The Zombie Enlightenment Enslaves Us to a New Religion.

By Ross Hunt, Claremont Institute, May 2021

Ross Hunt is a partner at Murphy Nasica Associates, a Texas-based political consulting firm. He holds a B.A. in liberal arts from St. John’s College and a Ph.D. in Political Theory from the University of Dallas.

America’s tragic and needlessly incompetent public health response to COVID-19 was not an accident. It was the logical consequence of the prevailing American creed of the body. Over the course of the last year, America’s bureaucratic, academic, and media elites have taken advantage of the pandemic to turn that prevailing orthodoxy into a clerisy of public health and modern medicine. As governors, county judges, and newly minted bureaucratic kaisers around America closed down real churches for Sunday worship, they were hard at work building a new Church—the Church of Health.

Surviving the virus is this Church’s equivalent of salvation; saving “just one life” is its version of Christian charity and community; the daily and hourly COVID reports are its liturgy of the hours and the double mask its scapular. Social distance is its prayer without ceasing. …