if we're going to be really fair to the church, we should also note that priests and nuns probably died at a significantly higher rate than the rest of the population because they spent a lot of time ministering to

the sick and dying. Um. In his book The Great Mortality, John Kelly, the historian, not the not the trump guy uh points out that forty two of all of the clergy in Europe died during the plague. So half of all the priests, half of all the nuns, half of everyone who works in the church, which is again your only international organization. Effectively in this period, half of them are fucking gone. Um. And that's compared about of the general populace. And this has a a permanent, long term

effect on on the church in Rome. And I'm gonna quote from a rite up in medievalist dot net. Because so many were ill and so few priests remained. As the disease progressed, Clement the sixth, who was the pope at the time, declared that the dying could make their confession to anyone present, even to a woman, said an English bishop, and that it would still lead to salvation. This was a big deal for the church is previously

only clared you were permitted to perform last rites. As Barbara Tuckman writes in A Distant Mirror, the climate is fourteenth century climate. The sixth founded necessary to grant remission of sin to all who died of the plague because so many were unattended by priests. Uh, the priests were doing what they could, but they were paying with their lives. So this is one of those situations where like, the Catholic Church isn't really to blame for what happens during

this period, but really fox them over and you can. Honestly, a lot of historians look at this as like the beginning of the end for church power and the way that it had been just because like all of their best priests, the most dedicated, the most connected to the community all fucking die. Um, and the only priests left are like the shittiest, the ones who believed the least, the ones who are willing to like hide from the plague. Yeah. Um, and that has a long term impact, so right yeah

yeah um. So regular people, because there's suddenly less priests, less nuns, no one doing last, rites feel like the church has abandoned them through the crisis, even though it actually probably did more than almost anything to reduce the spread of the disease. That now priests who had been exposed to the plague weren't wandering around touching people anymore or like you don't want to be Yeah. Um, but

people don't see it that way. They see it as the church abandoning them, um and and so yeah, it's pretty cool thing that happens in this period of time. And it's hard to take any kind of lesson from this because, like I'm going to say, it's bad that the Catholic Church lost, but it's like messed up that after all the genocide and torture. The thing that like really starts to funk them over is too many compassionate

priests trying to minister to the sick. But also those compassionate priests were the ones spreading the plague the most. So it's like there's no lesson a lot of the time in history, right, it just filtered out all the

fucking shitty guys. Yeah. Yeah, there's like the there's like the bits of history like studying the rise of the Nazis where it's like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of really direct and critical lessons here, and then there's stuff where it's like, funk, I don't even know what you're supposed to learn from this, Yeah, because you're playing completely in a different reality. Yeah, completely a different set of not this is just some ship that happened wild yeah, yeah, yeah,

that happened. Yeah. And it's worth noting that religion itself didn't decline during this period, just people who's faith in the church. Um, the dead priests and the disease bearing possessions of old were replaced by something that spread just as much disease, but that wasn't directly connected to the power of the Catholic Church and was in fact even weirder. And we're gonna talk now about flagelence. Do you know what flagelence are? Miles like when you self whip? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

that's that's the basic idea. I am very excited to talk to you about whipping yourself, But you know what's a lot like beating yourself bloody with an iron tipped whip. No capitalism, Yeah that part. Here's some ads, okay, and we're back, uh, And we're talking about flagelence. So flagelens are our men who believed that they were ordained by God to redeem society by recreating the suffering of Christ on their own bodies. And because I don't know if

you've ever tried to crucify yourself, Miles. I can say from experience it's not easy. Um, there's a lot of there's a lot of like really unexpected challenges in the self crucifixion process. Yeah. I mean I would only maybe only metaphorically emotionally have I engaged in crucifixion. I mean

I do that all the time. Whenever someone gets angry at me because I'm say, swinging a machette around and it it wounds someone, I put my arms out on my side in the manner of Christ to to to portray the fact that I have become a christ figure and I'm taking the sense of the world onto my own body. Um. I find that works out really well with people. They tend to they tend to respond to that. Yeah. But Flagelens are doing this, uh in a in a much more direct way. They're they're just beating the ship

out of themselves. Uh. And I'm going to quote from what is I would say generally positive right up from the Christian History Institute, because I find it interesting to go to these groups sometimes to find their write ups somethings. So here's how the Christian History Institute describes flagelence stripped to the waists beating themselves with leather whips tipped with iron spikes until the blood flowed. Groups of two hundred to three hundred, and sometimes up to a thousand march

from city to city. They begged Christ and Mary for pity, and townspeople sobbed and growned in sympathy. They performed three times a day, twice publicly in the church square and once in private. They were organized under a lay master for usually thirty three and a half days to represent Christ's years on earth. They pledge self support and obedience to the master. They were not allowed to bathe, shave, change clothes, sleep in beds, talk, or have intercourse with

women without the master's permission. So you see what we're going through here is like we start with the Catholic Church's response these processions, which are a horrible thing to do, and then we move on to the flagelens, which are like even we're getting even worse at social distancing now, um, because it's just sort of like a like a kink show, like a live kink show road to Yeah, it shows and the public will do like sun of a basic

self whip being, they'll get off. And then where we really get the money is the private shows we do at night. Now, if you want to get in there, we'll do some weird ship. The lay master will let us fuck if we need to whatever, you know, so check it out. It just sounded like a weird racket. It's it's it's almost like it's an experiment to see

how you can spread the plague most efficiently. So now you have people who don't bathe for weeks on end and beat themselves bloody every day, wandering through town and they're not just being watched by people. Um, sick children are brought to them for healing. Uh. If those children have the plague, obviously that spreads to the Flagelens. If the Flagelens have the plague, it spreads to the sick

kids and their family. But also these people. As these men are whipping themselves bloody, worshippers would dip their clothing in the blood and then press it to and then press it to their eyes. Disgusting. It's like it really is like someone some scientists set out to be like what's the how can I spread the most plague like? And they nail it. They nail it like this is solid work in terms of plague spreading. I'm very impressed. Get the bloody whip, guys. Blood it's in your fucking

rub it in your eyes. You want to get it right in that fucking eye, dude, Like that's the place to do it. Who fucking told them like that? You need? You had to go that far with it. Why couldn't have just been like, oh, we're near them. Might have to be like now I need the blood in my fucking I You know, I think it's always I think Miles that it's kind of like the yes and sort of thing is applied to religion. You know. This is just sort of you just do what feels good in

the moment, you know. Or it's like speaking tongues where one person whatever and then other people go all the way in there like you got watch but yeah, and they fucking start vibing. Yeah, I get it. Performative. So I guess that person just like, oh, you're just gonna fucking sort of weep near them. I'm gonna put the fucking blood in my eyes because that's down. And everyone's like, now we're rubbing plague blood in our eyes. It's a new hip thing. It spreads viral e you know. Although

the bubonic plague wasn't a virus. But you know what I'm saying, you get the get the you get the I don't think it was a virus. What's the bubonic plague of virus? I always get this mixed up, the whole virus versus bacteria. Bacteria, Yep, yep, that's what I thought. Okay, cool, I remain a great expert. So the Flagelens are doing a bad thing here in terms of this objectively spread

the plague to a shipload of people. But again, they're not monsters, Like there's no one with like good advice really being like this is a bad idea, and here's the evidence as to why, Like I mean, you could. I'm sure there were people who recognize it like this, really see, it seems like we get a lot more plague cases once the Flagelens came in. But like, we're not doing so hot at science in this areas. You can't.

They're not trying to be irresponsible. It's a nonsense. Time they thought God had just started murdering all of them, and they reacted with panic, but also in a way that like I think I can't call them monsters for doing it. Um, Yeah, if we're looking for the greatest evil committed by Christendom. In the play Gears, Um, it's actually something that occurs kind of separate from the organized chunks of the Catholic Church, or at least separate from

what the church wanted in that period. See folks suffering through the worst of the plague. Gears noticed that Jewish people did not seem to suffer as badly from the creeping death. And there's a number of theories for this, and it probably boils down to the fact that number one, Jewish people bathed regularly in the Middle Ages, and Christians really didn't, so they're kind of the only people. And yeah, that's still like maybe like once a week or once

a month or something like. They're not bathing, but bathing, and other people are just like, no, you just put on new clothes over your flth and um. They also washed the bodies of their dead before burial. And since the plague is spread heavily by like, um fucking fleas and stuff like, this helps, right, it reduces the They don't get it as much as Christians. Um. And they also aren't attending these giant marches through the city. They're not hanging around near around near the flag a Lens.

They're doing their own thing in their own neighborhoods, while Christians and Christian parts of town are rubbing the blood of whip building transients into their eyes. So it's not hard to see why Jewish people don't get it quite as much, and still a lot of them die of the plague. Don't get me wrong, but they people notice that Jewish communities aren't being hit by this as hard

as the Christian ones. Um, And rather than kind of recognized, oh, maybe we should start bathing and stop hanging out with these whip people, UM, Christians started engaging in a series of unspeakably violent pogroms. And in fact, some scholars will call this the first Holocaust. UM, and we will we will never even have a vague idea of the total death toll. But the individual massacres we know about, we're horrific. UM. In one Valence Tine's Day in Strasburg, Germany, two thousand

Jewish people were burnt to death. UM. Three thousand Jews were massacred in a couple of days in the ghetto of Mainz. Um. Jews were massacred in Spain and France and the Balkans and and basically everywhere but chunks of Poland because the king of Poland the time had a Jewish mistress and so he was he was chill. Yeah, he was like he's like, hold up, wait a minute, this is great for me, So yeah, don't worry about it.

I'm also just kind of I'm still thinking about the bathing part where the Christians culturally were so much dirtier, and they're like, look at them, the old clean people who don't get sick. They must be involved in some kind of dark shit or whatever. And then the idea of yet what I don't know, like the complexion of a person who has not bathed in however long you naturally interact with a bathing situation, what that's like If it's like a scratcher that you'd get at a liquor store,

like you'd reveal a whole other thing on. Yeah, you get, you get holier. You know, the longer you go without bathing, the more God loves you. Oh damn it. God's God's God's into some kinky ship miles. Um, really He's really into you know that, Like, um, you know, you know, God's favorite pornography is actually old episodes of Peanuts and that character Pig. But now this has gone too far, this is god further than it ought to. Oh hell yeah, yeah,

where you going with that, buddy? You want to you want to finish that there is you know, I didn't want to lead this into like child porn territory. So let's go back to anti Semitism. Um. So uh now and trying to like parce out the Catholic Church is

guilt in this. The Catholic Church is guilty of a ton, an, absolute assload of anti Semitism over the centuries, and they definitely seeded communities around Europe with a lot of this and reinforced it in their Catholic churches with like stained glass reliefs of Jewish people killing Christian children that are around to this day. There were even more of them

back then. So there's absolutely a significant level of guilt that goes into the Catholic Church in terms of inculcating these enough of these beliefs in people that they were there when the plague hit and that had an impact on the massacre. But when it comes to what they actually did during the plague when Jewish people started getting murdered. They didn't they didn't encourage this sort of ship quite

the opposite. In fact, Pope Clement the sixth released two papal bowls during the plague, one in eight, and papal bowls were kind of like the presidential tweets of the day, like this is Pope Clement like getting up and and hopping on the twitter um. The first of his papal bowls condemned people who attacked Jews for spreading the plague uh and in specifically stated that Christians who did this

had been seduced by that liar the devil. And in his second papal bowl, Pope Clement said, it cannot be true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world, the same plague, by the hidden judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves in many other races who have never lived alongside them, which is actually like a really reasonable, like scientifically backed

reason for for not doing this, Like he's actually very he handles this as well as you can expect, I guess, like that's like that's like that meme where it shows like level of thinking where it's just fucking light bursting out of your skull. We're like, hold on, let's look around. Everybody's getting it. Everybody's getting it. That's not fair. Cities without any Jewish people are getting to like you can't

you clearly this can't be their fault. Hey, I want Hey, I want to blame him as much as you guys do. Trust me, I do. I'm the pope. I want to It would be great if we could love blaming people. Huge about blame. I mean, I would love to escapegoat,

but I'm just this one's tough. This I will say, it's interesting that the initial response of the Pope in Um was arguably based in sounder science than the first responses of the President of the United States to r o Play Like clements reasoning is more solid than what Trump was dropping. So there you go. You're getting own. You're getting owned from centuries and so Clement the sixth I would say, response to this about as well as you could have possibly hoped. But also a lot of

people ignore him, millions of people. And there's also obviously there's individual Catholic priest, individual churches who don't follow it. Like, but people in general follow some people aren't on Twitter as Yeah, tens of thousands of Jews die horribly during the plague from violence, you know, kind of a minimum um. And the explanation you'll hear most often for why these people were killed is that ignorant Christians assumed that the Jews were poisoning them all as part of some sort

of like white genocide scheme. Um. And yeah, this is this is something the Church does deserve some credit for because they spread the rumor that Rabbi sacrificed Christian children for centuries. But um, the it's more complicated than that, even though, because more recent research into the eradication of Jewish communities in Europe during the plague suggests that what happened actually has fairly little to do with the actual

damage done by the plague. In other words, the places where Jewish people weren't killed weren't necessary the places that suffered most from the plague. It wasn't Oh, a bunch of us died from the plague, and now we're angry and we need a scapegold to be violent towards. It's actually not that's that doesn't seem to be what really happened, and I'm gonna quote now from a paper put out by the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

At an aggregate level, we found that scapegoating led to an increase in the baseline probability of a persecution. However, at the city level, locations which experienced higher plague mortality rates were less likely to engage in persecutions. Furthermore, persecutions were more likely in cities with a history of anti semitism consistent with scapegoating, and less likely in cities where Jews played an important economic role. This jokes with long

standing findings in the field of genocide studies. Essential what you're seeing is that like the towns that people hated Jews the most before the plague took the opportunity to murder a bunch of Jewish people, the towns that suffered the worst from the plague, if they didn't have as much of a history from anti Semitism, they didn't find themselves driven to suddenly start killing Jewish people. Um. It

was folks who just kind of took the opportunity. Um. And one of the things that seemed to be most protective of Jewish people during this time was the cities in which they were kind of most economically integrated. And this, um this brings us to a real fucking bummer in

the field of genocide studies. Uh and it, I'm gonna mean, it almost seems like a given, Like yeah, I want to tell you, like the really the coolest thing, the most fun thing about genocide studies, Like that's I don't know if that's ever sentence someone's going to say, so thank you though for preparing me. I consider this one of the least fun things about genocide studies, even though it's kind of explaining why genocides don't happen in some places.

Um quote. According to the scapegoating theory, members of a majority experiencing negative shocks settle on a specific target to blame for their problems. Another potential mechanism determining the likelihood of persecution focuses on the extent of economic complementarities, so the ability to which their economically intermingled between the majority

and the minority. This thesis argues that patterns of economic complementarity and substitute ability determine the ability of two groups to coexist when the economic activities of the two groups complement each other, shocks may lead the majority to protect the minority because of its economic value. So that's a bummer that, like what protected communities from. I mean, there's

two ways to view it. Either the soulas is like oh no, like purely, when people think that they have financial benefits from not murdering each other, they don't murder each other. That's the bummer where it's like, oh god,

our only solution is more capitalism. The other way to look at is just that like, no, when when two different groups, when a minority group becomes intermingled with a majority and they all become economically tied, they get to know each other, they shop at each other's stores, and they don't and they're like, oh no, I know these people, they're part of my community. I'm not going to murder them. And I see that they have there's we have value that we offer each other and at all, it's not

just like who the funk are these people? Yeah, so you can you can interpret this and in an optimistic view of human nature or a pessimistic view of human nature, and it kind of feeds equally well into either. You know, I wonder if it would be something like, well, you know, once there's robots, Um, we're just going to be that's I mean, that's my solution. Like, I don't know, that seems like that motive seems a little bit far off. You know, for years now, Miles, every time we've hung out,

I've said, if there weren't robots, I'd be murdering you. Um. And I never really thought about why I was saying that, but yeah, it was super funny. And then now that you said this, I'm starting anyway. Yeah, we can explore that later. Um. So yeah, it's cool stuff. Um. Anyway, there's a lot of the Black plague is a bomber um.

And and we're going to move on from the Black plague. Uh, and the question of whether or not genocide is inevitable or if it's only avoidable with economic complimentarity or whatever. We're gonna We're gonna move on from that complicated topic of discussions to talk about something fun. The Spanish flew epidemic of nineteen eighteen. Are you a big span flu fan? Are you a sea Yeah? Oh my God of the flues so much about this whole thing. I love it

so much. Um. Yeah, if I'm you know. No. The only thing I know is that I think Babe Ruth got it twice. That sounds about that sounds like Babe Ruth, And a lot of people would say, you know, Babe Ruth, it's the Babe Ruth of flues. I think more modernly people would say it's the Lebron James of flues. But it's really this is like you're sucking. I'm just saying, if Lebron was a flu, he would kill five to fifty million human beings, much like is though, just as

like a personal thing. I feel very proud of you for knowing he don't bring him into this dunking. Well look, I'm just trying to make this to the audience. Lebron James, I mean, how far? And like the Lakers, the Spanish flu carried out a series of dunks all around the world. Um that killed tens of millions of people, just like the Lakers. Oh my god, now this is do you do You have you heard much about like how the name Spanish flu came about Miles. Isn't it like his

xenophobic label? No? Um, well it became one. Actually, it's very this is a tremendous irony. Um So the Spanish Flu, we don't know where it came from. Some people say somewhere in Asia, some people say somewhere in eastern Europe. There's actually a really good chance it started in Kansas. And if you like, some people tracing it back to

think that it actually did start in Kansas. Um. Yeah, And if the Spanish Flu originated from Kansas, then it's probably the second deadliest thing to come out of that state, right next to Kirstie Alley. Um. Yeah, it's yeah. I was just talking about Kirsty recently. Yeah, I fifty million human beings. Um. So the Moniker, the Spanish Flu came out. The Spanish Flu started to break out in nineteen eighteen. And what was happening in nineteen eighteen, we have this

this whole World War One thing. You might have heard of it, Um it was kind of World Wars before World Wars were cool, you know, yeah, before they got gentrified. Um, before like Disney took over. Um So, the Spanish flew this influenza hits and it starts killing people on the Western Front is where a lot of early cases were, and it spread heavily, but it actually killed more people than the whole war that, but it starts spreading widely

among soldiers. But like all of the Western powers, had clamped down on freedom of the press during the war, so you couldn't report in England, or in France or in Germany. You couldn't write stories about this new flu that was spreading. You'd get fucking you wind up in a fucking prison cell. Whereas Spain is a neutral power and their press is relatively free during this time. So Spanish newspapers start reporting on the influenza first, and so

people blame start assuming that it started in Spain. And there absolutely is racism and persecution as a result of this. But just because Spain didn't clamp down on the press, super fucked up. Holy sh it, look at you had to fucking open your big fucking mouth, and ye shouldn't have had just Spain. It's good that they did, but it is just part of one of the lessons of histories that you should never do good things because everything's bad. No, that's not the lesson of history, but it can feel

that way sometimes. Uh, don't lose hope. Let's talk about the Spanish flu pandemic. So the influenza did start in Spain, but it did kill a funk pile of Spaniards, like it killed so many Spanish people miles. Um. I would compare it to like Christie Alley um in its ability to murder people in Spain. How many piles to a Christie Alley is seven or eight? Um so And in nowhere in Spain did the Spanish flu kill more people than the town of Zamora, or kill at least a

higher percentage of people than the town of Zamora. Now, Zamora was renowned as being one of the most devout parts of Spain, which was a very devout country at this time, you know. Uh. And Zamora was very particularly famous for its Holy Week processions, which are kind of like, you know, sort of like what we saw with the Black plague. You know, it's the it's this thing that

the Church has always done. They would have these processions of barefoot, hooded peditents um, like marching through town and everybody sort of show up to watch them and worship together. Um, which is I'm sure a very satisfying thing to do if you're a Catholic believer, but also is a super good way to spread the plague. Um. So that's that's

a big part of the culture in Zamora. UM. Now. So, in nineteen fourteen, Zamora had welcomed the arrival of a new bishop named Antonio Alvario I Blanno at thirty eight years old. The church newspaper El Cario had declared Bologno an eloquent, youthful, fire brand of a leader. So he's like this hot young priest who comes into town. He's

very popular, very charismatic. Uh and he's you know, four years into the gig when the play hits um and So the Bishop of Zamoura had been seen as something of like a wounder kin within church circles prior to this point, which is why he got that job so young. He'd been one of the best students in his seminary, and at age twenty three he'd become the chair of metaphysics at the seminary in Guadalajara. UM. So he was a very well respected guy within the church. Um and Yeah.

The book Pale writer by Laura Spinning notes of the bishop quote. In his inaugural letter to his new diocese, Alvario Ebilangno wrote that men should actively seek God in truth, which were the same thing, and expressed his surprise that science seemed to advance and step with it a termination to turn away from God. The light of reason was weak, and modern society's mistake contempt for God's law for progress. He wrote of dark forces that wish to reject God

or even annihilate him, if that were possible. So we're not set up with this guy being a great dude to handle the first plague that hits in an era where people actually know about science and how disease spreads in a real concerted way. Yeah, because because what he is like, Oh, don't come at me with science, bro, I'm a fucking man of God. Science is atheism receipts and I don't need those in front of my face

right now. Yeah. And this is like, you know, Spanish blue hits were like right on the cusp of antibiotics. You know, we haven't really locked that ship down, but like we're starting to understand how all this ship works. And so there are experts who have good advice in the Spanish flu and um, yeah, he's not going to be the kind of guy who listens to experts. So when the when the influenza hit the country that would become its namesake. It starts at first in the east.

By September it had traveled into the interior of Spain. That fall was a particularly good time for it to spread in Spain because September is a harvest month, and it's also the month when many Spanish cities would host bull fights, which again I would say, I love fighting bulls um during this time of the year. If you're like me, try to do it alone. Don't fight bulls with hundreds of other people in the center of the town. It's it's gonna spread, you know, COVID nineteen A, right,

how many bulls have you thought? I don't know. It's kind of hard to remember with all the head injuries, but you know, yeah, so said. Fall was also kind of the time of the year in which the army would send new recruits to Zamora to conduct artillery drills, and this is probably how the disease first gets gets to the town, because some of these recruits were sick by the time they hit Zamora, and many soon followed.

And at first the city government attempted to quarantine six soldiers in their barracks, but this did not work, probably do partly to the fact that soldiers infected people before anyone knew that they were sick, and partly due to the fact that you just you can't try stop soldiers from fucking, you know, especially Spanish soldiers. They're just gonna sunk their way through that town and they're pictures. Yeah,

the Legion, the Spanish legion. Oh my boy. There's a whole fun discussion about the fact that those guys were like the main arm of Spain's fascist dictator and colonial anyway, we don't need to get into that, but yes, but those vs are so deep. You can be fucking and Spanish troops especially be fucking and I think they be fucking they be spreading the influenza when I think you can assume assume. However, the hotter the soldier, the more

evil they are. Yeah, the more plague they're gonna spread, which is why my presidential campaign will rest upon only hiring ugly people to be in the army. Were fantastic. Yeah, we're gonna lock this ship down, no no more. You're gonna have to brand that differently, so it's not like, yeah, well actually landed on it. This is our way of dealing with it, is just branding their faces. You know, as I'm a anybody ugly with it, this probably not that you should it should be a different name. Like,

it's not for ugly. It's an army of the normal, you know, not for the hot. So that way, you know, people don't have to admit to themselves they might not be as beautiful. We don't We don't want to do branding, but we do want to plug these brands because you know what time it is speaking of burning people's faces permanently to make them less aesthetically pleasing and reduce the spread of fascistic, militaristic dogma. You know what else will brand your faces in order to stop the spread of

negative attitudes towards the sectioness of violence. These products a great we're back. So, yeah, these troops come into town, they they intermingle with the civilian population. Everybody in fucking Zamora starts to get sick, right yeah, And enough people are sick within a couple of weeks that it actually gets in the way of the town's ability to take in the harvest, which of course means people start to starve.

It's not a good situation. And the whole problem was exacerbated by the fact that people did not have kind of an ideal handle on virology. Um, the the experts did, but normal people were still not all that far off from kind of where normal people were, you know, during the bubonic plague right there. There's doctors get this stuff, but like your average Joe doesn't. And I'm gonna quote

from the book Pale Writer again. During the first wave of the pandemic, the country's Inspector General of Health, Martin Salazar, had lamented the inability of a bureaucratic and underfunded health

system to prevent the disease from spreading. Though provincial health committees took their lead from his directorate, they had no powers of enforcement, and they quickly came up against what he described as the terrible pignorance of the populace, the failure to grasp, for example, that an infected person on

the move would transmit the disease. Oh yeah, ignorance, pignorance. Yeah, we've never seen anything like that happen again, because we've obviously moved forward so much in the last century, and we can just laugh at these simple Spaniards for failure to understand virology and isolate themselves. Oh my god, we know everything. Now look at us. We're not letting history

fucking repeat itself over and goddamn over miles. I've been quarantined in a bunker since the start of March, but I can guarantee that one thing that would never happen in America in the midst of a plague is people gathering in mass and clubs and beaches, um, while huge

chunks of the country locked themselves down. That wouldn't happen because we're not We're smarter than people were in nineteen eight, and we haven't been systematically dismantling our education system to create people who might not really give a funk about things like us. I don't even know what systematically dismantling means, and I'm just gonna roll along to my story now

sounds like it now. The popular liberal solution uh to sort of like within kind of the intelligencia, the kind of like more secular sort of people in like the cities in Spain. Their solution to the plague was what they called a sanitary dictatorship, a strict program of quarantine imposed from the top down to stop the spread of the illness on all costs, and dutifully the newspapers of Zamora try to explain the benefits of this system to

the people. But first they had to explain very basic facts about contagion to their readers, including the fact that the disease did not develop spontaneously as a result of God being angry at you. Um, and a lot of Again this is nineteen eighteen. A lot of local doctors

weren't helpful in spreading the real news. And I'm gonna quote again from pale writer one Luis Cebara suggested the imprint that is ease with the result of a build up of impurities in the blood due to sexual incontinence, a variation in the medieval idea that a moderate lechery could trigger a humoral imbalance. So this guy is like, no, it's people fucking too much. That's what makes you. You fucked too much. God gets angry at you, and God's

anger goes into your blood, as we all know. And so the more God anger that builds up, it just starts boiling out of you in the plague. And that's how it works. What they tell you, what they tell you, what that it's not God that's angry at who told you that because you're coming, scientist, because you're coming, and you know what, I bet that person doesn't come or has never comed. It's such a fucking week. I'm saying it right now. Dr Louis E. Barra never came, not once. Yeah.

I like that. That's the first myth like they have to take down as like a like a press or like just like the experts. All right, I know this flu is going around. It's really gnarly, and the question on everyone's mind is is it God? That's super We're angry at us and that's what's happening, and we've got to say, no, that's not what it is. And it just feels like a very heavy thing to have to lay on to people. Yeah, God's not pissed at you,

but you're still dying, and here's what we have to do. Yeah. I guess there's probably is an extent to which a lot of people found it more comfortable to believe that just God was God was you know, kind of drunken angry again, as opposed to like, oh no, actually, this is just a thing that we're going to be dealing with probably forever. Where sometimes horrible viruses creep up somewhere in the world and kill people all over the planet. And this is this is just the way it is,

and there is no reason to it. Uh yeah. So the good news is that the actual government of Zamora listened to the experts, the experts who weren't idiots at least, and announced a ban on large gatherings until further notice. Now, we in the USA are well familiar with how our own country people reacted when this started to happen um, and the same things occurred in Zamora, only instead of drunk college kids on spa break, the culprit was the Bishop of Zamora. And I'm gonna quote again from the

book Pale Writer. On thirty September, Bishop Alvario Eblano defied the health authorities by ordering a novena evening prayers on nine consecutive days in honor of St. Roco, the patron Saint of Plague and Pestilence, because the evil that had befallen Zamoranos was due to our sins and ingratitude, for which the avenging arm of eternal justice has been brought down upon us. On the first day of the novenna,

in the presence of the mayor and other notables. He dispensed holy communion to a large crowd at the Church of St. Esteban. At another church, the congregation was asked to adore relics of St. Rocco, which meant lining up to kiss them. So plague breaks out. Let's get everyone into a small room, have them all dipped their hands into the same water him them all kissed the same thing, Like everybody, take a sip out this cup to kiss

that thing. Is It is weird that like we got over like all of our most of our prescriptions against like X and intoxication, all the stuff that the Catholic Church would have said people shouldn't be doing. But the same basic bad idea is the same. Like this group of people who thinks fucking is horrible, in this group of people who are all there to funk, are all still gathering in a small area and touching their mouths

to the same things. Fundamentally, the problem is the same. Yeah, right, exactly, But you're just you're doing the worst version of it, that's the least fun version of what ye doing. At least some of these dead people had a good party. I don't know if I want to say that, but it does sound. Yeah, I don't know. There's again, there's no lesson here other than it's always a bad idea to shove your mouth on the same things other people are in a cramped room in the middle of a plague. Yeah.

At the very least is what are the what are the scientists saying? What are experts saying things? And stay inside? Yeah? No really, na, Na, So I fucked that. I'm going to suck a bunch of ship party with a bunch of my friends. Yeah. Well, I think I told Robert this. But the the kid that was like a TikToker that was going around looking to its ended up in the hospital with coronavirus. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna I'm not going to spare a whole lot of my sympathy

for that kid. Yeah yeah, keep moving, keep moving the same day as that, let's all kiss the same thing party. Uh. Sister Docitia Andreas of the Servants of Mary and Nun died while treating influenza riddle soldiers of the barracks because you know, she got sick from them. The bishop called her a virtuous and exemplary nun who accepted her martyrdom by flu with grace and a plum um. He praised her for sleeping only four hours a day during this period,

which I'm sure helped her immune system out a whole bunch. Now, the mother, Yeah, she was so dedicated to hanging out with blague victims and then she died from it. It's a bummer, um. The mother superior of this nun's convent was so taken by the sacrifices Sister Andreas had made that she urged all of the people of Or to

turn out in large numbers for her funeral. And the bishop immediately hopped onto this, and he announced that all attendees of this nun's funeral would be given sixty days indulgence, which means like sixty days of get out of Hell free cards. Basically like sixty days that you like you don't gotta pay the church and like go to the go to the fucking priest or whatever to like you know, you don't have to like get your sins forgiven for

sixty days because you've been you've been to this. So he promises everyone who shows up at this funeral, and again, a crowded and disease riddled uh cathedral that they'll all get out of hell free for two months. And while the newspapers of Zamora or are all trying to warn people to stay home, they're also required because they're backed by the church, to print the notices of church events.

So they're simultaneously telling people to stay home and being like huge plague party at the cathedral on this day, get out of hell for two straight months, you know. So a whole bunch of Zamaranio show up to this this this funeral, and the bishop calls the funeral in the face of a state ban on gatherings. Quote one of the most significant victories Catholicism has obtained. Maybe as a stretch, Um, yeah, yeah, well, I don't know. They've

They're pretty they've They've had a lot of victories. We can argue they were victories that were won by doing horrible things. But they didn't get all those billions of dollars in art from losing mm hmm. So as October began, journalists started to write about the weird fact that Zamarano seemed to be dying in much much higher numbers than the residents of other cities. They blamed the problem on poor local hygiene, and later that month the sanitary dictatorship

they sought was finally put in place. People were fined for throwing trash into the streets, Businesses were closed for failing to pass inspection, citizens were ticketed for letting their chickens roam free. But the Bishop of Zamora continued to hold man and Zamoranos crowded into the church in greater

numbers than ever before. In fact, as the flu claimed more and more of their lives, the bishop repeated the prayer pro tempore pestilential over and over again, and this prayer basically states the disease happens by the will of God and only God's mercy can end it, and so is huge peep numbers of the people who chanted this prayer started to sicken and die. The priests starts circulating a letter and which he claims that the continuing deaths

are proof that science can't cure the illness. So he's telling people to do the opposite of what the science says, telling them only God can pick who gets sick. A bunch of these people ignore the advice of scientists and get sick and die, and the bishop puts out a letter being like, see, the scientists are fullest shit, he writes, quote, observing in their troubles that there is no protection or relief to be found on the earth. The people distance themselves,

disenchanted and turn their eyes towards Heaven. And of course, Heaven, as represented by the bishop, is telling them all to get into crowded uh spaces together and kiss the same thing. Yeah, he's yeah, you see what happened to those fucking idiots. That's right. Let's keep the party going, baby. Yeah. So four days after sending out this letter, on October, the bishop held a mass procession, bringing in worshippers from all around the countryside and cramming the cathedral fuller of people

than it had been in years. Law enforcement attempted to stop this, pointing out that it was a clear violation of the ban on mass gatherings, and the bishop accused them of unjustly interfering in church business. The mass went on as scheduled, and in the days that followed, even more people sickened. And I'm gonna quote again from pale writer. As in other towns and villages, the decision was taken to stop bringing the church bells and eulogy of the

dead in case the constant tolling frightened people. But in other places funeral processions had also been banned, not in Zamora, where mourners continued to pass through the narrow streets as the din of the bells gave way to silence. Even in normal times, coffins, white ones for children were a luxury beyond the means of most. Now, Wood for coffins was hard for anyone to come by, and the bloated, blackened remains of the deceased were transported to their final

resting place, draped own in a shroud. In an echo of the ritual burning of incense to purify the altar, gunpowder was sprinkled in the streets and set a light, and approaching funeral cortage could thus be perceived only dimly through the choking black smoke, mixed at times with the fog that rose from the Duero. In those cool autumn days, the town must have looked as if it were on fire. When historian noted, h, yeah, it would have looked like the end of the fucking world, or like New York

Now maybe um so, just even like yeah. The inability to like Bury, they're dead properly. Is just makes it such a fucking stark picture. It's pretty cool that in the space of a month our president has gone from where we got fifteen cases and soon they'll be zero to now the government is having to buy a hundred thousand extra bodybags from Canada. Pretty cool evolution for all this to take. Like, yeah, I mean I think like

maybe okay, I said a hundred thousand, maybe a little more. Uh, And I don't know who I'm gonna blame, but I'm just gonna completely play a casual. It's really yeah. From it's fine too, we're out of corpse bags, okay. Yeah. So the town of Zamora had one of the highest death rates in Spain, losing more than ten percent of its population in the month of October alone. Um so that's a bad October. Um. Now, this was nearly three times the overall death rate in Spain at the time.

The Catholic Church and Zamora, working with for the Bishop, declared to this frightful toll to be God's vengeance. Quote, the evil upon us might be a consequence of our sins and lack of gratitude, and therefore the vengeance of eternal justice felt upon us. When the plague finally left Zamora much depleted, the bishop cheered that he and his fellow faithful had saved the town by placating God's legitimate anger.

And the Bishop of Zamora probably counts as one of the most deliberately and fatally irresponsible religious leaders of the entire Spanish flu epidemic. And of course he suffered no consequences as a result of this. Uh he did fine, So that's good. Wow, that's a good all that ship And then yeah, he did find it to the end of the movie. He made it to the end of the movie. And he was far from alone in In fact, I found a Pathos article that included just a bunch

of digitized newspaper assets. Uh. And they kind of like trace different American Christian leaders who were just as hell bent upon leading their followers into disasters. This is not just a Catholic thing. Uh. In Buffalo, New York quote, while local churches remained and closed in accordance with the mayor's proclamation, several congregations, however, have arranged to conduct outdoor services tomorrow. The Courier listed several open air masses in St. Paul's.

The Episcopal Cathedral planned to worship in Shelton Square with the assistance of its full choir. The service will largely consist of the singing of patriotic hymns and General Pershing's message to the Churches of America will be read on Sunday, October thirteenth, nineteen eighteen. UH Dr W. S. Black, rector of the Episcopal Church, wrote that he was angry to walk through town and find the pool room in full

blast with an ample supply of patrons. So he goes through and he sees that like pools and bars are still, and so he was like, well, why should I keep my fucking church closed if other businesses are opened? Uh He states, I believe in obeying the law of constituted authorities, but I'm under pledged to the boys over there that customary times of service, certain prayers must be said. So he reopens his church in the middle of the plague,

and people start attending church again. In Indianapolis, Indiana, Tin Black Apostolic Christians were arrested for attempting to worship despite the fact that the Board of Health had told them not to quote from their local newspaper. When the seven women and three men were taken to police headquarters, they began talking in the unknown tongue, and it was some time before the turnkey and matron were able to learn

their names. So this sort of stuff happens all over the world as a result of the plague um and science being what it was back then. It's impossible to say kind of how many of the dead and the Spanish flew epidemic could trace their illness from an infection they got in a church service that occurred after like things got closed down. We just weren't keeping good enough

track to do that. But thankfully, Miles, we have the coronavirus pandemic of to give us kind of a fun modern example for how virulent a single church service could be. So that's that's gonna be fun. You would do that, Miles. You wanna talk about that? Oh, you got the numbers, sure deal, buddy. On February sixty South Korea had thirty known cases of novel coronavirus. Almost all of the people infected had caught it from family or friends. On February eight,

only thirty nine people had tested positive. One of them was a sixty one year old woman known as Patient thirty one. She came down ill and decided to go attend her church anyway, and her church was the shin Honi Church of Jesus in Daigu. Two days after this, on February hundred and four, South Koreans had the coronavirus. Fifteen of these confirmed cases were members of or were directly connected to the shin Shony church in some way.

This woman attends the service while sick and knowing she's sick. Two days later, there's fifteen cases connected to that church. Now, by March twenty, a month or so later, South Korea had more than nine thousand confirmed cases, and the shin Shony Rich Cluster was responsible for five thousand and eighty of them, making up more than half of the total cases in South Korea. All because of a single worshiper who had to get the Bible study when she was ill.

Oh yeah, so that's yeah, okay, yeah, it's it's cool, and I don't know, it's it's the Yeah. The irony of it all too is like, you know, people will use religion as a thing that they're like in their mind, they may think, I actually, if if I go to church, I may feel better or something like that, but not actually being totally aware or considerate or whatever the reason is of like what the risk is to other people

and even yourself from just going out there. It's cruel, Yeah, and it it has a lot to do with the nature of the specific church, but also a lot of churches do kind of the same things as church does, So I'm gonna get into that in a second. I do want to note right now, since we started by talking about the Catholic Church, it took them too plagues, but I think they kind of got it right this time. Right.

The Pope was pretty early on like we're fucking no, no, no no, no, none of this ship like state of funk. Hod this God understands like like we don't gotta be all dipping the same Like no, um yeah, He's like, because I got if we were, if we get rid of all the good ones, now, I don't know what the funk we're going to be left with. So the Catholic Church at least broadly got there. So the third plague is a charm, is what I'm saying. Mm hmm, yeah,

we really makes sense. Like American Christian churches only have one other plague, Like the next plague that comes around, we'll get it, right, I think, yeah, if we follow, we'll see, We'll see. I'm really very excited for the next plague, Miles, you know, I mean a lot. I think that's really what we're gonna learn. He's like, all right, fourth plagues the charm. I think I'm hoping third plague

is the charm. But we'll see, they'll keep you in more plagues, so we'll you'll be like, oh, look, there's the only thing to learn from this is third plagues the charm. Yeah, that's what it takes, is three. So I do want to talk about some peculiarities of the Shinshone Church of Jesus that explained why five they got

five thousand people are more sick um. Yeah, so the Washington Post notes, quote, Unlike other churches, Shinshony makes its members sit on the floor tightly together during services and neat military like ranks and file, says Lee hoo Yahn, who left the church in two thousand and fifteen. We were not supposed to have anything on our faces like glasses or masks. We were traded to sing our hymns loudly and of course, in Korea, as in a lot of parts of Asia, wearing kind of face mask is

a lot more common. Um. You know, it's just like a thing people did more often in regular daily life. Uh. And the church had a specific prescription against that because they wanted to bring people together, which also in a time of illness, gets them sick together. Um. That doesn't even make I mean, because in Asian culture, when you wear it, you notes to be considerate of other people.

It's not because like I'm this because it's like wearing a hood, but you're also Christianity in particular in a lot of parts like in Korea, also, it has like this kind of very powerfully um anti not I mean anti authoritarian might be the wrong word, but like anti um countercultural thing, right, because Christianity is not as common in that part of the world. And I think this it's from what I'm reading this, it seems like that's a part of this is that they're they're like because

they're like, yeah, that's what they would do. Yeah, we're trying to be connected and see each other's faces. Yeah, and miss Lee this this former member UM, who was interviewed by The Post, stated we were taught not to be afraid of illness. We were taught not to care about such worldly things like jobs, ambition, or passion. Everything was focused on proselytizing, even when we were sick. So if you're sick and you're proselytizing, obviously you're going to

spread it more. So that's and that's how a lot that's why half of the cases in Korea, you know a month later, are from this church clusters, because a lot of these people are going up ministering to people while they're contagious. Um. And yeah, it's it's it's bummer. Um. Now,

it's also not unique to South Korea. UM. I think at this point we all remember that Louisiana pastor who defied the governor's order to not hold gatherings larger than fifty people and like repeatedly held gatherings, Pastor Tony spell Um. And he actually made the same justification. One of those guys from nineteen eighteen made uh. He stated, he told CNN, if we close every door in the city, then I will close my doors. But you can't say the retailers

are essential, but the church is not. That is a persecution of the faith. Um. So that's a hundred two years later you got the same basic line of reasoning. Spell also believes that the pandemic is like politically motivated. Uh. There's another evangelical pastor, Rodney Howard Brown of Florida's Tampa Bay Church, who called people pansies for being scared of the coronavirus. In yeah, he said his church would only close its doors when the rapture is taking place. Um, yeah,

continuing to bust people in. I think this is the guy who got arrested. Later, there's at least one church you like, and it was like a kind of a show arrest, like he got he was in an out a little bit. I don't think it's gonna do anything to him. Um. But the scariest thing to me. So you can find many, many stories, And if I had a little more time, I probably would have collected a longer list of different shitty individual churches and the things they've said. But we're all familiar with a lot of

religious leaders have said horrible, stupid things about it. You can't get it if you pray or you know, my church isn't gonna Jesus will protect you. All these things that will lead people to take risks, or they'll just be like, you know what, I'm gonna command God right now to knock this off right now, Okay, but I need about sixty tho more dollars to come in, and then I'll fucking I'm gonna tell God. I'm telling you, I'm gonna tell him. I'm gonna say, fucking hey, God,

quit it. You want that safe. This is all a problem, obviously, Each of these churches, these pastors, these people are are problems that we all have to deal with as we confront this virus. But I don't think that's not what scares me the most. Um. What scares me the most is what I read in a March fifteenth Washington Post article. Without guidance from the top, Americans have been left to figure out their own coronavirus solutions. It includes interviews with

a number of pastors. I want to quote from that now because I find this terrifying in a totally different way. In Arkansas, the Reverend Josh King met with pastors of five other churches on Thursday to decide whether or not to continue holding service. The religious beliefs told them that meeting in person to worship each Sunday remained an essential part of their faith, and some of their members signed on to Trump's claim that the media and the Democrats

were overblowing the danger posed by the virus. One pastor said half of his church is ready to lick the floor to prove there's no actual virus, said King and King, I think it seems like at least he understands that it's a serious threat and real, and he took some actions like to try to to to reduce, you know,

the likelihood that dis congregation would get it. But he's posted pointon like I don't know how to deal with this, the fact that a huge and over my pastors, like yeah, you're willing to like lick the fucking floor to prove that there's no virus. That scares me more than even the pastors pushing this stuff, Like how widespread this information

is and how centralized it is. You know, I don't know if it's also like just feel like I can grow out so hard that I won't get sick, Like, dude, yeah you want to fucking see, Dude, how much I believe bro, I'll lick this fucking floor. Dude, this coronavirus shit so Miles, that's the episode that I've got for you today. Oh boy, how are you feeling? Oh? I'm just just glad that I was raised in the house

that respects science. Yeah. I was raised in a house that I thought respected science, uh until recently, until recently. But you know that's a lesson for another time. Yeah, sorry to hear that. Um yep, so Miles, you want to plug anything, Yeah, I want to plug Daily Zeitgeist stand Fiance, which is that show I do with Sophia Alexandra who you've had on numerous times. We get high and watch Fiance. So if you want to escape and watch trash TV with us and be faded, come through. Yes,

so do that. Um go, uh, find people who are bleeding and touch their blood to your eyes. Oh no, no, that's a bad thing. Sorry, I mixed up my my post it notes here. I'm so sorry. Not that. Um, stay in your houses and listen to podcasts exactly. Yeah. Um like our podcast, this podcast, which you can find wherever you found this episode of it. Just keep doing what you're doing. It's perfect. Um. That's the episode. Bye, bye bye.