Do It For Jesus, Man!

How they weaponized the church to get more shots in arms.

In the 1983 teen coming of age drama, The Outsiders, directed by Frances Ford Coppola and based on the novel by S.E. Hinton, the film’s lead character, Dallas Winston (played by Matt Dillon) lies injured in a hospital bed after being burned in a church fire.

Set during the early 60’s, Dallas, or Dally as he’s called, is a hardened member of a rag tag bunch of kids, the de facto leader of a family-ish gang of broken home “greasers” who spend the majority of their time “rumbling” with the rich kids, the Socials, who hail from the affluent part of town.

While in the hospital, Dally gets a visit from two of his fellow greasers, Two-Bit and Ponyboy, who are also there to check up on their critically injured friend, Johnny. That night, the greasers and the Socs are set to rumble once again and their rivalry couldn’t be more heated now that it appears Johnny is going to die.

In a pivotal moment, Dally, who serves as the gang’s trusted voice and confidant despite his own inherent character flaws, issues a specific call to action to the group,

“We gotta win that fight tonight. We gotta get even with those Socs! Let's do it for Johnny, man. We'll do it for Johnny!”

It’s in this hyper-emotional moment that we see Dally as something much more than simply another lost kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Dally the angry young man becomes Dally the Leader commanding his greasers to perform a single action, that action being exacting revenge on the Socs for the death of Johnny, which the gang in turn, performs without hesitancy by winning the late night rumble.

The greasers execute Dally’s assigned task seemingly with the greater good of the group as a whole in mind (that is, avenging Johnny while protecting/preserving the gang itself) and they do so without care, even for their own safety.

But why?

It’s simple. Because they trust Dally. The greasers know Dally would never lead them down the wrong path towards danger. He is their “trusted messenger”. For a gang of greasers from the wrong side of the tracks with the odds ever stacked against them and whose sense of family can only be found within the group itself, almost any action designed for the betterment of the whole can be easily summoned once you have the right messenger.

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“I think the vaccines are a gift from god. In our current circumstances with this pandemic, getting vaccinated is one of the best expressions of loving our neighbor.”

—Reverend Walter Kim, President of the National Association of Evangelicals

The Trusted Messenger Initiative

In April 2021, the Biden Administration announced that they would be moving away from focusing on mass vaccination centers, like the ones that brought in the military to do the jabbing en masse, in order to experiment with more creative alternatives to reach a seemingly random target goal of vaccinating 70% of Americans by July 4th, 2021, because, you know, it’s the “science”.

In a video call with faith leaders, President Biden compelled ministers, preachers, pastors, and priests to urge their congregations (on Easter no less) to hurry up and get over any irrational fears about vaccine safety or efficacy and just take the damn shot because then and only then can everyone else have a “more normal July 4th”.

"What I'm worried about now what the scientists are telling me, people are getting too cavalier with traveling a great deal, gathering in larger crowds, and people aren't wearing their masks. Aren't on social distancing. Aren't washing their hands. And you've seen this spike,” Biden said. “I think this is the godly thing to do. Protect your brother and sister.”

Biden’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy also announced that the administration had a shiny new object in their vaccine toolkit in the form of “trusted messengers”. These sentinels of vaccine truth consisted of faith leaders who were already well-respected in their communities and who would serve, Bible in hand, as a trusted voice of scientific reason for the vaccine naysayers. Their assignment? Get as many shots into the arms of the faithful with specific focus on those ever-pesky vax hesitant types and do it by any means necessary, including by invoking the Word of Pfizer God.

The Biden admin even created handy dandy toolkits to help church leaders and evangelicals spread the Good Word even when those words were designed to hijack one’s personal faith in order to guilt and instill fear— God gifted you a brain, therefore you should use it to follow God’s will and God’s will is for you to get vaccinated. Better yet, instead of doing it for Johnny you get to do it for some Washington State professor’s grandkids:

“For those who hesitate to be vaccinated, I ask that you trust the gift God has already given you. I ask not for me but for my three unvaccinated grandchildren, and all the children and grandchildren who don’t have access to the vaccine yet. God’s will is for us to use our brains.”

Sometimes medical professionals and “Christians” wrote op-eds in major newspapers that instructed the lepers unvaccinated to get the shot as a, “sacrifice in His name as Jesus offered himself as the perfect sacrifice to atone for our sins” and to remember to “love your neighbor as yourself” by getting the jab.

I can only imagine what was regularly preached in private from thousands of church pulpits throughout the country during 2021.

Whatever the message, it got people to take the bait.

Just like the loyal greasers from The Outsiders, people of all walks of life, from rural America to the inner cities, from democrats to republicans, from the faithful to the faithless, dutifully obeyed Pfizer’s God’s Word and lined up to get their heaven-sent jabs for the greater good, all while securing themselves a coveted seat at the throne in the afterlife, and as a result Biden achieved his coveted 70% vaccination rate. In fact, he superseded his original goals as nearly 263 million or 79% of the population has now received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccines.

The Trusted Messenger Initiative worked.

Biden’s false prophets trusted messengers issued the faithful a single call to action that was carefully cobbled together from cherry-picked Biblical scripture designed to instill guilt and fear with the ultimate goal being capitulation.

“Do it for Jesus”, and they all did.