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The discussion of best practices for containing COVID-19 has become another front in Americas culture wars. Do lockdowns suppress the virus? Should masks be mandatory? What about bolstered unemployment benefits and freezes on evictions to help with the economic fallout?

Julia Raifman cant broker peace, but she does oversee the go-to information warehouse on these questions. Starting in March, Raifman, a School of Public Health assistant professor of health law, policy, and management, has been leading a team of about 30 grad students in creating the COVID-19 U.S. State Policy Database (CUSP), cataloging 100 policies enacted by various states and the District of Columbia to combat the medical and financial woes of the pandemic.

Their handiwork has proven the adage, Build it and they will come.

At least 25 academic papers have cited the database, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given Raifman a grant to build a website for the information.

Meanwhile, the website Journalists Resource, run by Harvard Kennedy Schools Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, calls the database a useful tool for journalists who want to keep their communities up-to-date on the latest mandates.

Journalists Resource notes that others have compiled online sites for COVID-19 information, but what makes Raifmans COVID-19 U.S. State Policy DatabaseCUSPparticularly useful for journalists on deadline is that its a quick way to find out when a state policy started, ended, and possibly restarted. Including that particular datum, Raifman says, grew out of her own experience as a policy analyst, which made her realize the importance of knowing the dates when states changed their policies, to evaluate how outcomes changed before and after policy changes.

News illustrators found another purpose for CUSP, she adds: The Wall Street Journal used the database to visualize when states implemented mask orders.

As a scholar, Raifman has reseached how policies targeted towards people having trouble paying rent during the pandemic, and whove been made lonely by it, might help prevent sucide. People are having trouble paying rent, she says, which has led some states to pause evictions. (The Massachusetts freeze currently is scheduled through mid-October.) She also led a study in which she, Jacob Bor, an SPH assistant professor of global health, and a UPenn colleague suggested that the temporary federal unemployment insurance premium this summer cut food insecurity by almost one third.

Given these food and rent realities, Raifman says, theres an urgent need for more research on which policies have been most effective for supporting people to inform federal and state actions.

Rapid-response research on the pandemic was her goal in creating the database. I specifically wanted to facilitate research on both COVID prevention, so we could learn from early policy decisions, and wanted to encourage researchers to consider how policies such as eviction freezes and unemployment insurance may be just as important as COVID prevention policies in shaping health and well-being,she says.

With scores of state policies in the database, Raifman and her team update it weekly or monthly, depending on the topic, prioritizing policies that are most relevant to peoples health and well-being in the present moment, she says. Those are state mask policies and reopening and reclosing of indoor gathering spaces. We can also see that really serious economic precarity is causing increases in food and housing insecurity, so we are spending a lot of time considering unemployment insurance policies, eviction policies, utility shut-off policies, and food security policies.

Making the database public was crucial. I knew that the harms that COVID and its economic ramifications would cause were so much larger than any one research team, Raifman says. I wanted everyone who could work on these topics to have access to this database if it would help them.

There was a personal angle to that teamwork approach as well, she admits.

I also had limited ability to take time for deep thought and careful data analyses while working from home with an infant and no childcare from March through August. The database was something I could contribute in my limited capacity to work in two-hour periods as my husband and I took turns caring for our baby.

Read more here:
What Are States Doing about COVID-19? This BU Database Has Answers - BU Today

This column is part of our ongoing opinion commentary on faith, called Living Our Faith. Find this weeks reader question and get weekly roundups of the project in your email inbox by signing up for the Living Our Faith newsletter.

On Oct. 31, 1517, Martin Luther accidentally kicked off the historical era known as the Reformation.

This obscure German professor began a rather technical argument about sin, forgiveness and purgatory that turned into a violent crisis that reshaped Christianity ever since. As a Lutheran pastor, I am duly obligated to mark the anniversary of this event (usually on the preceding Sunday), which, as complicated as its causes were and as mixed as its outcomes have been, is certainly a point from which most Protestant churches can trace their origins.

But the Reformation was never supposed to be remembered as a single moment in history. It was supposed to be an ongoing process of reform and renewal within the whole Christian tradition.

So I startled myself when a friend asked me recently: Could another Reformation happen in American Christianity? With churches heavily polarized along political and sometimes racial lines, with leaders growing increasingly out of touch with both dissenters in their own flocks and people just outside of them, and with increasing numbers of Americans departing the church traditions in which they were raised (if they were raised in church at all), it was a good question. But I didnt hesitate to answer: No, theres no second Reformation coming. Even if thats what we need.

The danger signs for American Christianity are obvious and growing. The conservative evangelical establishment, having largely embraced Donald Trump since his 2016 campaign for the presidency, increasingly appears to take its doctrinal cues from whatever culture wars are being pushed in national media and politics. The summer wave of protests against racial injustice have been answered with calls to defend the policing status quo. The Rev. Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas said on Fox News that to resist law enforcement officers is to resist God himself, paraphrasing the words of Paul the Apostle.

But among other evangelical groups, that deference to civil authorities is nowhere to be found when public health authorities restrict public gatherings (whether those restrictions apply to worship or not) to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. In October, evangelical entertainer Sean Feucht did not have a permit when he held a huge worship protest in Nashville, where churches are largely open and not prohibited from gathering, and he falsely claimed Christians are being persecuted there. From the outside, white American evangelicalism appears less concerned with doctrine or theology than with a continuous adaptation to Republican electoral fortunes.

My own mainline Protestantism, meanwhile, has had different but related struggles. If the public profile of conservative evangelicalism can seem like a pious extension of Fox News talking points, our public profile (to the extent it even exists) hews closely to the rhetoric and priorities of progressive activist groups and liberal institutions. And while our denominational leadership leans vocally but rather indistinctly left on issues of racial justice, gender and immigration, our congregations are often politically mixed.

The local pastors job is very often a balancing act that leads some of us to compulsively lower the stakes of political conflict and to stigmatize the very fact of conflict itself. Everyone is a little bit right and a little bit wrong, and in the end the important thing is not what decisions get made but how well we come together to keep the Sunday school and the church budget functioning. (I know this happens because Ive been guilty of saying this many times.)

The Catholic church has at times avoided this secular co-opting by mixing liberal positions on immigration and poverty with conservative positions on abortion and sexuality. But in recent years even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has been a barely audible voice in our national life, mildly lamenting things like racism and mistreatment of migrants while some members freelance by promoting claims that climate change is a hoax and Democrats cant be Catholic.

How so many American Christian leaders ended up sounding like talk radio hosts or school administrators is a long story. But here we are now, as likely to be found barricading our rhetorical doors to keep our constituents inside as trying to throw them open to people outside. Rather than trying to serve as the conscience of a party or nation, plenty of us are content to tag along with the people who have real influence.

Seems like as good a time as any to nail some theses to a door and start something, right?

But part of the reason the Reformation happened in the first place is that the stakes were so high for pretty much everyone. You couldnt just opt out of the church, and the decisions of your prince or of a council of bishops or a theological faculty could determine the faith you lived by (not to mention the often dreadful consequences for heresy). Churches lived on rents and subsidies more than voluntary offerings. While the relationship between the church and the state was a big topic in the Reformation (though not nearly the biggest), the place of the church as a state-protected monopoly really wasnt. If the prince decided against your faction, it was possible to migrate to an area with a friendlier prince, but not to go across the street and start up Second Lutheran Church.

Today we can argue to our hearts' content and define our faith as precisely or broadly as we wish without fear of being banished or executed. Thats a considerable improvement since the era of the Reformation. But now the solution to deep conflict within a Christian tradition is usually not to try to win a consensus or even a concession within it. Today the solution is more typically to just leave for the church across the street, for another denomination, or for the eloquent arguments for sleeping in on Sunday.

Lutherans, Episcopalians and now Methodists have all gone through this at a national level, and in countless individual cases in churches all over the country. Catholicism and evangelicalism have recently joined the Protestant mainline in numerical decline. Reform becomes more and more urgent even as it becomes harder and harder to accomplish.

So on this years Reformation Sunday, I will try to remember that Martin Luther had no idea he was starting anything so consequential back in 1517. I wouldnt wish for history to repeat even if it could. If theres a possibility of renewal in all our futures, if theres another path for Christianity in America, it will have to be something unlooked for and unexpected. And the sooner the better.

Benjamin J. Dueholm is pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in University Park.

Original post:
Christians wont see another Reformation, but maybe we need one - The Dallas Morning News

In his recent article, Oliver Kamm made a link between supporters of Brexit and the increasing number of lockdown sceptics, who are cropping up in the comment pages and broadcast studios to attack the governments infringements of their liberty. The extraordinarily close crossover between Brexiters and opponents of public-health shows up, Kamm says, in an inherent suspicion of expertise.

Many obvious figures fall into this category: Nigel Farage, Daniel Hannan and crackpot conspiracists such as Piers Corbyn and David Icke. The latter two are in this argument irrelevant; both base their esoteric ideas on the notion that the state created coronavirus. Farage and his coterie on the other hand, while prone to spouting conspiracies, see the lockdown as a chance to stoke the culture wars that have engulfed America and threaten to divide Britain.

The establishment, as they see it, is the voice of the government and its scientific advisors. Therefore the establishment must be challenged, and that means all lockdown measures are attacked. Their opinion is not derived from questions of liberty, or from a horror at the lives ruined by the economic consequences of lockdown. It is merely another way of extending the anti-establishment contest, which was set off in the Brexit debate.

Unfortunately, Kamm and those who find themselves backing the lockdown groupthink as well, form the flip side of this unhappy contest. The odious Faragists are so prevalent that all lockdown sceptics are smeared with the same invective. To oppose the lockdown is to express an anti-public health sentiment. To hold such a view it to ignore the experts and to leave the old to fend for themselves.But the idea that in opposing the Prime ministers edicts I was hastening their end cannot be substantiated.

This idea, that the matter of opinion in this lockdown is merely one of lives versus the economy or vice versa is profoundly damaging, and derails any chance of serious debate. Consider the tens of thousands whose lives will be shortened by delayed cancer treatments, missed GPs appointments, and the families of those people who died, having been discouraged from attending A&E departments. Should we chastise those who oppose the measures which brought these tragedies about as being ideologues who fail to recognise the truth, and who are guilty of intellectual obscurantism? Fallaciously told that there was a binary choice between saving lives and keeping jobs, it is no surprise that the majority of the country have stuck firmly to the first offering.

As winter approaches and Hancock and Co. show little sign of letting up on their new programme of provincial immiseration by stages, the two sides of the culture war are reemerging in the form of this new division. Pitted on the one side are the fanatics who supported Brexit, and on the other are the Remoaners, who support the lockdown consensus of Johnson and No10. This factionalism can only damage the argument, and take it away from the real point which is that lives are at risk.

Mr Kamm will no doubt be aware of Christopher Hitchenss saying that, The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks. I may be unsettled to be holding the same opinion as Toby Young and Peter Hitchens on anything, but I would also hope that such a coincidence should never bar me from holding an opinion. Fervent Remainer I may be, but Brexit has little to do with our present woes. I do not have an innate suspicion of experts in any field, but I know that to tackle this virus and save lives it takes far more than the advice of epidemiologists alone. I happen to agree with Dr. Sunetra Gupta and thousands of others who have challenged the accepted narrative. I happen to think that continuing with much of the measures we are under will cut down many more years of life than coronavirus ever did, and that much of the damage is yet to be done.

To be such a lockdown sceptic does not require a hatred of expertise or a right-wing ideology, and or any particular identity at all. When arguments start to forget the real points and descend into the stock phrases to which we have become so accustomed herd immunity, exponential growth, let the virus rip then we know that new, more treacherous ground has been reached. This path leads down into the quagmire of identity, and of culture war where all those who disagree are thrown onto the same ignominious heap.

Read more:
On lockdown and Brexit: a response to Oliver Kamm - TheArticle

The chants come after the FBI foiled a plan from a group of men who plotted to kidnap the governor.

NORTON SHORES, Mich. President Donald Trump visited Muskegon County Saturday in a push to rally Michigan voters with just a few weeks left until the election. The rally was held by FlyBy Air at the Muskegon County Airport in Norton Shores.

Twice at the rally, the president referenced Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the crowd responded by chanting lock her up. While originating during the 2016 campaign cycle, these chants are especially pointed since federal officials recently announced the governor was the target of a kidnapping plot.

You got to get your governor to open up your state, he said to the first round of lock her up chants. And get your schools open. The schools have to be open. Most of Michigans restrictions have been relaxed, and schools can be open for in-person, hybrid or remote learning.

The president then referenced the kidnapping plot: I guess they said she was threatened, and she blamed me.

The FBI foiled a plan to kidnap the governor, storm the Michigan Capitol and instigate a civil war. Fourteen men are charged in these plots. Several members of the group talked about murdering tyrants or taking a sitting governor, a criminal complaint said.

Eight of the men are facing state charges related to terrorism, and six others are facing federal charges.

Whitmer has said Trumps rhetoric is dangerous. In April, he tweeted LIBERATE MICHIGAN, encouraging protesters who were upset with COVID-19 restrictions. While Trump was still speaking, Whitmer retweeted a clip of the crowd chanting lock her up, saying this is exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family, and other government officials lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans. It needs to stop.

Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield, a Republican who attended the rally, denounced the chants Saturday night in a tweet.

"Trump didn't chant 'lock her up' about our governor. But others did and it was wrong. She was literally just targeted. Let's debate differences. Let's win elections. But not that," he said.

The president spoke for about 90 minutes, using the stage to talk about some of his administrations accomplishments from the past four years, culture wars topics and a few mentions of Michigan.

Trump also mentioned the Friday decision by the Michigan appeals court to block a 14-day extension to accept and count absentee ballots. State law says that ballots need to be received by election day to be counted, but Democratic lawmakers have been pushing for an extension because of a record number of people voting by mail this year.

We just won a huge victory for voting rights in Michigan, Trump said.

A couple thousand people attended the rally, which is only the fourth time a sitting president has visited Muskegon County.

Julie Dagen, who is from Ravenna in Muskegon County, said she has never attended a political rally before Saturdays but believes this election is extra important. Living in the area, she said it means a lot for the president to visit Muskegon County.

This is a working-class community and there used to be a lot of industry here, and he has brought back industry, Dagen said.

Kari Hibbard, who attended the rally with her family, thinks that Trump will win Michigan again, after eking out a victory in 2016 with less than 11,000 votes. Hibbird is from Norton Shores, where Muskegon County Airport is located.

Its a small, little city and it just feels very honoring that our president chose to be here to come and talk about police too, she said. Hibbard said her husband works in law enforcement.

At Heritage Landing, a Democratic event was held at 4 p.m. to counter Trumps rally. Muskegon County Democratic Party Chair Jennifer Barnes said earlier this week, they planned the event one hour before the presidents rally because they want to keep momentum going.

"I thought it was important to show the contrast, that Democrats are a force here in Michigan as well," said Julie Bratton.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Muskegon County by a thin margin of 1,177 votesmaking it one of only two counties in West Michigan to vote Democratic. Before that, Muskegon County had a solid track record of voting blue, with President Barack Obama getting 59% of the vote in 2012, and 65% in 2008.

Both Trump and Biden have put Michigan in their sights. Biden stopped in Grand Rapids two weeks ago and held events on the east side of the state on Friday. This is Trumps second rally in Michigan in the past month. And both candidates have also sent surrogates to campaign in the state in recent weeks.

The president ended his speech by encouraging people to vote and submit their ballots on time. Michiganders can register to vote online and via mail through Oct. 19. After that, individuals can register to vote in person at their local clerk's office.

The general election is on Nov. 3.

Watch the full rally here:

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Crowd chants 'lock her up' against Whitmer at Trump rally - 10TV

Where to next for the National Party? Ben Thomas reviews the post-election wreckage.

The National Party is undertaking a review of its campaign. Presumably this will not be to determine the cause of its historic defeat.

The cause is well known. The cause screams out from the pages of The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald. The cause haunts the dreams of Nationals vastly reduced caucus of 34. The cause is Jacinda.

More specifically, it is the relationship the prime minister formed with the public during the first lockdown, and the promise of stable and secure leadership through three years of unknown dangers as Covid continues to wreak havoc on the worlds economy and population.

Instead, it must focus on how National could have done better and, perhaps, where to from here. Already debate has begun about how to reframe the partys policies.

Its findings will highlight certain obvious logistical and management issues. It appeared candidate advertising had either sloppy or no sign-off from the central campaign. The leaders itinerary was a moveable feast, one which the rest of the campaign struggled to keep up with.

The review will probably conclude that walkabouts should happen in busy areas where voters are free to speak, not on windswept streets with the cast of a Tory Westworld making rote conversation. It may find its possible to argue the state should not have a role in regulating the interaction of personal choices with social and environmental factors, without insulting fat people. Depending on its thoroughness, it may finally answer the question who was Todd Muller anyway?

The review will have to address the issues of caucus composition and diversity. One possible outcome of the election failed to materialise: the much discussed conservative caucus within National which in the past year or two has come to mean those MPs with very socially conservative views based in religious belief has not become more dominant as a result of the loss. Instead, its numbers have thinned dramatically. Christopher Luxon in Botany is the only addition to this very loosely conceived group, assuaging fears that the party will recede away further from urban liberal centre voters, and swelling the ranks of identikit bald white men to record highs.

Former conservative caucus members Harete Hipango, Alfred Ngaro, Paulo Garcia and Agnes Loheni are gone. That list of electoral casualties also illustrates another problem facing National: its notable lack of diversity. The religious bloc was also the diversity bloc, in relatively strong positions on the list (with the exception of Ngaro, who had alienated key party figures with increasingly strident social media posts), but now wiped out.

The future of veterans Nick Smith and Gerry Brownlee is under scrutiny after both lost their seats. But the reality is that their retirements would do nothing to reinvigorate the caucus. The next cabs off the rank as listed above were none too stellar performers for the party in government.

For National to bring in the candidates who represent the future of the party to join the handful of accomplished new candidates like Nicola Grigg in Selwyn it must somehow convince armies of has-beens and never-weres to step aside and make way for Tania Tapsell, Megan Hands, Emma Mellow and Katie Nimon. Its likely an impossible task.

That should focus the party on the real question: knowing the tide was going out, did it bring in enough new talent, from different backgrounds? The answer is almost certainly no.

These are issue for the board and the successor to president Peter Goodfellow to deal with. The parliamentary National party must play the hand its been dealt.

Judith Collins and Gerry Brownlee lead out the National caucus after their selections as leader and deputy, July 2020. (Photo: Robert Kitchin-Pool/Getty Images)

There are big decisions ahead. Chief among them is whether, or more likely when, Judith Collins is replaced as leader. The days of major party politicians being given two campaigns to win an election are a distant memory, although the recent experiences of both Labour and National (twice) with leadership churn while in opposition have been decidedly mixed.

Luxon has been touted as the next John Key by no lesser personage than the previous John Key. The former Air New Zealand chief executive stands out for his high level management experience, and for being the only National caucus member caught on camera smiling on Monday. His business credentials are catnip to National activists, and he has been busy networking throughout the campaign.

However, he remains entirely untested in national politics, and was poor in media appearances during his ill-judged and overhyped candidacy launch last year. The unfortunate experiment of Todd Muller will give caucus pause before they stuff another CV in a suit and present it as the next prime minister.

Former defence minister and security firm owner Mark Mitchell remains in the mix, but his public profile and record of scoring hits on the government doesnt yet match his ambition.

Simon Bridges, the former leader, has publicly demurred from taking back the leadership, which probably means he is waiting to be begged, in the manner Collins was. He is clearly much more comfortable in his own skin now, but the yak-renaissance remains a mostly online phenomenon, and his previously formidable majority in the blue chip seat of Tauranga was slashed by almost 75% on Saturday. National is running out of warm bodies to replace Collins.

If she is to remain, however, she must realise there is no future in the culture wars into which she dipped a little toe in the preceding months. Firstly, because National is a broad church party, which means it must have diversity of voices. There is of course nothing wrong with religious MPs Chris Penk is a valuable caucus member and a strong rule-of-law advocate, for example. But New Zealanders have shown an admirable disdain for US-style culture wars based on scratching itches around abortion and gay rights that should have been left behind in the 1970s.

Secondly, because the issues affecting the New Zealand electorate for the next three years will be decidedly materialist, not cultural. There is a recession, there is still poverty, there is shit spilling onto the streets of the capital from ancient sewerage infrastructure. Theres a pandemic and theres climate change. Theres the chilling spectre of corruption at previously unknown levels in New Zealand, with gangs co-opting border staff to facilitate drug deals.

The good news for National is that this means the battle for its soul (which may strike some as an oxymoron) can be parked until much later in the term.

Polls at the beginning of 2020, approximately 3,000 months ago, had National poised to win the election. It was a position based purely on the governments lack of delivery to that point, helped by excellent opposition work from the likes of Collins in highlighting failures on (in particular) Kiwibuild, light rail and gangs, and other promises.

Although Ardern and Grant Robertson seem to have learned their lessons about over-promising and under-delivering, new challenges arise all the time, requiring new and untested government responses. Labour excelled at this in 2020. There is no guarantee they always will, or that the solutions wont cause problems of their own.

Months ago, economists were predicting house prices would fall. Now, thanks to the wash of low interest cash coming from the Reserve Bank, prices are skyrocketing, and the housing crisis is back in the public mind.

The National Party of October 2020 has no idea how those issues will pan out yet, or what kind of response will be required in 2023.

The review could find, simply by doing a word cloud of 2020, that we live in unprecedented times, and sometimes its good to have the luxury of opposition to wait and see.

The Spinoff Weekly compiles the best stories of the week an essential guide to modern life in New Zealand, emailed out on Monday evenings.

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For National, umpteen tough questions and one small ray of light - The Spinoff