(单词翻译:单击)
“Before I turn to the Word,” the preacher announces, “I’m gonna do another diatribe.”
“在我开始诵经之前，”这位传教士宣布，“我要再次进行谴责。”
“Go on!” one man yells. “Amen!” shouts a woman several pews in front of me.
“继续吧”一名男子喊道。“阿门！”一名坐在我前面几排长椅上的女人喊道。
Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I’ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship.
40分钟的颂乐和40分钟的布道是我在拜神礼拜里见过的最奇怪的仪式。
Pastor Bill Bolin calls it his “diatribe.”
牧师比尔·博林称这是他的“谴责”。
The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: “Headline News.”
密歇根州布赖顿的洪水门教堂的会众们称其为：“头条新闻”。
Bolin, in his mid-60s, is a gregarious man with thick jowls and a thinning wave of dyed hair.
65岁左右的博林是一个喜欢交际的人，他拥有厚厚的下巴，但染过的头发却越来越稀疏。
His floral shirt is untucked over dark-blue jeans.
他的花衬衫敞开着，盖住了深蓝色牛仔裤。
“On the vaccines …” he begins.
“关于疫苗的…”。他开始了。
For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting.
在接下来的15分钟里，博林没有提宽恕罪过、复活身体或永生。
Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines.
相反，他滔滔不绝地散布虚假信息和胡说八道的阴谋论，其中很多都与“极其危险”的新冠疫苗疫苗有关。
“A local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time—she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.” Bolin pauses dramatically.
“一名定期去洪水门教堂的当地护士，这个时候她需要匿名--她前几天向我妻子报告说，在她的医院，有两名新冠肺炎患者在住院。两名。”博林戏剧性地停顿了一下。
“They have 103 vaccine-complication patients.” The crowd gasps.
“他们有103名疫苗并发症患者。”人群倒吸了一口气。
“How about this one?” Bolin says.
“这个怎么样？”博林说。
He tells of a doctor who claims to know that “between 100 and 200 United States Congress members, plus many of their staffers and family members with COVID, were treated by a colleague of his over the past 15 months … with …”
他讲述了一位医生的故事，他声称自己知道“在过去的15个月里，有100到200名美国国会议员，以及他们的许多工作人员和家人感染了新冠，接受了他的一位同事的治疗……
Bolin stops and puts a hand to his ear.
博林停下来，把一只手放在他的耳朵上。
A chorus of people responds: “Ivermectin.”
一群人齐声回答：“伊维菌素。”
Bolin pretends not to hear. “What was that?” he says, leaning over the lectern.
博林假装没听见。“那是什么？”他身体依靠在诵经台上问道。
This time, they shout: “Ivermectin!” Bolin nods.
这一次，他们大喊：“伊维菌素！”博林点了点头。
This isn’t my first time at FloodGate, so none of what Bolin says shocks me.
这并不是我第一次来洪水门教堂，所以博林说的话都不会让我感到惊讶。
Yet I’m still struggling to make sense of the place.
然而，我仍然在努力弄清楚这个地方的意义。
Having grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pastor at another church in town, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity.
我是在这条路上长大的，父亲是镇上另一家教堂的高级牧师。我一生都在看着福音派从一种精神倾向转变为一种政治身份。
It’s heartbreaking.
太令人心碎了。
So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature.
那么多爱主的人，把时间和金钱奉献给穷人、哀痛之人和受迫害之人，他们却成了滑稽的人物。
But I understand why.
但我明白为什么。
Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ.
福音派信徒——包括我自己的父亲——被迫变得政治化，允许具体的伦理争论滚雪球般发展成全面的党派宣传，这些方式往往会分散他们为基督传播福音的使命。
To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective.
值得称赞的是，即使当我父亲努力投入一场政治辩论时，他也会小心翼翼地提醒他的教徒使用正确的基督教观点。
“God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”
“上帝不会因为这些事咬指甲，”他会在选举期间说。 “你们也不会。”
