Jesus or…Amazon…Loves You

“Jesus Loves You. Jesus is there for you when you need him,” reads a children’s book at the Barnes & Noble bookstore almost four years after lockdowns descended on this country and all over the world. With what children and teens endured these last few years, the book might as well say, “A Martian spaceship will land on your lawn, and a door will open for you.” 

“Jesus is always with you. Jesus is there when you need him,” reads page after page of this picture book in the religious books section. When you are lonely and sad, he is always with you. When you are afraid, he is always with you. When you don’t know what to do, he is always with you. What are children to do with this message after politicians and bureaucrats, or the elite oligarchs – or whomever we believe accomplished it – shut down the world in spring of 2020, closed children’s schools and churches and activities, neighborhoods and communities, their sufferings ignored?

A church billboard sign near our house reads – “Jesus is the good Shepherd. He cares for you.” After what I have seen ordinary people and populations do to each other and especially to children in the name of a virus that posed little risk to most people, I now read all such messages in a new context and have not yet reconciled what to do with my confusion and dismay. 

Covid mania and devastating harms skewed my perceptions of easy religious slogans and especially how they now may be perceived by children, teens, and young people. I believe God is tough enough to tolerate our questions, doubts, and even our irreverent musings. These religious phrases may ring hollow to middle school children I taught during lockdowns, who were confined to their bedrooms rather than enjoying classroom activities with friends. Those from chaotic or alcoholic homes or those desperately poor or even those with overly fearful parents may find woefully inadequate the slogans, “Jesus Loves You,” “Jesus Will Never Leave You,” “Jesus Will be There When You Need Him.”

To a five- or eight-year-old or a 12-year-old shut in his room, trying to make sense of computer school, where was Jesus? Where was God, he may ask? School left. Church left. My friends left. My family was too frightened to do anything outside the house. Where did all the adults go, for that matter? They all left with Jesus.

After horrific harms of lockdowns, lost jobs and education, fractured families, overdoses and suicides, deaths of loneliness and despair, increases in child sexual abuse and child trafficking because social services and support shut down, religious slogans like these may seem like no more than slick marketing language, compelling us to pull out our checkbooks. How is an 11- or 12-year-old supposed to envision or experience this now – Jesus Loves Me? Jesus Will Never Leave Me or Forsake Me? 

How might a 14-year-old alone in his room view Jesus when a parent said he couldn’t see his friends until a vaccine came out? He stares at a computer screen, in a new bizarre world, staring at other teens’ faces stacked in little boxes? Teens are naturally self-conscious, some painfully so; and yet, suddenly we expected them to endure being on cameras for hours, video and audio recorded from their rooms – in order to go to school.

Young musicians did not gather to play with their orchestra leader. Child and teen singers did not gather to practice. Soccer practice and games stopped. Little League Baseball ceased. Webs of communities with violin lessons and playdates, soccer practices and orchestra rehearsals, math tutoring and church camps – webs that mostly moms had woven since birth for our children’s mental, emotional, and academic health and well-being – ended abruptly and without adequate meaning-making. Vaccines came out, the child or teen’s parent had him injected perhaps multiple times, and yet everyone around seemed to get Covid anyway. What sense are we to make of all this? How will we help children make sense of it?

Jesus loves me? Is he always there for me? What does that even mean now? We have heard and read and told children in Sunday schools that Jesus (or God) will never leave you or forsake you. I am not an atheist, but a believer, with a faith developed over years, who cherishes my faith communities – my core one, the Quaker Meeting, and my second one, the Episcopal Church. And yet, when I saw this children’s book in the local bookstore, strange voices called out from my faith. How can we expect children to believe this after these recent cultural betrayals? How will children emerge from this harrowing time? What meanings will they make from it? What faiths, inspiration, and encouragement will they find? 

Mainstream church youth groups ceased meeting for one to two years or more in some states after March 2020 lockdowns. Computer meetings were a bereft substitute for hearing a friend’s lively laugh in person. School was on the computer for a year or longer in some places. When school buildings finally reopened, fear and paranoid practices depressed even the heartiest students. Children were forced to cover their faces. Adults forced masks on toddlers in daycares. Teens saw only their friends’ obscured faces, had to sit six feet from each other to eat lunch, had no after-school activities or limited ones with shots required to attend. Some students played basketball outside in the heat with masks on. Even teachers couldn’t gather to eat lunch together. And too many people acted like this was normal. It wasn’t.

Amazon will never leave you or forsake you seems a truer message for these times after March 2020. Amazon never stopped. Its boxes never stopped arriving. Its billions ballooned as people mouse-clicked on everything from gourmet baked goods, sweaters, make-up, power tools, computer equipment, movies, video games, clicked on well, everything – and boxes appeared on porches. My best friend gone. My school and clubs closed. Jesus gone. Parents gone. But Amazon will never leave you or forsake you. Is this the lesson we want to leave with our children?

We swam in a chaos of conflicting, false, misleading, or manipulative information, and it was hard to get a footing on anything. Adults felt this way. How did children and teenagers think and feel? Where was hope and a future? How long would the fear and isolation go on? And where was the Jesus who would never leave you, as the children’s book says now almost four years after bureaucrats and politicians wrecked the world? Where was God? Where was he when my colleague’s 17-year-old child committed suicide? 

Jesus will always be there for you? When a teen boy simply missed his best friend and his brother, who didn’t live with him, and didn’t know when or how they would return, they and the Dungeons and Dragons games, Frisbee, bike riding, or just easy hanging out they used to do together? How was a teen to imagine that “Jesus loves me” or that “God would never leave me or forsake me?”

At the Barnes & Noble, I look around the children, teen, and adult sections for books displayed that may help us make meaning from what happened. I know these books exist, have bought a few of them from dissident writers and independent thinkers, but they are not featured here in a major bookstore in a busy town and have been censored on Amazon. Recent emails, obtained by the House Judiciary Committee, reveal that Amazon yielded to White House pressure to censor books critical of the administration’s Covid policy. 

“Jesus Will Never Leave You and Is Always There for You,” reads this picture book. If religious language and slogans in a post-Covid lockdown world are to be more than just alien-speak or marketing ploys to get us to reach for our checkbooks, then we have to grapple with difficult confusions, heartbreaks, and hard efforts at meaning-making. I am not at all sure how this will play out. But I do worry a lot about children, teens, and young people and the future meaning-making I hope they will be able to do with our help.

We survive by forming stories, whether narrative, poetry, art, music, or other forms. We survive by making meanings. Often, we also learn about the presence of the divine through fellowship with others, through serving others, and by spending time in nature. We often experience God through community.

In many stories, Jesus walked among the diseased and downtrodden, touched those whom no one would touch, laid his bare hands – so they may feel his warmth – on the bodies of the sickest, the most lonely, the most desperate among us. They saw his open face – as faces of compassion, faces of recognition heal us. Where is this picture book in our post-lockdown time?

After I wrote about church closures in “The Speakeasy Churches of 2020,” people wrote to me from all over the country with angry and heartbroken stories of how their long-time churches closed permanently because of declining membership after shutdowns and Zoom services. Some wrote of excess deaths among church members, which were not Covid deaths. They mourned the absence of funerals. When he learned I was a Quaker, a long-time attender at a New England Quaker Meeting wrote to me about his Meeting’s “separate but equal” policy. The Meeting installed a sign stating that vaccinated people may worship together in the main room while the unvaccinated had to worship in a separate room.

What could we count on after lockdowns descended? Mainstream churches shuttered doors while the local AA meeting near my house met at a park in the winter. Another 12-step meeting met under a tree in the yard of the church in warm months and under a porch awning when it rained. Church bureaucracies ordered doors closed. What had happened to us? Yet, Amazon never stopped.

What will really never leave us or forsake us? The question eludes me, but I am fairly certain that it won’t be found on a computer screen. Perhaps it has something to do with ongoing struggles to make meanings? And those struggles happen in live communities – whether it’s one friend or brother or sister or a roomful.

“If ye love not each other in daily communion, how can ye love God whom ye hath not seen?” says the Shaker hymn, “More Love. More Love.” The song continues, “If ye love one another/ Then God dwelleth within you/ And ye are made strong/ To live by his word.”

What does daily communion mean? Being together to touch, eat, talk, listen, laugh, sing, play. Serving others through work or volunteering helps. Struggles to learn and to make meanings from trials and losses and the beauty of community with its surprises and miracles, new ideas and alliances, strengthening, encouraging, and inspiring us – these will never show up on a computer screen or in an Amazon box on the porch. 

A version of this piece was originally published in The American Spectator.