You know who Dr. Kent Brantly is. He's the American doctor who contracted the Ebola virus while on a mission trip to Africa and is now in the fight of his life. And you know who Ann Coulter is. She's the conservative columnist who has written a lot of great things over the years, and has never been afraid to be criticized for what she says or how she says it. In fact, I'd say she relishes it, which is going to come in handy in this instance.
Coulter doesn't have much sympathy for Dr. Brantly. In fact, she thinks he's an idiot, along all other American Christians who go on mission trips to "disease-ridden cesspools" like Africa rather than doing their ministry work in America. Wow:
If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.
If he had provided health care for the uninsured editors, writers, videographers and pundits in Gotham and managed to open one set of eyes, he would have done more good than marinating himself in medieval diseases of the Third World.
Of course, if Brantly had evangelized in New York City or Los Angeles, the New York Times would get upset and accuse him of anti-Semitism, until he swore--as the pope did--that you don't have to be a Christian to go to heaven. Evangelize in Liberia, and theTimes' Nicholas Kristof will be totally impressed.
Which explains why American Christians go on "mission trips" to disease-ridden cesspools. They're tired of fighting the culture war in the U.S., tired of being called homophobes, racists, sexists and bigots. So they slink off to Third World countries, away from American culture to do good works, forgetting that the first rule of life on a riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.
Now I have to say I have a lot of sympathy for many of the individual points Coulter makes here - especially about the spiritual bankruptcy perpetuated in part by Hollywood and the importance of pleasing God rather than trying to please the drivers of the secular culture.
But Coulter forgets one basic thing here: God knows what He's doing when He calls us to our assignments. It's not as if there is no one He's assigned to minister to America. There are millions of people He has called to do that. I'm one of them. But God often sends people to unlikely and unexpected places for reasons that are His and His alone.
I'm sure the last thing the Apostle Paul expected to be told to do was to go preach to the Gentiles, given his background as a religious Jew. But the Jews were Peter's assignment, and once the scales fell out of Paul's eyes, he had to realize that God had sovereignty over his life and that he simply needed to get ready to heed the call and go.
It's not for Ann Coulter to judge Dr. Brantly's calling from God or his faithfulness to it. Nothing she says about the spiritual condition of America is wrong, but if Ann Coulter believes every American Christian should minister in America only - and none should be sent overseas - then she should take that up with God.
As it is, I trust that He knows what He's doing and He calls each of us for His own reasons - some of which are designed to fulfill our missions in life, some of which are designed to impact our own lives for His glory.
Ann Coulter is pretty smart. But everyone gets in trouble when they start thinking they're smarter than God.
