Behind the Bastards - The Priests of Plague

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

Robert is joined by Miles Gray to discuss the history of priests and plagues.Footnotes: Popular televangelist: 'We don't have a flu season' Evangelical Trump adviser tells people to skip flu shots in favor of prayer Liturgical Processions in the Black Death THE BLACK DEATH AND ITS IMPACT ON THE CHURCH AND POPULAR RELIGION The Black Death of Cats Priests and the Black Death When a Third of the World Died Negative Shocks and Mass Persecutions How a South Korean church helped fuel the spread of the coronavirus Shadowy Church Is at Center of Coronavirus Outbreak in South Korea Without guidance from the top, Americans have been left to figure out their own coronavirus solutions One pastor was so outraged by church ban during Spanish flu that he went to jail Resolution, addressed to City Council, Los Angeles, written by First Chuch of Christ, Scientist In Italy and beyond, churches grapple with coronavirus 'Superspreader' in South Korea infects nearly 40 people with coronavirus The 1918 “Spanish Flu” in Spain Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, good. Now, today we're talking with my friend Mr. Miles Gray. Miles, how are you doing in quarantine? Oh, my God. Help me, Robert.

You're not doing great? I'm fine, relatively speaking. I'm getting used to a new way of living to put it mildly. But, you know, it's taking a lot. I'm actually learning a lot about myself through this quarantine, and I'm trying to use that part to be empowering rather than fucking frightening. Well, we're all learning a lot during this new period of quarantine. And some of the people who are learning the most are America's religious leaders, particularly the leaders of large churches that make their money by having a lot of people cram in the door every Sunday and drop out donations. Yeah, and today, Miles, we're going to talk about how organized religion historically responds to plagues.

And that's going to be a fun topic for you to discuss. Are you a big fan of plagues or organized religion? Plagues, not as much. Not as much as I used to be. Not as much as you used to be. When were you really into plagues? Oh, around 2012, when that Game Plague Inc. came out, and I was just fucking laughing my ass off. I'm like, here come the London Olympics. Get ready for global spread. Anyway, but organized religion, I went to Lutheran school until eighth grade, and then I went to Catholic high school. So, I know a little bit about all sides of the crucifix.

Of the crucifix? Interesting. Yeah. Oh, right, because religion. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, Miles, let's shove our intellectual proboscis into this subject and excrete saliva in order to dissolve it so that we can suck it back up and gain nourishment. Wow. Who eats like that? What insect? Oh, is that a flyhead? Okay. Yeah, they squirt, goop out, and it dissolves stuff, and then they suck it back up. I'm pretty sure that's how flies work. Can you, now this is the natural extension of knowing something like that, is can you make a big barrel of whatever they spit out and just kill somebody with that?

Probably not. I mean, maybe if the flies are carrying a disease, but they aren't always. Yeah, you need a lot of flies. You need a lot of flies. Now, Miles, outside of your plans to murder people with flies, let's talk about, let's get into this subject. So on a video posted in early February, 2018, Texas evangelical preacher and member of Donald Trump's Faith Advisory Council, Gloria Copeland, said this to her parishioners in a Facebook live video. And I want to have you play that and play the start to about a minute and four seconds. Well, listen, partners, we don't have a flu season. We've got a duck season, the deer season, but we don't have a flu season. And don't receive it when somebody threatens you with everybody's getting the flu.

We've already had our shot. He bore our sicknesses and carried our diseases. That's what we stand on. And by his stripes, we were healed. If you've already got the flu, I'm going to pray for you right now. Father, I pray for every person that has symptoms of flu. I'm asking you, Lord, with your supernatural power to heal them now from the top of their head to the soles of their feet. Flu, I bind you off of the people in the name of Jesus. Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of flu and we receive it and we take it and we are healed by his stripes.

Amen. And the Bible says, he himself bore our sicknesses and carried our diseases. And by his stripes, we were healed. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that's pretty great, isn't it? Woo! You loving that? Dude, her energy is like someone at a bar who has been lying about everything they've been telling you the whole time,

but is ultimately trying to get free drinks. Yeah, because basically, the way I look at it is everybody's blessing, it's just very fast, very smooth, but she sounds fucked up, though, too, in a weird way. Yeah, she does sound like she's doing all of this to get you to give her a pack of cigarettes. Yeah, exactly. All that to say, man. You want to buy me a shot? But the people who do that get a lot of free shots and a lot of cigarettes.

And she has made a lot of money and is now advising President Donald Trump. I mean, bless her. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Gloria in that video went on to note that listeners should just keep saying, I'll never have the flu, I'll never have the flu. Inoculate yourself with the word of God. Flu, I bind you off of the people in the name of Jesus. Oh, no.

It's good stuff. Oh, no. Yeah. And that was February of 2018, Miles. And that year's flu season was, according to the CDC, responsible for more hospitalizations than any previous season in the CDC's records. And the fact that Copeland had the ear of the president while she was advising her, more than a million listeners to not get flu shots may have had an impact on why that season was so bad

and may also have been a message of things to come. As I write this in March of 2020, we are while actually, yeah, I wrote this in March. It's now April. But we're at a place where the president very recently voiced his desire to reopen the country well before medical officials advised him to do so so that he could have it open in time for Easter. It looks like we've moved past that particular bad idea. But my God, it was like right on the fucking edge there for a little while. Oh, boy.

I don't even... Yeah, I mean, I get it. That would have been great thematically. It would have been awesome. While everyone was dying around me, I would have at least been able to envision the scene in the movie made 70 years later where they film a bunch of... to increasingly unsettling music builds as all these different congregants file in and shake each other's hands.

Yeah, you could make that four-minute scene is amazing. And then switch to the mass graves, you know? Yeah, I mean, it'd be a great meme, though, where Jesus, capitalist Christ, you know, is being crucified by COVID-19 right now and then resurrected on Easter to come back with massive sales with 30% off some of your most favorite items. Yeah. Yes. You know, speaking of capitalist Jesus Christ... Yeah, so I wound up, like, interested in all this, and I went down this rabbit hole of, like, digging into the reactions

specifically Christian churches to horrible plagues all throughout history. And I, as a little bit of a, I don't know, a content warning here, this whole episode is just because I was drunk on Google at midnight a couple of days ago, and now this script exists, so it's just gonna happen to you now, Miles, and there's no escaping it. So we'll start with the Black Plague, because it killed about a third of the world, and it's like, you know, kind of the gold standard of plagues, you know? Yeah. If we're comparing plagues to, like, terrorist manifestos, it's like the plague equivalent of the Unabombers book, you know?

Right, right. It's like the top of the fucking pillar, you know? What is this album, as in terms of albums? I mean, I guess it all depends on your taste, but for you, what's, if the plague was an album, to you, what is it? I think the Who's Tommy is the greatest album of all time, so I would say the Black Plague is the Tommy of plagues. Wow. Okay, I like that. I learned a lot about you right now.

Thank you, yeah. So, most of our media tends to focus on the damage the plague did to Medieval Europe, and it fucked Medieval Europe up pretty bad. But the plague actually started off somewhere in the east. We don't really know where exactly, and it was equally devastating in Asia and the Middle East. And one of the first sources we have for the Black Plague was Abu Hafs Umar ibn Al-Wardi, a Muslim scholar who himself died of the Black Plague in 1349. And he claimed its origin was somewhere in China, which at that point was a much vaguer term than it is today. And he described that in the Near East, it quote,

sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily 1,000 or more and decimating the population, which is a sentiment now that we're losing 1,000 Americans a day to this that reminds me more and more of the president of the country. Yeah. Oh, god. Yeah. I hate when history does that thing of like just showing back up like, you thought I was done. So the Black Plague like rolled probably spread along the Silk Road, you know, through travel and transit and the major arteries of those two things at the time.

And yeah, by 1349 it was, it had had Limburg, Germany, where one chronicler wrote, there came a great death in Germany that is called the first great death and they died by the dozen. And that began on the third day they died in Limburg, more than 2,400 people died, not counting the children, because we didn't really count the children back in the day. Like, why would we give a shit about kids? Like, fuck that noise. How do you, what the fuck was going on back then when they're doing body counts? Like, they're just tossing them to the side like Jeremy Irons.

You know, kids die for no reason. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's kids are just dropping left and right back in the day. So until somebody's like 15, they're not even real. So it's like a bunch of babies die. Like who gives a shit? Expectations are low.

Yeah. Once some like adults start dropping, then it's like, okay, now we're losing some. Uh-oh. Right, right. Those little, those little screaming short people are all quiet, but now there's not as many people to go work the field. Something might be wrong. Yeah.

If you can't work, you don't count. Yeah. Yeah. That was kind of the attitude. Now, at this point in history, if you were a Christian, you know, there was no Protestant game in town, right? It's like Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. Like that was kind of it for you. Um, and since, you know, Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism were like the,

the Christian religions in town and the church in Rome was the wealthiest government in Europe and probably the most powerful government in Europe. The church was kind of on deck to take action when this horrible plague starts killing everybody. Like there's not really much in the way of organization or unity pan, you know, European when the plague hits, the church is the closest thing you have. You know, it's your CDC at the time. And it was not great at being the CDC. Oh, boy. I can only imagine what that is like.

Oh, science. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Not our strong suit. Um, now to give them, I mean, to give them a little bit of credit, it wasn't anyone's strong suit at the time. Like it's not like the doctors had a great handle on germ theory in the 1340s. Yeah. Um, so no one really knew what to do.

Um, so this will actually be the first, the only part in the story where like the church isn't taking any, they're taking actions that are endangering and killing huge numbers of people, but they, they don't mean to be, you know? Um, like they couldn't have really known how this was all going to work out. It's not really, there's a lot to blame. Yeah, it's like watching like a puppy play with like dynamite or something. You're like, oh, you don't want to go. I know it looks like a toy.

I don't know because like the Catholic church is a horror had done a lot of horrible, horrible things up to this point in history. It's more like, it's more like a serial killer accidentally backing over a puppy. We're like, that doesn't really like, if you're trying to like list, list that person's crimes, like, well, they didn't mean to hit the puppy, but it's just a thing that happened because they, yeah. That happens to be a thing that just happened. It's on their resumes towards the bottom really. Yeah, it's like John Wayne Gacy accidentally runs over a cat.

That's the Catholic church in this specific instance. So the church's first reaction to the outbreak of plague in Europe, authorized by the Pope, was to hold mass processions through the great cities of Europe. Now again, they couldn't have known this was a bad idea, but this was a terrible, terrible call. And it came out of a longstanding tradition called Rogation Days, which were enormous multi-day processions held by the church to quote, Sate God's desire for penitence. Oh boy.

Yeah, so like God's pissed and you got to march through. God's always angry at you and you got to like, so the ancient Catholic church, if any of you had parents who had anger management problems or substance abuse issues and like they come home like really pissed off and it's like everybody's job has to be to calm down, you know, mom or dad or whoever. I'm guessing a lot of people listening have had that experience. That's kind of the general attitude towards the Catholic church is like, something bad is happening.

We've got to all like fucking the church, like God is home and drunk and we need to like, chill him out or things are going to get badly. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Jesus. That's very much the attitude kind of everyone has towards God in Europe. And so they start these mass exhibitions of faith to honor specific saints. And it also kind of gives, you know, it kind of helps reinforce the power of the church in Rome.

So, yeah, as one historian wrote, it is little wonder then that one of the first actions of the church upon the arrival of the plague was to call special civic masses and processions thought to be useful in quelling the divine rage and sparking repentance in the people. And in some cities, these processions lasted as long as three days and were attended by thousands of people. Penitence went barefoot and wore sackcloth. They sprinkled each other in ashes, wept, prayed, tore out their hair

and waved candles as they stumbled through city streets. You may recognize this all as very bad social distancing. This is not recommended. It's just plague cellar in the streets. Yeah, yeah, it's exactly. It's like, all right, let's fucking, yeah, let's spring break everywhere but with hair tearing. Hair tearing. That's like, and you know, like, sure,

hair tearing though isn't like a fun, calm thing. You can say like hair tearing, like you have to really envision what's happening there. People are probably screaming, crying, pissing. Just get a hand on your hair right now and just kind of feel how deep it's in there. Yeah, imagine having a list of things where hair tearing is probably towards like the top and you start at the bottom like, okay, yeah, screaming, right, like sobbing, right, like crying, great. Like punching, sure. You have to get through a lot of shit before you're like, yeah, hair tearing.

Yeah, pull my own fucking hair out. Rip my hair out. It is one of those things like, like, tearing and feathering where, you know, we kind of, it just kind of gets like, oh yeah, people used to get tired and feathered. That sure was a thing but it's like, no, no, people were pouring boiling pitch on each other. And it killed them. Yeah, it's not like in a fucking like Disney like channel show where the kids do a gag where it's like feather with glue.

Yeah, it's not really glue, you know. Their only glue was like as hot as the coffee that burned that woman so bad she needed to be hospitalized because of McDonald's. Anyway, this is, yeah, let's roll along. So yeah, obviously all these processions spread the bubonic plague fucking everywhere, right? Like, of course. But you know, you can't really, the church didn't know what they were doing. And for a little bit of fairness, the best data we have, which is also very imperfect and none of it, you know, is numerical data,

but the best data we have suggests that non-Catholic parts of the world suffered pretty similar death rates to the Catholic parts of the world. So like, and probably because kind of everyone's reaction was to do similar things when this starts to happen. Like it's just this unknown horrible thing, you know. And if we're going to be really fair to the church, we should also note that priests and nuns probably died at a significantly higher rate than the rest of the population because they spent a lot of time ministering to the sick and dying. In his book, The Great Mortality, John Kelly, the historian, not the Trump guy, points out that 42 to 45% of all of the clergy in Europe died during the plague. So half of all the priests, half of all the nuns, half of everyone who works in the church, which is, again, your only international organization effectively in this period,

half of them are fucking gone. And that's compared to about 30% of the general populace. And this has a permanent long-term effect on the church in Rome. And I'm going to quote from a writeup in medievalist.net. Because so many were ill and so few priests remained as the disease progressed, Clement VI, who was the pope at the time, declared that the dying could make their confession to anyone present, even to a woman, said an English bishop, and that it would still lead to salvation. Now, this was a big deal for the church as previously only clergy were permitted to perform last rites.

As Barbara Tuckman writes, in a distant mirror, the climate is 14th century, Clement VI found it necessary to grant remission of sin to all who died of the plague, because so many were unattended by priests. The priests were doing what they could, but they were paying with their lives. So this is one of those situations where like the Catholic church isn't really to blame for what happens during this period, but it really fucks them over. And you can honestly, a lot of historians look at this as like the beginning of the end for church power and the way that it had been. Just because like all of their best priests, the most dedicated, the most connected to the community, all fucking die. And the only priests left are like the shittiest, the ones who believe the least, the ones who are willing to like hide from the plague.

The scumbags. Yeah. And that has a long term impact. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, regular people, because there's suddenly less priests, less nuns, no one doing last rites, feel like the church has abandoned them through the crisis, even though it actually probably did more than almost anything

to reduce the spread of the disease that now priests who had been exposed to the plague weren't wandering around touching people anymore. Right. Like you don't want to be, yeah. But people don't see it that way. They see it as the church abandoning them. And so, yeah, it's a pretty cool thing that happens in this period of time. And it's hard to take any kind of lesson from this, because like, we're going to say it's bad that the Catholic church lost, but it's like messed up that after all the genocide and torture, the thing that like really starts to fuck them over is too many compassionate priests trying to minister to the sick.

But also, those compassionate priests were the ones spreading the plague the most. So, it's like there's no lesson a lot of the time in history. It's like what are you going to do? It's just a bunch of shit. Yeah. Right. And now look at us. It just filtered out all the fucking shitty guys.

Yeah. There's like the bits of history, like studying the rise of the Nazis, where it's like, oh yeah, there's a lot of really direct and critical lessons here. And then there's stuff where it's like, fuck, I don't even know what you're supposed to learn from this. Yeah. And because you're playing it completely in a different reality. Yeah. A completely different set of knowledge. This is just some shit that happened.

Wild, huh? Yeah. Like what? Yep. That happened. Yeah. Something that religion itself didn't decline during this period, just people's faith in the church. The dead priests and the disease bearing possessions of old were replaced by something that spread just as much disease, but that wasn't directly connected to the power of the Catholic church, and was in fact, even weirder.

And we're going to talk now about flagellants. Do you know what flagellants are, Miles? Like when you self-whip? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the basic idea. I am very excited to talk to you about whipping yourself. But you know what's a lot like beating yourself bloody with an iron-tipped whip?

No. Tell me. Capitalism. Yeah. Aha. That part. Here's some ads. Yay.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, and we're back and we're talking about flagellants. So, flagellants are men who believed that they were ordained by God to redeem society by recreating the suffering of Christ on their own bodies. And because I don't know if you've ever tried to crucify yourself, Miles, I can say from experience, it's not easy. There's a lot of really unexpected challenges in the self-crucifixion process. Yeah, I mean, maybe only metaphorically, emotionally, have I engaged in crucifixion. I mean, I do that all the time. Whenever someone gets angry at me because I'm, say, swinging a machete around and it wounds someone, I put my arms out to my side in the manner of Christ to portray the fact that I have become a Christ figure and am taking the sense of the world onto my own body.

I find that works out really well with people. They tend to respond to that. Because it depends on their mood. Yeah, but flagellants are doing this in a much more direct way. They're just beating the shit out of themselves. And I'm going to quote from what is, I would say, a generally positive write-up from the Christian History Institute, because I find it interesting to go to these groups sometimes to find their write-ups on things. So here's how the Christian History Institute describes flagellants. They pledged self-support and obedience to the Master. They were not allowed to bathe, shave, change clothes, sleep in beds, talk, or have intercourse with women without the Master's permission. So you see what we're going through here is like, we start with the Catholic Church's response, these processions, which are a horrible thing to do.

Yeah. Then we move on to the flagellants, which are like even worse. We're getting even worse at social distancing now. And it's just sort of like a kink show, like a live kink show road tour. Yeah, it is a lot like. We do two shows and the public will do like sign up a basic self-whipping, they'll get off. And then where we really get the money is the private shows we do at night. Now, if you want to get in there, we'll do some weird shit. The laymaster will let us fuck if we need to, whatever. So check it out. It just sounded like a weird racket.

It's almost like it's an experiment to see how you can spread the plague most efficiently. So now you have people who don't bathe for weeks on end and beat themselves bloody every day, wandering through town. And they're not just being watched by people. Sick children are brought to them for healing. If those children have the plague, obviously that spreads to the flagellants. If the flagellants have the plague, it spreads to the sick kids and their family. I take back the kink show thing. These people, as these men are whipping themselves bloody, worshipers would dip their clothing in the blood and then press it to their eyes.

Is that not disgusting as fuck, Miles? It really is like someone, some scientist set out to be like, what's the, how can I spread the most plague? They nail it, they nail it. This is solid work in terms of plague spreading. I'm very impressed. Get the bloody whip guy's blood in your fucking, rub it in your eyes. You want to get it right in that fucking eye, dude. That's the place to do it.

Who fucking told them that you had to go that far with it? Why couldn't it just been like, oh, we're near them? Why do I have to be like, now I need the blood in my fucking eye? You know, I think it's, I think, Miles, that it's kind of like the yes and sort of thing as applied to religion. You know, this is just sort of, you just do what feels good in the moment, you know? Yeah. Or it's like speaking tongues where one person's like, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. And then other people go all the way in. They're like, oh, that's all you got. Watch this. And they fucking start vibing.

Yeah, I get it. Performative. So I guess that person's just like, oh, you're just going to fucking sort of weep near them. I'm going to put the fucking blood in my eyes because that's down for everyone's like, now we're rubbing plague blood in our eyes. It's the new hip thing. It spreads virally, you know, although the bubonic plague wasn't a virus. But you know what I'm saying, you get the, you get the, you get the, you don't think it was a virus. It was the bubonic plague of virus. I always get this mixed up. The whole virus versus bacteria. Oh.

Bacteria. Yep. Yep. That's what I thought. Okay. Boom. I remain a great expert. So the flagellants are doing a bad thing here in terms of this objectively spread the plague to a shitload of people. But again, they're not monsters. Like there's no one with like good advice really being like this is a bad idea. And here's the evidence as to why, like, I mean, you could, I'm sure there were people who recognized that like this really seems, it seems like we get a lot more plague cases once the flagellants came in. But like, we're not doing so hot at science in this era.

So you can't, they're not trying to be irresponsible. It's a nonsense time. They thought God had just started murdering all of them and they reacted with panic, but also in a way that like, I can't eat. I can't call them monsters for doing it. Yeah. If we're looking for the greatest evil committed by Christendom in the plague years, it's actually something that occurs kind of separate from the organized chunks of the Catholic Church, or at least separate from what the church wanted in that period. See, folks suffering through the worst of the plague years notice that Jewish people did not seem to suffer as badly from the creeping death.

And there's a number of theories for this. And it probably boils down to the fact that number one, Jewish people bathed regularly in the Middle Ages. And Christians really didn't. So they're kind of the only people, and yeah, that's still like maybe like once a week or once a month or something. Like they're not. But bathing. But bathing. And other people are just like, no, you just put on new clothes over your filth.

And they also washed the bodies of their dead before burial. And since the plague is spread heavily by like fucking fleas and stuff like this helps, right? It reduces the, they don't get it as much as Christians. Wow. And they also aren't attending these giant marches through the city. They're not hanging around near the flagellants. They're doing their own thing in their own neighborhoods while Christians and Christian parts of town are rubbing the blood of whip-wielding transients into their eyes. So it's not hard to see why Jewish people don't get it quite as much.

And still a lot of them die of the plague. Don't get me wrong. But people notice that Jewish communities aren't being hit by this as hard as the Christian ones. And rather than kind of recognize, oh, maybe we should start bathing and stop hanging out with these whip people. No. Christians started engaging in a series of unspeakably violent pogroms. And in fact, some scholars will call this the first holocaust. And we will, we will never even have a vague idea of the total death toll.

But the individual massacres we know about were horrific. In one Valentine's Day in Strasburg, Germany, 2,000 Jewish people were burnt to death. 3,000 Jews were massacred in a couple of days in the ghetto of Mainz. Jews were massacred in Spain, in France, in the Balkans and basically everywhere but chunks of Poland. Because the king of Poland at the time had a Jewish mistress and so he was, he was chill. He was like, he's like, hold up, wait a minute. This is great for me. So don't worry about it.

I'm also just kind of, I'm still thinking about the bathing part where the Christians culturally were so much dirtier and they're like, look at them, the old clean people who don't get sick. They must be involved in some kind of dark shit or whatever. And then I don't, the idea of, yeah, what, I don't know, like the complexion of a person who has not bathed in however long you naturally interact with a bathing situation. What that's like if it's like a scratcher that you'd get at a liquor store, like you'd reveal a whole other thing. Yeah, you get, you get holier, you know, the longer you go without bathing, the more God loves you. Oh, damn it. God's, God's, God's into some kinky shit, Miles.

He's really, he's really into, you know, that like, you know, you know, God's favorite pornography is actually old episodes of peanuts and that character pig. No, this has gone too far. This has gone further than it ought to. Oh hell yeah. Yeah. Where are you, where are you going with that buddy? You want to finish that? There is, you know, I didn't want to lead this into like child porn territory, so let's go back to anti-Semitism.

Oh boy. So now in trying to like parse out the Catholic Church's guilt in this, the Catholic Church is guilty of a ton, an absolute ass load of anti-Semitism over the centuries. And they definitely seeded communities around Europe with a lot of this and reinforced it in their Catholic Churches with like stained glass reliefs of Jewish people killing Christian children that are around to this day. There were even more of them back then. So there's absolutely a significant level of guilt that goes into the Catholic Church in terms of inculcating these, enough of these beliefs in people that they were there when the plague hit and that had an impact on the massacre. But when it comes to what they actually did during the plague, when Jewish people started getting murdered, they didn't, they didn't encourage this sort of shit, quite the opposite in fact. Pope Clement VI released two papal bulls during the plague, one in 1348.

And papal bulls were kind of like the presidential tweets of the day, like this is Pope Clement getting up and hopping on the Twitter. The first of his papal bulls condemned people who attacked Jews for spreading the plague. And then specifically stated that Christians who did this had been seduced by that liar, the devil. And in his second papal bull, Pope Clement said, it cannot be true that the Jews by such a heinous crime are the cause or occasion of the plague. Because through many parts of the world, the same plague by the hidden judgment of God has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them. Which is actually like a really reasonable, like scientifically backed reason for not doing this. Like he's actually very, he handles this about as well as you can expect, I guess. That's like, that's like that meme where it shows like level of thinking where it's just fucking light bursting out of your skull where you're like, hold on, let's look around.

Everybody's getting it. Okay, maybe that's not fair. Cities without any Jewish people are getting it too. Like you can't, clearly this can't be their fault. Hey, look, I want, hey, I want to blame them as much as you guys do. Trust me, I do, I'm the Pope. I want to, it would be great if we could. Love blaming people, huge about blame.

Huge, I mean, I would love to scapegoat, but I'm just, this one's tough. This one's tough. This goat ain't it. This goat ain't it. I will say it's interesting that the initial response of the Pope in 1349 was arguably based in sounder science than the first responses of the president of the United States in 2020 to our own place. Oh my God. Like, Clement's reasoning is more solid than what Trump was dropping. Oh, no.

So, there you go. You're getting owned. You're getting owned from centuries in the past. So, Clement VI, I would say, responds to this about as well as you could have possibly hoped, but also a lot of people ignore him, millions of people ignore him. And there's also, obviously, there's individual Catholic priests, individual churches who don't follow it, like, but people in general don't listen to the church. Some people don't follow Twitter. Some people aren't on Twitter, just as you say. If that's something that doesn't...

Yeah, tens of thousands of Jews die horribly during the plague from violence, you know, kind of at minimum. And the explanation you'll hear most often for why these people were killed is that ignorant Christians assumed that the Jews were poisoning them all as part of some sort of, like, white genocide scheme. And yeah, this is something the church does deserve some credit for because they spread the rumor that rabbis sacrificed Christian children for centuries. But the... it's more complicated than that even though. Because more recent research into the eradication of Jewish communities in Europe during the plague suggests that what happened actually has fairly little to do with the actual damage done by the plague. In other words, the places where Jewish people weren't killed weren't necessarily the places that suffered most from the plague. It wasn't, oh, a bunch of us died from the plague and now we're angry and we need a scapegoat to be violent towards. It's actually not... that doesn't seem to be what really happened.

And I'm going to quote now from a paper put out by the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. At an aggregate level, we found that scapegoating led to an increase in the baseline probability of a persecution. However, at the city level, locations which experienced higher plague mortality rates were less likely to engage in persecutions. Furthermore, persecutions were more likely in cities with a history of anti-Semitism consistent with scapegoating and less likely in cities where Jews played an important economic role. This gels with longstanding findings in the field of genocide studies. Essentially, what you're seeing is that like the towns that people hated Jews the most before the plague took the opportunity to murder a bunch of Jewish people. The towns that suffered the worst from the plague, if they didn't have as much of a history from anti-Semitism, they didn't find themselves driven to suddenly start killing Jewish people. It was folks who just kind of took the opportunity.

And one of the things that seemed to be most protective of Jewish people during this time was the cities in which they were kind of most economically integrated. And this brings us to a real fucking bummer in the field of genocide studies. I mean, that almost seems like a given. Yeah, it's all a bummer. Hey, I want to tell you the coolest thing, the most fun thing about genocide studies. I don't know if that's ever a sentence someone's going to say, so thank you though for preparing me. I consider this one of the least fun things about genocide studies, even though it's kind of explaining why genocides don't happen in some places. According to the scapegoating theory, members of a majority experiencing negative shocks settle on a specific target to blame for their problems.

Another potential mechanism determining the likelihood of persecution focuses on the extent of economic complementarities, so the ability to which they're economically intermingled, between the majority and the minority. This thesis argues that patterns of economic complementarity and substitutability determine the ability of two groups to coexist. When the economic activities of the two groups complement each other, shocks may lead the majority to protect the minority because of its economic value. So that's a bummer that like what protected communities from, I mean, there's two ways to view it. Either the soulless is like, oh no, like purely when people think that they have financial benefits from not murdering each other, they don't murder each other. That's the bummer where it's like, oh God, our only solution is more capitalism. The other way to look at it is just that like, no, when two different groups, when a minority group becomes intermingled with a majority and they all become economically tied, they get to know each other. They shop at each other's stores and they're like, oh no, I know these people, they're part of my community.

I'm not going to murder them. I see that we have value that we offer each other and it's not just like who the fuck are these people. Yeah, so you can interpret this in an optimistic view of human nature or a pessimistic view of human nature and it kind of feeds equally well into either, you know? I wonder if it would be something like, well, you know, once there's robots to do jobs I don't want to do. We're just going to be murdering left and right. That's my solution. Like, I don't know. That seems like a, that motive seems a little bit far off.

You know, for years now, Miles, every time we've hung out, I've said if there weren't robots, I'd be murdering you. And I never really thought about why I was saying that, but yeah. I always thought it was super funny. And then now that you said this, I'm starting, anyway, we can explore that later. Yeah, we can explore that later. So, yeah, it's cool stuff. Anyway, there's a lot of, the Black Plague is a bummer and we're going to move on from the Black Plague now. Well said.

And the question of whether or not genocide is inevitable or if it's only avoidable with economic, complementary or whatever, we're going to move on from that complicated topic of discussions to talk about something fun. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Are you a big spam flu fan? Oh, man. Are you a flu stan? Hell yeah. Yeah.

Oh my God. Exactly. Of the flues. Call me Doug Fludi. Such a good flu. I'm so much about this whole thing. I love it so much. Yeah, if I'm, you know, no.

The only thing I know is that I think Babe Ruth got it twice. That sounds about. That sounds like Babe Ruth. And a lot of people would say, you know, Babe Ruth, it's the Babe Ruth of Flues. I think more modernly people would say it's the LeBron James of Flues. But it's really, this is like your fucking. Hey, don't bring LeBron into this shit. I'm just saying if LeBron was a flu, he would kill 25 to 50 million human beings, much like the Spanish flu.

Don't bring LeBron into this shit. I'm proud of you for knowing who LeBron James is though, just as like a personal thing. I'm very proud of you for knowing who he is. But don't bring him into this shit. Dunking. Well, look, I'm just trying to make this accessible. Look at Sophie defending LeBron James. To the audience.

Los Angeles Lakers. LeBron James. I mean, he's, I mean. How far you've come. I mean, you know where I stand. And like the L.A. Lakers, the Spanish flu carried out a series of dunks all around the world that killed tens of millions of people, just like the Lakers. Oh my God.

Yeah, this is, do you, have you heard much about like how the, the name Spanish flu came about Miles? Isn't it like a xenophobic label? No. Well, it became one. Actually, it's very, this is a tremendous irony. Okay. So the Spanish flu, we don't know where it came from. Some people say somewhere in Asia, some people say somewhere in Eastern Europe.

There's actually a really good chance it started in Kansas. And if you, like some of the people tracing it back think that it actually did start in Kansas. Yeah. And if the Spanish flu originated from Kansas, then it's probably the second deadliest thing to come out of that state right next to Kirstie Alley. Yeah. I was just talking about Kirstie Alley recently. Yeah.

What is she up to? I don't know, but that was wonderful. Killing 25 to 50 million human beings. So the moniker, the Spanish flu came out, the Spanish flu started to break out in 1918. What was happening in 1918, we have this whole World War I thing. You might have heard of it. It was kind of World Wars before World Wars were cool, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. Before they got gentrified. Before like Disney fucking took over. So the Spanish flu, this influenza hits and it starts killing people on the Western front, is where a lot of early cases were and it spread heavily. And it actually killed more people than the whole war did, but it starts spreading widely among soldiers. All of the Western powers had clamped down on freedom of the press during the war.

So you couldn't report in England or in France or in Germany. You couldn't write stories about this new flu that was spreading. You'd get fucking, you'd wind up in a fucking prison cell. Whereas Spain is a neutral power and their press is relatively free during this time. So Spanish newspapers start reporting on the influenza first. And so people blame, start assuming that it started in Spain. And there absolutely is racism and persecution as a result of this, just because Spain didn't clamp down on the press.

Wow. It's super fucked up. Holy shit. Oh, look at you had to fucking open your big fucking mouth and eyes. Yeah, shouldn't they have journaled the shit just Spain? Idiot. It's good that they did, but it is just part of it. Holy shit.

One of the lessons of history is that you should never do good things because everything's bad. No, that's not the lesson of history, but it can feel that way sometimes. Don't lose hope. Let's talk about the Spanish flu pandemic. So the influenza didn't start in Spain, but it did kill a fuckpile of Spaniards. It killed so many Spanish people miles. I would compare it to, like, Cristiali and its ability to murder people in Spain.

How many fuckpiles to a Cristiali? Seven or eight. Okay. So and in nowhere in Spain did the Spanish flu kill more people than the town of Zamora or kill at least a higher percentage of people than the town of Zamora. Now, Zamora was renowned as being one of the most devout parts of Spain, which was a very devout country at this time, you know, and Zamora was particularly famous for its holy week processions, which are kind of like, you know, sort of like what we saw with the

Black Plague. You know, it's this thing that the church has always done. They would have these processions of barefoot hooded peditants, like marching through town, and everybody sort of show up to watch them and worship together, which is a, I'm sure, a very satisfying thing to do if you're a Catholic believer, but also is a super good way to spread the plague. Yeah. So that's a big part of the culture in Zamora.

Okay. Now, so in 1914, Zamora had welcomed the arrival of a new bishop named Antonio Alvario Ibalano. At 38 years old, the church newspaper El Corío had declared Balano an eloquent youthful firebrand of a leader. So he's like this hot young priest who comes into town. He's very popular. Yeah. Very charismatic.

Oh, yeah. And he's, you know, four years into the gig when the plague hits. And so the Bishop of Zamora had been seen as something of like a wonder kind within church circles prior to this point, which is why he got that job so young. He'd been one of the best students in his seminary. And at age 23, he'd become the chair of metaphysics at the seminary in Guadalajara. So he was a very well-respected guy within the church. And yeah, the book Pale Rider by Laura Spinney notes of the bishop quote, in his inaugural

letter to his new diocese, Alvario Ibalano wrote that men should actively seek God and truth, which were the same thing and expressed a surprise that science seemed to advance and step with a determination to turn away from God. The light of reason was weak and modern society's mistake contempt for God's law for progress. He wrote of dark forces that wish to reject God or even annihilate him if that were possible. So we're not set up with this guy being a great dude to handle the first plague that hits in an era where people actually know about science and how disease spreads in a real concerted way.

Right. Yeah. Because what he is like, oh, don't come at me with science, bro. I'm a fucking man of God. Science is atheism receipts. And I don't need those in front of my face right now. Yeah. And this is like, you know, Spanish flu hits.

We're like right on the cusp of antibiotics. You know, we haven't really locked that shit down, but like we're starting to understand how all this shit works. And so there are experts who have good advice in the Spanish flu. And yeah, he's not going to be the kind of guy who listens to experts. Absolutely not. So when the when the influenza hit the country that would become its namesake, it started first in the East.

By September, it had traveled into the interior of Spain. That fall was a particularly good time for it to spread in Spain because September is a harvest month, and it's also the month when many Spanish cities would host bull fights, which again, I would say I love fighting bulls. During this time of the year, if you're like me, try to do it alone. Don't fight bulls with hundreds of other people in the center of the town. It's going to spread, you know, COVID-19. Right.

Yeah. How many bulls have you fought? I don't know. It's kind of hard to remember with all the head injuries, but you know, yeah. So it said fall was also kind of the time of the year in which the army would send new recruits to Zamora to conduct artillery drills. And this is probably how the disease first gets gets to the town because some of these recruits were sick by the time they hit Zamora and many soon followed.

And at first, the city government attempted to quarantine six soldiers in their barracks, but this did not work. Probably do partly to the fact that soldiers infected people before anyone knew that they were sick and partly due to the fact that you can't stop soldiers from fucking, you know, especially Spanish soldiers. They're just going to fuck their way through that town and they're going to spread the disease the whole way. I saw those pictures of the legion, the Spanish legion.

Oh my, la legión. Oh boy. We didn't, we didn't even, there's a whole fun discussion about the fact that those guys were like the main arm of Spain's fascist dictator and colonial. Anyway, we don't need to get into that. But yes. Hey, but those V's are so deep. You can see those chiseled chests.

Troops be fucking and Spanish troops especially be fucking and when they be fucking, they be spreading the influenza. I think you can assume, assume however the hotter the soldier, the more evil they are. Yeah. The more plague they're going to spread for sure. Absolutely. Which is why my presidential campaign will rest upon only hiring ugly people to be in the army.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah. I co-sign that. You're going to have to lock this shit down. No, no more. You're going to have to brand that differently. So it's not like, yeah. Well actually, Miles, you've landed on it.

This is our way of dealing with it is just branding their faces. You know, I'm a, I've always said you can make anybody ugly with it. This probably is not an effective. This is a bad idea. But Robert. What I mean is that you should, it should be a different name. Like it's not for ugly. It's an army of the normal, you know, not for the hot.

So that way, you know, people don't have to admit to themselves. It might not be as beautiful. Robert, we don't, we don't want to do branding, but we do want to plug these brands. Cause you know what time it is. Speaking of burning people's faces permanently to make them less aesthetically pleasing and reduce the spread of fascistic militaristic dogma. You know what else will brand your faces in order to stop the spread of negative attitudes towards the sexiness of violence.

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We're back. So yeah, these troops come into town. They intermingle with the civilian population. Everybody in fucking Zamora starts to get sick, right? Yeah. And enough people are sick within a couple of weeks that it actually gets in the way of the town's ability to take in the harvest, which of course means people start to starve. It's not a good situation.

And the whole problem was exacerbated by the fact that people did not have kind of an ideal handle on virology. The experts did, but normal people were still not all that far off from kind of where normal people were, you know, during the bubonic plague, right? There's doctors get this stuff, but like your average Joe doesn't. And I'm going to quote from the book Pale Rider again. During the first wave of the pandemic, the country's inspector general of health, Martin Salazar, had lamented the inability of a bureaucratic and underfunded health system to prevent the

disease from spreading. Though provincial health committees took their lead from his directorate, they had no powers of enforcement, and they quickly came up against what he described as the terrible ignorance of the populace, the failure to grasp, for example, that an infected person on the move would transmit the disease. Oh, yeah. Pignorance. Pignorance.

Yeah, we've never seen anything like that happen again, because we've obviously moved forward so much in the last century, and we can just laugh at the simple Spaniards for failing to understand virology and isolate themselves. Exactly. Oh my God. We know everything now. Look at us. We are not letting history fucking repeat itself over and goddamn over.

Miles, I've been quarantined in a bunker since the start of March, but I can guarantee that one thing that would never happen in America 2020 in the midst of a plague is people gathering in mass in clubs and beaches while huge chunks of the country locked themselves down. That wouldn't happen, because we're smarter than people were in 1918. And we haven't been systematically dismantling our education system to create people who might not really give a fuck about things like that. Nope, not us. I don't even know what systematically dismantling means, and I'm just going to roll along to

my story now. Is that a band? Sounds like it. Now, the popular liberal solution to sort of like within kind of the intelligentsia, the kind of like more secular sort of people in like the cities in Spain, their solution to the plague was what they called a sanitary dictatorship, a strict program of quarantine imposed from the top down to stop the spread of the illness on all costs. And dutifully, the newspapers of Zamora tried to explain the benefits of this system to

the people, but first they had to explain very basic facts about contagion to their readers, including the fact that the disease did not develop spontaneously as a result of God being angry at you. And a lot of, again, this is 1918, a lot of local doctors weren't helpful in spreading the real news. And I'm going to quote again from Pale Writer. Oh, no. One Louis Ibarra suggested in print that the disease was the result of a buildup of impurities

in the blood due to sexual incontinence, a variation on the medieval idea that a moderate lechery could trigger a humoral imbalance. So this guy is like, nah, this people fucking too much. That's what makes you, you fuck too much, God gets angry at you, and God's anger goes into your blood as we all know. And so the more that God anger that builds up, it just starts boiling out of you in the plague, and that's how it works. What'd they tell you?

What'd they tell you? What? That it's not God that's angry at? Who told you that? It's because you're coming. A fucking scientist? Because you're coming. Yeah.

And you know what? I bet that person doesn't come or has never come. It's such a fucking weird ass. No, I'm saying it right now. Dr. Louis Ibarra never came. Not once. Yeah. I like that.

I have to take down as like a, like a press or like just to like the experts. All right. I know this flu is going around. It's really gnarly. And the question on everyone's mind is, is it God that's super angry at us? And that's what's happening. And we got to say, no, that's not what it is. And it just feels like a very heavy thing to have to lay on to people.

Yeah. God's not pissed at you, but you're still dying and here's what we have to do. Right. And it probably is an extent to which a lot of people found it more comfortable to believe that just God was, God was, you know, kind of drunk and angry again, as opposed to like, Oh no, actually, this is just a thing that we're going to be dealing with probably forever where sometimes horrible viruses creep up somewhere in the world and kill people all over the planet.

And this is, this is just the way it is. And there is no reason to it. Yeah. So the good news is that the actual government of Zamora listened to the experts, the experts who weren't idiots at least and announced a ban on large gatherings until further notice. Now we in the USA are well familiar with how our own country people reacted when this started to happen. And the same things occurred in Zamora only instead of drunk college kids on spring break.

The culprit was the Bishop of Zamora. And I'm going to quote again from the book Pale Rider. On 30 September, Bishop Alvario and Balanio defied the health authorities by ordering a Novena evening prayers on nine consecutive days in honor of Saint Rocco, the patron saint of plague and pestilence, because the evil that had befallen Zamoraños was due to our sins and ingratitude for which the avenging arm of eternal justice has been brought down upon us. On the first day of the Novena, in the presence of the mayor and other notables, he dispensed

holy communion to a large crowd at the church of Saint Esteban. At another church, the congregation was asked to adore relics of Saint Rocco, which meant lining up to kiss them. So plague breaks out. Let's get everyone into a small room. Have them all dip their hands into the same water. Have them all kissed the same thing. Yeah.

Hey, we're going to pass around this party cup. Everybody take a sip out this cup to kiss that thing. It is weird that we got over all of our prescriptions against sex and intoxication, all the stuff that the Catholic church would have said people shouldn't be doing. But the same basic bad idea is the same. Like this group of people who thinks fucking is horrible and this group of people who are all there to fuck are all still gathering in a small area and touching their mouths to the same things.

Fundamentally, the problem is the same. Yeah, right, exactly. But you're doing the worst version of it. That's the least fun version of what you're doing. At least some of these dead people had a good party. I don't know if I want to say that, but it does sound. Yeah, I don't know. Again, there's no lesson here other than it's always a bad idea to shove your mouth on the

same things other people are in a cramped room in the middle of a plague. Yeah. At the very least is what are the scientists saying? What are experts saying? Keep your mouth off of things and stay inside. Yeah. No, really? Nah, nah.

Fuck that. I'm going to suck a bunch of shit party with a bunch of my friends. Yeah. Well, I think I told Robert this, but the kid that was like a tiktoker that was going around looking toilets ended up in the hospital with coronavirus. Yeah. Fucking idiot. Good friend.

Yeah, I'm not going to spare a whole lot of my sympathy for that kid. Fuck is it? Yeah. He's got time. Keep him moving. Keep the train moving. The same day as the let's all kiss the same thing party. Sister Dositia, Andreas of the servants of Mary and none died while treating influenza

riddles soldiers at the barracks because, you know, she got sick from them. The bishop called her a virtuous and exemplary nun who accepted her martyrdom by flu with grace and aplomb. He praised her for sleeping only four hours a day during this period, which I'm sure helped her immune system out a whole bunch. Now, the mother. Four hours a day. Yeah.

She was so dedicated to hanging out with plague victims and then she died from it. It's a bummer. The mother superior of this nun's convent was so taken by the sacrifices sister Andreas had made that she urged all of the people of Zamora to turn out in large numbers for her funeral. And the bishop immediately hopped onto this and he announced that all attendees of this nun's funeral would be given 60 days indulgence, which means like 60 days of get out of hell free cards, basically like 60 days that you like, you don't got to pay the church or like,

the fucking priest or whatever to like, you know, you don't have to like get your sins forgiven for 60 days because you've been to this. So he promises everyone who shows up at this funeral and again, a crowded and disease riddled cathedral that they'll all get out of hell free for two months. And while the newspapers of Zamora are all trying to warn people to stay home, they're required because they're backed by the church to print the notices of church events. So they're simultaneously telling people to stay home and being like, huge plague party at the cathedral on this day, get out of hell for two straight months, you know.

Oh my God. A whole bunch of Zamoranos show up to this, this, this funeral and the bishop calls the funeral in the face of a state ban on gatherings, quote, one of the most significant victories Catholicism has obtained. Maybe as a stretch. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I don't know. They've, they're pretty, they've, they've had a lot of victories. We can argue they were victories that were won by doing horrible things, but they didn't get all those billions of dollars in art from losing. So as October began, journalists started to write about the weird fact that Zamoranos seemed to be dying in much, much higher numbers than the residents of other cities. They blamed the problem on poor local hygiene and later that month, the sanitary dictatorship they sought was finally put in place.

People were fined for throwing trash into the streets. Businesses were closed for failing to pass inspection. Citizens were ticketed for letting their chickens roam free. But the bishop of Zamora continued to hold mass and Zamoranos crowded into the church in greater numbers than ever before. In fact, as the flu claimed more and more of their lives, the bishop repeated the prayer pro tempore pestilential over and over again. And this prayer basically states that the disease happens by the will of God and only

God's mercy can end it. And so is huge people, numbers of the people who chanted this prayer started to sick and die. The priest starts circulating a letter in which he claims that the continuing deaths are proof that science can't cure the illness. So he's telling people to do the opposite of what the science says, telling them only God can pick who gets sick. A bunch of these people ignore the advice of scientists and get sick and die.

And the bishop puts out a letter being like, see, the scientists are full of shit. He writes, quote, observing in their troubles that there is no protection or relief to be found on the earth. The people distance themselves disenchanted and turn their eyes towards heaven. And of course, heaven as represented by the bishop is telling them all to get into crowded spaces together and kiss the same thing. Yeah, you see what happened to those fucking idiots. That's right.

Let's keep the party going, baby. Four days after sending out this letter, on October 24th, the bishop held a mass procession, bringing in worshipers from all around the countryside and cramming the cathedral fuller of people than it had been in years. The law enforcement attempted to stop this, pointing out that it was a clear violation of the ban on mass gatherings. And the bishop accused them of unjustly interfering in church business. The mass went on as scheduled.

And in the days that followed, even more people sickened. And I'm going to quote again from Pale Writer. As in other towns and villages, a decision was taken to stop bringing the church bells and eulogy of the dead, in case the constant tolling frightened people. But in other places, funeral processions had also been banned, not in Zamora, where mourners continued to pass through the narrow streets as the din of the bells gave way to silence. Even in normal times, coffins, white ones for children, were a luxury beyond the means of most. Now wood for coffins was hard for anyone to come by, and the bloated, blackened remains of the deceased

were transported to their final resting place, draped only in a shroud. In an echo of the ritual burning of incense to purify the altar, gunpowder was sprinkled in the streets and set a light. An approaching funeral courtage could thus be perceived only dimly through the choking black smoke. It mixed at times with the fog that rose from the duero in those cool autumn days. The town must have looked as if it were on fire, one historian noted. Oh. Yeah, it would have looked like the end of the fucking world. Or like New York now, maybe.

Oh, good. So just even like the inability to like bury their dad properly is just makes it such a fucking stark picture. It's pretty cool that in the space of a month, their president has gone from we got 15 cases and soon there'll be zero to now the government is having to buy 100,000 extra body bags from Canada. Pretty cool evolution for all this to take. Yeah, I mean, I think like maybe, okay, I said 100,000 might be a little more. And I don't know who I'm going to blame, but I'm just going to completely play it casually. It's really fucking frightening. From it's fine to oh, we're out of corpse bags.

Okay, yeah. So the town of Zamora had one of the highest death rates in Spain losing more than 10% of its population in the month of October alone. So that's a bad October. Now, this was nearly three times the overall death rate in Spain at the time. The Catholic Church in Zamora working with for the bishop declared to this frightful toll to be God's vengeance. Quote, the evil upon us might be a consequence of our sins and lack of gratitude and therefore the vengeance of eternal justice felt upon us. When the plague finally left Zamora much depleted, the bishop cheered that he and his fellow faithful had saved the town by placating God's legitimate anger. And the bishop of Zamora probably counts as one of the most deliberately and fatally irresponsible religious leaders of the entire Spanish flu epidemic.

And of course, he suffered no consequences as a result of this. He did fine. So that's good. Wow. That's a good lesson. He talked all that shit and then made it to the end of the movie. He made it to the end of the movie. And he was far from alone.

In effect, I found a pathos article that included just a bunch of digitized newspaper assets and they kind of like trace different American Christian leaders who were just as hell bent upon leading their followers into disasters. This is not just a Catholic thing. In Buffalo, New York, quote, while local churches remained and closed in accordance with the mayor's proclamation, several congregations, however, have arranged to conduct outdoor services tomorrow. The courier listed several open air masses in St. Paul's, the Episcopal Cathedral, planned to worship in Shelton Square with the assistance of its full choir. The service will largely consist of the singing of patriotic hymns and General Pershing's message to the churches of America will be read on Sunday, October 13, 1918. Dr. W. S. Black, rector of the Episcopal Church, wrote that he was angry to walk through town and find the pool room in full blast with an ample supply of patrons. So he goes through and he sees that like pools and bars are still open. So he's like, well, why should I keep my fucking church closed if other businesses are opened?

He states, I believe in obeying the law of constituted authorities, but I'm under pledge to the boys over there that at customary times of service, certain prayers must be said. So he reopens his church in the middle of the plague and people start attending church again. In Indianapolis, Indiana, 10 black apostolic Christians were arrested for attempting to worship, despite the fact that the Board of Health had told them not to quote from their local church. When the seven women and three men were taken to police headquarters, they began talking in the unknown tongue and it was some time before the turnkey and matron were able to learn their names. So this sort of stuff happens all over the world as a result of the plague. And science being what it was back then, it's impossible to say kind of how many of the dead in the Spanish flu epidemic could trace their illness from an infection they got in a church service that occurred after like things got closed down. We just weren't keeping good enough track to do that. Right, right. But thankfully, Miles, we have the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 to give us kind of a fun modern example for how virulent a single church service could be.

So that's going to be fun. You want to do that, Miles? You want to talk about that? Oh, you got the numbers? I sure do, buddy. Oh, boy. On February 16th, 2020, South Korea had 30 known cases of novel coronavirus. Most all of the people infected had caught it from family or friends. On February 18th, only 39 people had tested positive. One of them was a 61-year-old woman known as Patient 31. She came down ill and decided to go attend her church anyway.

And her church was the Shincheoni Church of Jesus in Daegu. Two days after this, on February 20th, 104 South Koreans had the coronavirus. 15 of these confirmed cases were members of or were directly connected to the Shincheoni Church in some way. So this woman attends a service while sick and knowing she's sick. Two days later, there's 15 cases connected to that church. Now, by March 25th, a month or so later, South Korea had more than 9,000 confirmed cases. And the Shincheoni Church cluster was responsible for 5,080 of them, making up more than half of the total cases in South Korea,

all because of a single worshiper who had to get the Bible study when she was ill. Wow. Yeah. So that's good. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's cool. I don't know. The irony of it all, too, is people will use religion as a thing that they're like,

in their mind, they may think, if I go to church, I may feel better or something like that, but not actually being totally aware or considerate or whatever the reason is of what the risk is to other people and even yourself from just going out there. It's cruel. Yeah, and it has a lot to do with the nature of this specific church, but also a lot of churches do kind of the same things this church does. So I'm going to get into that in a second.

I do want to note right now, since we started by talking about the Catholic Church, it took them two plagues, but I think they kind of got it right this time, right? The Pope was pretty early on like, we're fucking none of this shit. Like, stay the fuck home. God understands, like, we don't got to be all dipping the same, like, no. Yeah, because I got, if we get rid of all the good ones now,

I don't know what the fuck we're going to be left with. Right. So the Catholic Church at least broadly got there. So third plague is a charm is what I'm saying. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we really... Does that make sense? Like, American Christian churches only have one other plague.

Like, the next plague that comes around, we'll get it right, I think. Yeah. I don't know. If we follow, we'll see. We'll see. I'm really, I'm very excited for the next plague, Miles. We're going to learn a lot from that one. Yeah, I mean, a lot.

I think that's really what we're going to learn is like, all right, fourth plague's the charm. Oh, my God. And I think I'm hoping third plague is the charm, but we'll see. Okay. There'll keep being more plagues, so we'll get more. That'll be the lesson. You'll be like, no, look, there's...

The only thing to learn from this is third plague's the charm. Yeah. And that's what it takes is three plague. Piece of shit. So I do want to talk about some peculiarities of the Shinchoni church of Jesus that explain why fight, they got 5,000 people or more sick. Yeah. So the Washington Post notes, quote, unlike other churches,

Shinchoni makes its members sit on the floor tightly together during services in neat military-like ranks and files, says Lee Ho-yeon, who left the church in 2015. We were not supposed to have anything on our faces, like glasses or masks. We were trained to sing our hymns loudly. And of course, in Korea, as in a lot of parts of Asia, wearing kind of face masks is a lot more common. You know, it's just like a thing people did more often in regular daily life. And the church had a specific prescription against that

because they wanted to bring people together, which also in a time of illness gets them sick together. That doesn't even make... I mean, because in Asian culture, when you wear it, you know it's to be considerate of other people. It's not because like, I'm wearing this because it's like wearing a hoodie. Yeah, but you're also... Christianity in particular in a lot of parts, like in Korea also has like this kind of very powerfully anti...

I mean, anti-authoritarian might be the wrong word, but like anti-counter-cultural thing, right? Because Christianity is not as common in that part of the world. And I think this... From what I'm reading this, it seems like that's a part of this, is that they're like... Right, because they're like, oh yeah, that's what they would do. Yeah. But we're trying to be connected and see each other's faces.

Yeah, and Miss Lee, this former member who was interviewed by the post stated, we were taught not to be afraid of illness. We were taught not to care about such worldly things like jobs, ambition, or passion. Everything was focused on proselytizing, even when we were sick. So if you're sick and you're proselytizing, obviously you're going to spread it more. So that's how a lot... That's why half of the cases in Korea, you know, a month later are from this church clusters, because a lot of these people are going out ministering to people while they're contagious.

Right. And yeah, it's a bummer. Now, it's also not unique to South Korea. I think at this point, we all remember that Louisiana pastor who defied the governor's order to not hold gatherings larger than 50 people and like repeatedly held gatherings, Pastor Tony Spell. And he actually made the same justification one of those guys from 1918 made. He stated, he told CNN,

if we close every door in the city, then I will close my doors. But you can't say the retailers are essential, but the church is not. That is a persecution of the faith. So that's 102 years later. You got the same basic line of reasoning. Spell also believes that the pandemic is like politically motivated. There's another evangelical pastor, Rodney Howard Brown, a Florida's Tampa Bay church, who called people pansies for being scared of the coronavirus and busing people in.

Yeah. He said his church would only close its doors when the rapture is taking place. Yeah. Continuing to bust people in. I think this is the guy who got arrested later. There's at least one church you like. And it was like kind of a show arrest like he got. He was in and out a little bit. I don't think he's going to do anything to him.

But the scariest thing to me, so you can find many, many stories. And if I had a little more time, I probably would have collected a longer list of different shitty individual churches and the things they've said. But we're all familiar with a lot of religious leaders have said horrible, stupid things about it. You can't get it if you pray or, you know, my church isn't going to, Jesus will protect you. All these things that will lead people to take risks. Or they'll just be like, you know what? I'm going to command God right now on TV to knock this off right now.

Okay. But I need about 60,000 more dollars to come in. And then I'll fucking, I'm going to tell God, I'm telling you, I'm going to tell him, I'm going to say fucking, hey, God, quit it. We want to be safe. This is all a problem, obviously, each of these churches, these pastors, these people are problems that we all have to deal with as we confront this virus. But I don't think that's not what scares me the most. What scares me the most is what I read in a March 15th Washington Post article without guidance from the top. Americans have been left to figure out their own coronavirus solutions.

It includes interviews with a number of pastors. I'm going to quote from that now because I find this terrifying in a totally different way. In Arkansas, the Reverend Josh King met with pastors of five other churches on Thursday to decide whether or not to continue holding service. The religious beliefs told them that meeting in person to worship each Sunday remained an essential part of their faith. And some of their members signed on to Trump's claim that the media and the Democrats were overblowing the danger posed by the virus. One pastor said half of his church is ready to lick the floor to prove there's no actual virus, said King. And King, I think it seems like at least he understands that it's a serious threat and real and he took some actions like to try to reduce the likelihood that his congregation would get it. But he's posing like, I don't know how to deal with this, the fact that a huge number of my pastors are willing to lick the fucking floor to prove that there's no virus.

That scares me more than even the pastors pushing this stuff, like how widespread this disinformation is and how decentralized it is. Right. I don't know if it's also like just feel like I can bro out so hard that I won't get sick. Like, dude, yeah, you want to fucking see, dude, how much I believe, bro? I'll lick this fucking floor, dude. This fucking coronavirus ain't shit. So Miles, that's the episode that I've got for you today. Oh boy. How are you feeling? Oh, I'm just, I'm just glad that I was raised in the house that respects science.

Yeah, I was raised in a house that I thought respected science. Oh boy, until recently. Yeah, until recently, but you know, that's a lesson for another time. Yeah, sorry to hear that. Yep. So, Miles, you want to plug anything? Yeah, I want to plug Daily Zeitgeist and 420 Day Fiancé, which is that show I do with Sophia Alexandra, who you've had on numerous times. We get high and watch 90 Day Fiancé. So if you want to escape and watch trash TV with us and be faded, come through.

Yes, so do that. Go find people who are bleeding and touch their blood to your eyes. Oh no, no, that's a bad thing. Sorry, I mixed up my post-it notes here. Not that. I'm so sorry. Not that. Stay in your houses and listen to podcasts. Exactly. Yeah. Like our podcast, this podcast, which you can find wherever you found this episode of it. Just keep doing what you're doing. It's perfect. That's the episode.

Yay. Bye. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.