The New York Times is “mainstreaming paranoia” by blaming evangelical Christians for the coronavirus pandemic, Catholic League President Bill Donohue said on Friday.

The Times is playing a “cheap game,” Dr. Donohue noted, in trying to whip up anti-Christian sentiment by accusing disciples of Jesus of being “anti-science” and, therefore, responsible for the spread of the coronavirus.

In her Friday New York Times op-ed titled “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals,” journalist and author Katherine Stewart claimed that since religious voters supported Trump, he governs without regard for science.

“Donald Trump rose to power with the determined assistance of a movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise,” Ms. Stewart wrote. “In the current crisis, we are all reaping what that movement has sown.”

The Stewart hit piece on Christians bears an uncanny similarity to another famous attack on Christians two millennia ago.

In the first century AD, the tyrannical Roman emperor Nero famously blamed Christians for setting the great fire of Rome, using it as an excuse to execute a number of early Christians, including Saints Peter and Paul. Nero used the Christians as scapegoats to escape public retaliation because it was widely believed that he himself had set the fire.

In his comments on the Stewart piece, Dr. Donohue observed that Stewart had taken issue with Trump for saying he hopes we are “just raring to go by Easter” (a Christian holiday) rather than saying “by mid-April,” revealing “how much Stewart hates religious conservatives.”

“It would be like conservatives blaming left-wing cable television channels for the coronavirus,” Donohue noted.

After all, left-wing media suggested that Trump is a bigot when he put a ban on travel from China on January 31, ten days after the first case of the virus hit the U.S.

“This led the Chinese-Communist friendly head of the World Health Organization to label Trump a ‘racist,’ and Joe Biden responded by saying he was fomenting ‘xenophobia’ and ‘fear-mongering,’” Donohue observed.

In reality, however, the medical community acknowledges that “Trump saved an untold number of lives by making this decision,” he added.

“This is the level of intellectual scholarship that the New York Times fancies these days. The newspaper of record is now mainstreaming paranoia,” he concluded.

Follow @tdwilliamsrome