WHY DID YOU THINK THE TRUMPBOTS CALLED IT THAT?:

During his February 7 sermon on "China in Biblical Prophecy," pastor Phil Hotsenpiller of Orange County's Influence Church shared his thoughts about the coronavirus and its relationship to the book of Revelation. "I call it the Chinese virus," Hotsenpiller told his megachurch, as a giant graphic of an American flag loomed on the screen behind him. Hotsenpiller had already declared, for his online and in-person audience, that China would catalyze the apocalypse. Now, with his congregation's rapt attention, he teased the topic for the following week's sermon: by unleashing a pandemic,  China was "setting the  stage" for Armageddon. "We're going to talk about whether it came out of a fish market or out of a laboratory," Hotsenpiller promised. His casual prejudice came after an 84-year-old Thai grandfather was murdered in San Francisco, and during a surge of anti-Asian hostility unlike anything the country has seen in decades. He preached his racism in a county that is home to the third-largest Asian American population in America, where a Chinese family was recently so terrorized by racist teens that neighbors instituted an overnight watch to guard them. But the minister showed no signs that he cared about anti-Asian violence.

Those unfamiliar with Evangelical eschatology, the study of the last days and God's ultimate plan for humanity, might be forgiven for wondering what xenophobic conspiracy theories have to do with "Biblical prophecy." Yet framing the "Chinese virus" as a step toward Armageddon exemplifies a century-old hermeneutical instinct amongst Evangelicals, one that frames "the East" as integral to the anti-God forces that will, sometime soon, spark the end of the world. The revival of this "sanctified Sinophobia," my term for Christian-inspired anti-Chinese hostility, has fueled the hatred now directed at Asians in America and around the globe.

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