On the signboard of our local church, all reference to Sunday Service and accompanying Bible texts have vanished. In their place we read the homily: Fewer Faces and Open Spaces, attributed not to the minister Gordon K. Brownmiller, but to British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry, whose gospel has become definitive. Indeed, Bonnie Henry has become a hero of the people, a font of daily information and a source of comfort, delivered in the dulcet tones of motherly consolation. She is probably the most revered political figure in the province. She is lauded for having the wellbeing of its citizens at heart and does everything she can to soothe anxiety and discomfort, issuing instructions dedicated to public safety, including reminders to wear masks and maintain social distancing. She has become an epidemiological saint and Bonniolatry is all the rage.

And yet, as a high-ranking member of the government, Bonnie had no objection to the massive BLM demonstrations in our two major cities, Vancouver and Kelowna, leading to the predictable surge in Coronavirus cases, which she then disingenuously attributed to people gathering in bars. The glaring discrepancy did not register among her admiring votaries. For Bonnie Henry is an apostle of the Lord and must have her reasons too abstruse for ordinary citizens to apprehend -- unless we accept the official canard that “racism” is a bigger virus than COVID and that something called “cultural health” -- as the Democrats, following in the footsteps of the American Public Health Association, righteously assert -- is far more important than the lives of individual people. In any event, for the people of this province, whatever Bonnie says, goes. She is the voice of God. And what a sweet, assuaging voice it is.

In this theological frame of reference, the virus naturally represents the wrath of the Lord against the denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah -- that is, Vancouver and Kelowna -- who were at one time indifferent to the gifts of authority and went about their sinful daily lives without a thought for higher things. Some complained about extortionate taxes. Some resented escalating prices. Many drove their vehicles with unprecedented recklessness, a notorious feature of the region, dramatically raising insurance rates. A few were known to go whoring after strange gods and even to vote Conservative. The Lord sent a plague to educate us and dispatched his prophet Bonnie Henry to steer us lovingly back to sacerdotal health, requiring us only to self-isolate, don masks and stay six feet away from one another. Covidianity has now become the new communion.

Of course, from the Covidian perspective, contrary evidence must be discounted as schismatic. Some fringe dissidents claimed that self-isolating led to depression, economic collapse, loneliness and suicide, and did little to nothing to stop the spread of the disease. Some fumed that the lockdown mandate was anti-Charter and an infringement upon our civil rights. A few heretics even claimed that masks were effectively useless, the weave far too large to prevent passage of nano-viral particles -- like building a chain-link fence to prevent the egress and ingress of flies.

Some even went so far as to claim that masks caused mask mouth and led to the ingestion of one's own CO2, resulting in oxidative stress and immune depletion. These blasphemers were vigorously denounced for spreading propaganda against the faith. The fact that over 500 German scientists, representing an organization called The Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee, referred to the COVID panic as “a fake story all over the world” is dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy -- despite their having made a full report accessible to the public. RFK Jr. addressing assemblies of 1.5 million Germans on Big Government and Big Pharma exploitation of pandemic panic obviously never happened since this was not covered by the mainstream media. As for the extensive list of eminent COVID whistleblowers, asserting that the global response to the disease has been blown out of proportion by orders of magnitude, these individuals are indisputably charlatans.

And there is more. City News reports that a group of 18 prominent health experts in Canada, including two previous chief public health officers, has been calling since early July for an end to attempts to eliminate the coronavirus. “It’s a fool’s errand,” says Dr. Neil Rau, an infectious disease specialist with the University of Toronto. “We’re not going to win with that strategy.” The physicians argue that “business closures, mandatory masks, and complete border closures are doing more harm than good.” City News plainly must be a fascist news service. Similarly, Common Law Assembly officials for two communities on Vancouver Island have passed a Public Safety Bylaw prohibiting COVID restrictions such as distancing, masking, quarantines and vaccinations as “unlawful, unwarranted and medically unsound.” Thankfully, these officials are being threatened with arrest. After all, the Babylon Bee has got it right:

So, it’s business as usual. Self-isolating is good. Social distancing is good. Staying in your “bubble” is good. Wearing a mask is good -- indeed, according to Canada’s Chief Health Officer Theresa Tam, wearing a mask during sex is especially good. Mingling shoulder to shoulder with vast multitudes at demonstrations and horking viral spittle into one another’s faces is also good. For contradictions are of no account. They may not even be contradictions but tests of our faith in adverse circumstances, like Job on the dunghill scratching his sores with potsherds.

For the word has come down, Bonnie Henry has tableted the Internet, along with her fellow prophets like infectious disease “expert” Anthony Fauci et al. -- for Bonnie is only one of a tribe of the ethereally beatified. As for Fewer Faces and Open Spaces morphing into More Faces and Crowded Spaces, this too is not a contradiction but an inscrutable revaluation of values whose fundamental meaning and purpose is known only to the Lord and His devoted servants. Yet, despite everything, the Lord has been gracious, as this graphic parchment for New York City reveals:

Still, we are told that the virus will always be with us, albeit in dormant form. We carry the seeds of our distemper within us lest we offer further provocation. Considered from the non-Covidian perspective, it is almost as if people are now idolatrously worshipping COVID, interpreting the plague as a mark of the Lord’s interest in them. The mask will be a communal sign, identifying believers to one another while differentiating them from the unhouseled and heretic rabble. Like the mark of Cain, it confers an aura of special dispensation, an imprint of favor and distinction upon negligible lives. Herd immunity yields to herd mentality, a subtle transition of which the masked are unaware, for they are now among the elect and wear the mask like a badge of predestination.

Some of us have not been converted to the new faith. Chastened and obedient Covidians, however, will continue to follow the commandments that the prophets of the Lord convey to them. They will remain thankful for their daily bulletins and act appropriately, ensuring they do not provoke divine rage for their trespasses. They are fortunate to have Anthony Fauci and Theresa Tam looking after their best interests. And they are grateful to have the Blessed Bonnie among them.

David Solway’s latest book is Notes from a Derelict Culture, Black House, London, 2019.