Ann Coulter has been almost universally criticized for her supremely anti-gospel Ebola polemic against faith-filled Christians seeking to do God’s will in overseas missions. She was almost uniformly excoriated across the Christian community – from biblical scholars, to evangelists, to missionary leaders, to lay members.
Those rare individuals who defended Coulter did so almost uniformly in support of her accurate observations about America’s need for spiritual reformation. Coulter accurately diagnosed a set of serious cultural problems in America that are at root spiritual in nature. But Coulter’s solution – that Christians should be less Christian and not follow God’s call in their lives – is ludicrous.
I have culled the best and most interesting excerpts from commentary on Coulter’s column and the subjects she raised. Your comments would be most welcome.
Free Republic
Free Republic was once a repository of libertarian-conservatives who almost literally worshiped Ann Coulter. No longer. Here are just a few of their observations:
- “I think she’ had an Ann-eurysm.”
- “Coulter and Pelosi belong in the same psychiatric ward.”
- “Christian missionaries have been going to the uttermost parts of the earth for centuries. Perhaps Ann would prefer that Islam or paganism or some such thing have total sway over the lost of the world. Jesus Christ has a different preference.”
- “Ann seems to think snarky equals clever. This is just peevish and mean.”
- “I think the ignorance of Ann is stunning and I think your fears are irrational. I work in hospitals on a daily basis and have as much fear of Ebola as I do of KmRSA. Which is none. Respect and common sense is good. Phobia is bad. Ann is phobic. Are you as well?”
- “Ann, you blew it big time! It isn’t narcissists that go where they sense the Lord is sending them, it takes a servant heart with a total sacrifice of self to answer the call of God. We have no business condemning those who are willing to go anywhere for the gospel!”
- “This was an attack on Christianity, and Evangelical Christians, which is a huge leap forward into the direction that Ann has been moving into for years.”
- “How about Ann Coulter’s narcissism? It’s all that has ever held her together.”
For the remainder of this column, the headings are actual hyperlinked titles of commentary on the Internet. The quotes below are all excerpted from those sites.
“Ann Coulter to Jesus: Fix Bethlehem First!”
[Isn’t that a great title? – DB]
It seems that she believes that Dr. Brantly, who is a medical doctor, has some mysterious power as a Christian to evangelize “Hollywood power-brokers,” and it’s only his vanity (“Christian narcissism,” she calls it) that sent him off to the third world with his medical supplies, rather than – what, trotting up to Quentin Tarrantino’s gate, introducing himself as an M.D., and suggesting that Mr. Tarantino repent? And this would have been more effective than ministering to the dying in Liberia.
“Ann Coulter: The World’s Worst Theologian”
Mark Twain famously said, “To a guy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Perhaps “to a woman with a political column, everything looks like the Democrats did it.” Here, without any knowledge of Brantly or his politics, she writes that Christian doctors are “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…”
Apparently, Coulter couldn’t be bothered to do any research about Brantly before writing her article. And haven’t Christians been serving overseas well before anyone ever heard of Jerry Falwell?
“The Gospels rewritten”
Apparently, his altruism didn’t measure up to Coulter’s brand of superior morality.
“Ann Coulter, Stop Speaking for Jesus”
Instead, she dresses up her vitriol in an feeble attempt to appear a caring Christian, lamenting the lost in this nation who are not cared for while this doctor apparently flitters about in Africa, as if to say Jesus cares more for Americans than He does for the lost in other nations.
This would be sad if not so sickening and jingoistic. …
But minus the venom in her sentiment, why does it have to be either/or? Why would we ever think that we need to ignore one group while focusing on the other? Can’t it be that the Church is far big enough to reach lost Americans AND lost Africans (and lost Europeans and lost South Americans and lost Asians and….)?
In Jesus’ last earthly words, as recorded in Acts 1:8, he encourages His disciples that “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
The last time I checked a map, the U.S. is not the sum-total of the end of the earth. I believe that Africa can be included in that description.
“Are Christian Missionaries Narcissistic Idiots? – A Response to Ann Coulter”
And yet from a Christian concern we cannot leave the issue of the Ebola outbreak without turning to another kind of atrocity. In this case the atrocity was an opinion piece published just yesterday by conservative commentator Ann Coulter. …
Well the real annoyance here, indeed outrage, is not over the service of these two missionary doctors. It is over this kind of column that flies in the very face of everything Christ taught his disciples. The logic of the Christian church and of Christian missions has nothing to do with American nationalism. Some parts of Ann Coulter’s article where she speaks especially of Africa come very close to racism, but she certainly falls directly into nationalism when she says that American Christians need to “serve their own country.” …
Coulter has written a very sad and infuriating article – an article that should lead to outrage in Christian circles. It reveals a radical nationalistic and libertarian worldview that is fundamentally incompatible with evangelical Christianity, with the Scripture, and with the command of Christ. …
True gospel missionaries – those faithful to the command of Jesus Christ – are not driven by “narcissism” to use Ann Coulter’s word, they are indeed heroic. More than heroic, they are simply faithful.
“Ann Coulter Plays God”
In Coulter’s world, charity is measured in dollars. Any lives Brantley may have physically saved, any comfort he may have given, any love of Christ he may have reflected toward those lost is now irrelevant and pales in comparison to … money spent. Coulter’s “god” is sadly small and limited. It doesn’t occur to her that possibly the $2 million was part of a bigger plan. Possibly it was specifically earmarked by God to be the means to get an infected Brantley back to one of America’s premier hospitals where first-world medical professionals and pioneers would have the opportunity to study and observe the disease firsthand, which in turn could play a major part in finding an effective vaccine. And as it goes, said vaccine or medicine could then circle back to West Africa. All things are indeed possible with God.
Further, would Coulter tell the people whose lives were touched by Brantley, people whose broken bodies were repaired by the doctor and people who may have come to know God as a result of his witness, that in light of the money it cost to bring him home, they weren’t worth it? …
Of course it doesn’t occur to Coulter that perhaps God Himself directed the path of Dr. Brantley to serve in a land far away. … Did God share the road map of Brantley’s life with Coulter? Did she know something he *should* have known? …
[Coulter] cannot know the Hollywood power-broker would be saved. He could as easily reject Christ as the Liberian. Likewise, she cannot know that the Liberians will not experience a spiritual revival as a result of the ministry of Dr. Brantley and others. And yes, Ebola kills the body, but even the body being killed by Ebola can house a soul that is at peace and in communion with God. Further, Coulter forgets that it is God who opens the eyes of the unbeliever to see their need, not man. Who and where He chooses to deliver the message is His business. …
So, choosing to leave the most extraordinary country in the world and all the comforts that come with a first-world existence to go help others in a third-world place which often comes with huge built-in risk and sorrow factors, is because ooh, name calling! For the Christian in America, name calling, mockery and being maligned comes with the territory. For the Christian in other parts of the world, being killed for their faith comes with the territory. And likely they would say the risk posed is a small price to pay to show the love of Christ to those in need.
The Christians I have known who have served in faraway places are a humble lot. They choose to do what they do because they care deeply about those in need. They want to give back for having been given so much and they want to know God more fully through their service. The last thing they would ever want to hear themselves described as is “heroic.”
“Ann Coulter’s no voice for Christian conservatism”
Coulter isn’t a spokesperson for any brand of Christian conservatism. Her statement directly contradicts one of the things that Christians think is most important – the inherent dignity of all people. We believe that every single human person is made in the image of God, is worthy of dignity, and has an eternal soul. That eternal soul has a destination, and the message of Jesus is for them.
“Ann Coulter Becomes Unhinged”
Has Ann Coulter become unhinged? It looks as if she may have. …
Pardon me for taking a moment to vomit.
Apparently, Coulter has read neither the New Testament parable about the sheep and the goats nor the parable about the Good Samaritan, both parables having been told by Jesus himself. Had she read and understood them, the Coulter would know that Dr. Brantly was doing exactly what living out the Gospel message requires, which requires taking personal risks when necessary. …
Only time will tell if Coulter feels enough shame to apologize for what she wrote, or if she will be too narcissistic to make such an apology.
“A Failed Test of Compassion: Whatever Ann Coulter has, It’s Worse than Ebola”
Like a lot of people, I would like to think I have developed a natural immunity against Ann Coulter and her dreadful attention-seeking declarations. I try believe that whatever she has – and by the looks and sounds of it, it’s quite lethal, I won’t catch it.
As any doctor will tell you, reducing one’s exposure decreases the chances of infection and subsequent transmission.
So, I do my best to avoid reading or hearing anything from Ms. Coulter. It’s not easy. Coulter’s the Bird Flu of the Right Wing. …
Like so many things that Coulter writes about, this article begins with a false premise and runs wild from that point. Is she trying to claim there are there no Christian charities working inside the US? If so, she needs to do a little more research before picking up her poison pen.
Here’s an easily-found website that offers a list of Christian charities and I assume that most of them work inside the US. (I will not vouch for any of them but that is surely enough evidence to scrap the Coulter article at its inception.)
But perhaps I have misread: is she trying to claim that American-based Christian charities have no business helping the poor outside of American borders? I don’t happen to remember Jesus saying any like that. …
The most ironic part of this particular Coulter rant is that the lack of empathy that Coulter herself promotes on a daily [basis] is the best example why more and more people have simply stopped caring about what happens to the poor and the needy.
If there is a culture war in the US then Coulter should be looking in the mirror to find who is firing the salvos.
“Ann Coulter Channels Margaret Sanger”
You see Ann Coulter is angered that an American Doctor went abroad to West Africa to confront the recent Ebola infestation when he could have been treating sick people here in the United States. She sees it as foolish … I’m reminded of one Jesus’ parables at this juncture. Something about a doctor going to where people are sick. That could involve a risk factor. Bless Ann’s heart for pointing that out. …
Ann, Americans who feel entitled to tell a man like Dr. Brantley who he should save and who he shouldn’t be bothering with are about one-step removed from the morality of eugenicists. One of Margaret Sanger’s big arguments in favor of Planned Parenthood involved the Malthusian conceit that resource constraints gave us the right to predetermine which of God’s Children should be permitted to breed. If only Dr. Brantly had treated the Burt Reynolds character from the movie “Boogie Nights” – the guy who gave the world Dirk Diggler and Chest Rockwell. What a wonderful service to humanity that would have been. They could have co-founded a charity together: “Dildos for Jeebus!” But no, he had to go waste his talents on poor people from Africa.
“Ann Coulter’s Casual Cruelty”
(The irony of Coulter accusing anyone of narcissism seems lost on her.) …
Helping people in lands other than America, Coulter argues, is not only cowardly and selfish, but unbiblical as well. …
Even grading on the Coulter curve, the column is cruel, biblically illiterate and morally incoherent. Cruel because she’s mocking a man who has contracted a brutal and often lethal disease, a man whose family is now terrified for his life. It takes an unusually callous and malicious heart to devote an entire column to attacking a husband and father who, while serving others, is stricken with a virulent disease. And as an added grace note, Coulter divines Dr. Brantley’s heart, accusing him – without a shred of evidence – of being both a coward and vainglorious. …
Ms. Coulter’s biblical illiteracy is evident in taking a verse from Deuteronomy (15:11) and building a doctrine that argues that serving people outside of your nation is a violation of God’s word and ways. The logic of her column is that until every problem in your nation is solved, no person should serve as a missionary to other lands. This doctrine would surprise St. Paul, whose missionary journeys took him to (among other places) modern-day Syria, Turkey, Greece and Rome. If Ms. Coulter wants to defend her peculiar missiology and hyper-nationalism, she needs to find sources other than the Bible. …
Ms. Coulter seems unaware of the fact that the global medical missions movement is one of the great achievements of Christianity. But then again, there is much about Christianity she seems unaware of. Let’s just say that when one thinks about what St. Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – Ann Coulter’s name doesn’t leap immediately to mind. …
The poor we shall always have among us. The cruel and heartless, too.
“Why is Ann Coulter mean?”
Is pundit Ann Coulter unloved and do inner demons tell her she’s unlovable forcing the conservative pundit to project a disturbing meanness onto others? …
Coulter projects emotional demons and insecurities and doesn’t seem to realize it. …
[Coulter asks, “But why do we have to deal with this at all?”] But she doesn’t. No one asked her to engage in Christian mission work in Africa. In addition, this isn’t about Ann Coulter. …
Jesus isn’t an American and what he taught was universal and transcendental not to be contained within artificial borders or boundaries. The holy author doesn’t make a distinction by loving some children more than others depending on the disease, country, continent, or overall wealth of a nation. …
Should Father Damien who helped lepers in Hawaii in the 19th century and Mother Teresa who cared for the sick and hungry in India in the 20th century have both stayed in Europe? Should American Christian workers in Haiti, after one of the country’s worse natural disasters, stayed away in 2010?
“Are You ‘Idiotic?’ Ann Coulter Might Think So”
Wow. So basically, anyone who helps anyone, and it happens to involve personal sacrifice, is “idiotic.” …
Unfortunately, in the majority of the world, you can have all the desire and drive to change or improve yourself, but there are no programs, there is no government assistance, there is no hope. Places such as Liberia, where the average income is about $400 a year. … thousands do it to honestly help others, and we never hear anything about them. They go to “risky” places to help people, where there is no other help available. Guess what. Some people, Christians and non-Christians alike, who serve within the United States are narcissistic. Some do it for attention, a free t-shirt, and an instagram photo. Thousands do it to help others as well, without the thought of being “heroic.” God calls us in Mark 16:15 to “go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel” just as much as He commands us to help our brothers. If all of us serve in one capacity or another, we are all obedient to the individual desires and callings God has put in our hearts. And there’s nothing idiotic about serving each other.
“Can Christ Not Spare One Man?”
I also think had St. Thomas stayed in Jerusalem instead of journeying to India, many Indians would have never found salvation through Christ. Had Paul stayed in Tarsus instead of going on his missionary journeys, we would not have his contribution to the body of faith or the churches he planted along the way. …
Should Jim Elliott have never gone into the jungle? He was savagely killed there. His death inspired countless Christians to follow in his footsteps delivering the gospel to places it had not been delivered. …
Liberals treat prosperity in America as a zero sum game – if there are winners, there must be losers. They are wrong. Christians should not do the same with Christianity – surely a Christian may lose his life, but even then he is a winner. There are no losers except the Devil himself when a Christian goes therefore unto all the nations. …
Christians should be focused on saving souls where the Lord leads them and lends them talent and we should all praise the work of the Holy Spirit in so doing.
“Ann Coulter causes firestorm for her attack on Ebola victim Kent Brantly”
One might also make the point, besides the notion that Christians believe that both the bodies and souls of Africans have equal worth in the eyes of the Almighty as those of Americans, that the suffering of Brantly and of his nurse Nancy Writebol is likely going to have a beneficial effect far and beyond the current outbreak of Ebola. Research and testing for treatments of the deadly disease have been fast tracked because of them having been infected. This means that many thousands of lives will likely be saved from an agonizing death as a result of their sacrifice. …
The consensus seems to be that she is missing a basic tenet of the Christian faith, that one is called to go and do good wherever one is called to go, no matter where in the world, no matter where that happens to be.
“Forget EBOLA: The Greatest Threat To Africa’s Medical Missionaries Is Ann Coulter!”
It’s easy to take cheap shots at Ann Coulter these days: Ann Coulter is without a soul. Ann Coulter is heartless. Ann Coulter is evil. Ann Coulter is … Ann Coulter. …
… her mockery was aimed at the heart of her own self-professed religion: Christianity. And not just any Christianity, but Evangelical Christianity and its missionaries: Dr. Kent Brantly was part of Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse. If Coulter had mocked Pat Robertson’s Operation Blessing, she could not have picked a more overtly Christian missionary team to add to her list of enemies. She also compounded her anti-Semitism by insinuating that Hollywood was controlled by Jews who needed to be saved (or rather, “perfected“). …
Writing about the latest Coulter outrage may seem to be futile since even her supporters know the obvious: Coulter is for Coulter is for Coulter is for Coulter. But oddly enough, she does have followers/readers who live vicariously through her outrage and mockery: most of them do not dare to enact her opinions for fear of seeming too un-Christian or inhuman. …
Yes, a “provocateur” is always worth the effort to focus upon when one knows the people she is provoking.
“Ann Coulter teaches us, ‘better hate than ever’”
This story is about Coulter being dead wrong, again. I know first-hand there are plenty of Christian do-gooders that get into the business because they want to right wrongs and help miserable people be less miserable, here and all over the planet. These people have two things that Coulter doesn’t: charity and compassion. … they work to feed starving people, take care of the sick, build houses, bury the dead, stuff like that. I’ve known these people first hand. …
Coulter would never listen to the likes of someone like me. Perhaps somewhere in history someone could speak to Coulter. Someone she could relate to. Maybe she and Marie Antoinette might have cake and tea together and talk about what can happen when the little people are expected to be someone else’s problem.
“Ann Coulter and Our Mission”
Many Christians were horrified because they rightly understood that Coulter’s comments are a repudiation of the gospel and the Great Commission. Many felt betrayed. We should not feel betrayed, any more than we would when Howard Stern mocks us on the radio. The same thing is at work. …
The church is built on the rock foundation of apostles and prophets, not hucksters and outrage artists.
“Ann Coulter’s American Christianity”
Coulter, in her rant, was terribly insulting to Africa, Liberia, and every third-world country on the planet. She was almost equally insulting to Dr. Brantly’s hometown, calling it a town of deadbeats. Finally, she was incredibly insulting to Dr. Brantly, accusing him of being a Christian narcissist. …
Ann Coulter has presumed to know Brantly’s motives for the work he did. And from that basis, she offers her stinging criticism of Brantly and not just Brantly, but now every American missionary that enters the foreign mission field. Ann is flat out wrong. In fact, she could not be more wrong. She is arrogant on a number of fronts. She is arrogant when she portends to know Dr. Brantly’s heart motives. The fact is that she hasn’t a clue as to anyone’s heart motives. …
Ann is also why so many in our culture view conservatives as cold and uncaring. Just look at her attitude toward third-world countries! She places them in an entirely different category than Americans as if God does the same thing. She refers to these human beings as a cesspool! How could any Christian ever love God and see helpless women and children as a cesspool? Add to this her description of the small struggling town in Texas as a “deadbeat” town. What? Clearly there is nothing godly about an attitude that pretends to know the motives of Christian missionaries, and that categorizes people less fortunate than them in the way Ann Coulter does in her article. Here is a man who put himself in harm’s way and he is classified as a Christian narcissist. Liberia is a third world cesspool. And the doctor’s little town in Texas is a deadbeat town.
In her attempt to preach to Dr. Brantly, Christian missionaries, and other Christians living in America about the evil that resides in our culture, Ann Coulter has demonstrated in so many ways that that very evil resides in her own heart as well. The only difference is that Ann’s evil displays itself differently from the evil she doesn’t like. And that is what we call self-righteous hypocrisy. The only evil that is really evil is the evil I don’t like.
“Coulter’s ‘Idiotic’ Response to Christian Missions”
It is ironic that someone as so publicity-obsessed as Coulter would have the gall to assert that if missionaries weren’t so “narcissistic” and had courage or weren’t burned out over all the social problems in the U.S., they’d stay in “some deadbeat town” in the U.S. and forego all the “superlatives” they get for serving as foreign missionaries.
It probably is a waste of time to ask the question: did you really mean to reveal how shallow your thinking can be? …
As a former member of the Board of Trustees for a mission organization for over a decade and marrying into a family of missionaries, I have learned a lot over the years about the sacrifices that missionaries make to answer God’s call to services overseas. Several generations have been inspired by Jim Elliott, who responded to the challenge: “There is one Christian worker for every 50,000 people in foreign lands, while there is one to every 500 in the United States.” In addition, reading church history reveals the enormous contributions that missionaries have made to bring education and health care to nations around the world. The biographies of many national leaders reveal how missionaries and the education provided by mission-run schools have had profound influence in developing international leaders.
“Ann Coulter calls US Ebola doc ‘idiotic,’ Africa ‘disease-ridden cesspool’”
Lead Republican thinker Ann Coulter has declared war on American Ebola victims. …
Yes, imagine a doctor going where there is disease. What was he thinking? …
Except one problem. While Ann Coulter divides the world up into Americans and others, and Republicans and others, and good Republicans and others, actual good human beings see people as, you know, human beings. And a Liberian in need of medical care is no different from an American in need of the same. They’re both human beings, and Dr. Brantly doesn’t lower the value of the social good by helping a cesspool Liberian instead of a vainglorious American.
“Ann Coulter And The Spiritual Poverty In America”
The Gospel is poured out on our society in great quantity via some 1,000 Christian radio stations. Despite this America is becoming more and more godless. …
I learned a valuable lesson that day: missionary service isn’t always about doing the safe thing; it’s about being obedient to God. …
Coulter … clearly is convinced that Christians from this country go for short stints to “disease-ridden cesspools” as a form of missionary tourism. As I learned in the harshest way from my former best friend, it is not tourism but a peek into God’s Heart.
Coulter’s jingoism is her god. …
Coulter’s passionate deprecation of Dr. Brantly is swaddled in the American flag. She has determined which acts of sacrifice are worthy of undertaking and which souls are worth saving. Her tortured thinking, calling Dr. Brantly a narcissist for following the call to God, is wrong.
“An Open Letter to Ann Coulter Regarding that “Idiotic” Ebola Doc”
Reading your article in which you put so much emphasis on Dr. Brantley’s potential influence a Hollywood power broker, I wondered why you spend your time tearing down the work of Dr. Brantly rather than building up the ones doing the very thing you wish the Ebola doctor would do? …
This is the point where I think you may have skipped a regiment of medication, or had too much red bull, or spent too much time in the sun. Let me tell you, Ann, international mission work is the last enterprise one goes into for the purposes of being perceived as heroic. …
The dirty little secret is that most missionaries go overseas knowing that they will be serving in virtual anonymity, that they will spend an inordinate amount of time struggling to understand a culture and a language that is not their own, that they are choosing to watch from afar as family members back home are born, others marry, and still others die – while they are absent. And they do it because it is their calling. …
I know it’s not your style, but I would finally recommend that you consider writing an article where you take back most of the things you said in your August 6th article, and possibly even – shudder – apologize.
“Don’t Wanna Be an Evangelical Idiot”
… right wing warrior princess Ann Coulter managed to pen what is perhaps the most virulent anti-Christian column ever seen by this author. …
This is not a man on the public dole, he is a Christian using his gifts to carry out, not some merely humanitarian mission, but the Great Commission of Christ. Who is Ann Coulter to object to the volunteer work of a Christian missionary? …
But Coulter doesn’t stop there. She also manages to betray her inner Pharisee when she has the gall to recommend to Dr. Brantly and presumably other Christians the proper object of their evangelistic efforts. No surprise, it’s not the poor. …
In her mind, the Pharisees were right to criticize Jesus for spending so much time with the poor, diseased and downtrodden of Judea. If only he had focused his energies on opening the eyes of a single Sadducee, Pharisee or other member of the ruling elite, he would have done infinitely more good than he did by wasting so much of his time with the sinners, tax gatherers, harlots, crippled, diseased, dying and poor people that he seemed to have so much misplaced compassion for, none of whom had the status or ability to change the corrupt culture of Second Temple Judaism or the larger pagan Greco-Roman world. What a fool Jesus was. If only he had been more like Ann Coulter. …
When it comes to hatred, Coulter needs to get the log out of her own eye. For by her comments she shows herself to be one of those who hate the servants of Christ. And if she hates the servants of Christ, she hates him as well. The words of the Apostle Paul are applicable to Coulter, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand” (Rom.14:4).
As for Coulter, in the view of this writer her condition has been downgraded to clueless.
“How Should We Respond to Ann Coulter’s Article on the Ebola Doctor?”
I think the answer is: grace. God is a God of grace, and since grace is unmerited favor, it by definition cannot be clearly seen if the primary focus is on helping those who seem most influential. For then it looks like there are conditions – namely, how influential you are. To show manifestly and decisively that grace is grace – that is, without conditions of merit or influence or ability – God serves (and commands us to serve) those who seemingly have nothing to offer, even at great risk.
This, in turn, allows us to see those with seeming influence (in Coulter’s example, Hollywood power-brokers) in the right light as well – namely, as those who in fact do not have anything to offer of their own either, but rather who are just as dependent on God as those visibly in great need and without influence.
So God isn’t creating an us vs. them scenario where people of influence don’t matter but those of no influence do, or where people next door don’t matter but those 8,000 miles away do. Rather, he is doing exactly what it takes to make it clear that we are all equally and fully dependent on grace.
That’s why we read “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:28-29). …
In sum, the problem is not first of all Coulter’s pragmatic argument that helping influential people here in the U.S. is better because it will be more effective (as insensitive as that is).
The problem is that she is failing to recognize that when people like Dr. Brantly go help those who have nothing to offer in faraway lands, it helps those of us in America as well. For it helps us see that we are all equally dependent on God’s grace. That’s the message America needs. It’s the message we all need to grasp to the core of our being, and something that can’t happen if we avoid helping the sick worldwide.
In this sense, then, Dr. Brantly’s going to Liberia is indeed far more influential for God’s kingdom than had he focused on helping turn Hollywood power-brokers to God. For it shows that God is not dependent on such power-brokers, and that those with influence in the world are not in any special category before him.
That’s the message of grace, it’s the message we all need to hear, and it’s exactly what Dr. Brantly has demonstrated in his life.
“Are Missionaries Idiots and Narcissists?: a Response to Ann Coulter”
Her most scathing comments are aimed at motive. Why would anyone do such an idiotically wasteful thing as try to help Liberians? …
To me, the most shocking aspect of Ann Coulter’s article is the allegation of cowardice and narcissism. …
Church history is filled with inspiring stories of missionary exploits. From William Carey to Hudson Taylor, from the Moravians to the “Auca Five”, the Spirit of Jesus shines brightly in these tales of courage and commitment.
I believe we must re-commit ourselves to standing strong in America, loving our land, and caring for our own nation. We must win back the heart of our country. But in doing so, we cannot back away from our world mandate. Jesus said, “Go into all the world…” It will be costly. It will be dangerous. But, please let’s not crucify and criticize our own.
God bless Dr. Kent Brantly and Mrs. Nancy Whitebol.
“Why Ann Coulter Has It All Wrong About Missions”
I have spoken to literally hundreds of missionaries and have yet to meet one who was timid to speak the truth, in their own country or otherwise. The missionaries I have met are bold and ready to share the gospel with anyone who will listen – whether in America, Europe or Asia, it really doesn’t matter. They just want to spread the gospel. …
Every missionary I have met has had a call. A deep, undeniable call to take the gospel to the world – anywhere: at home, at work, and on a foreign field. Most would be embarrassed to receive accolades and honor for what they do. They don’t serve for that reason – they serve to please an audience of One – Jesus Christ. …
Whether you are called to take the gospel to Hollywood or the Bronx, to Africa or Europe, to your neighbor or your co-worker, you have to answer the call. Staying at home to “care for your fellow countryman” would be disobedient if God called you to medical missions in Liberia; just as it would be disobedient to travel to China if God called you to be a missionary in your hometown. …
And I have news for Ann – the angels rejoice in heaven just as much when a leprosy-ridden body in a jungle someplace receives Christ as when a multi-million dollar executive in a corner office prays the sinner’s prayer.
“Coulter owes Ebola doc an apology: priest”
Presented with Ms. Coulter’s absurd dichotomy – as if the Church must choose between serving at home or abroad – we have an opportunity to remember how the Church is poorly served by those who reduce her or her teaching to merely ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ labels. Ms. Coulter has no idea what motivated Dr. Brantly, and mocking a father who faces death for his service is simply reprehensible. At the very least, she owes him and his family an apology.
Resources:
The Gospel According to Ann Coulter at www.coulterwatch.com/gospel.pdf.
CoulterWatch 