PAUL A. DJUPE AND AMANDA FRIESEN
If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
—II CHRONICLES 7:13–14 (KING JAMES VERSION)
A pandemic, unprecedented in nearly all of living human lifetimes, swept across continents starting in late 2019. By February 2021, total cases topped 100 million worldwide, with deaths numbering over 1.3 million. The United States’ delayed shutdown and varied response across states and localities have resulted in hot spots, surges, uneven health care, and high mortality rates. The third wave of cases centered in deep-red Republican states dispelled early notions that this was a Democratic pandemic only spreading in coastal cities. The remarkable rise in Great Plains states in the fall and winter only then started to change their laissez-faire response.
COVID-19 (CO = corona, VI = virus, D = disease, 19 = 2019 the year the virus was identified) is a mild to severe respiratory illness that is caused by a coronavirus (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 of the genus Betacoronavirus), according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The virus is primarily transmitted by contact with infectious material (including respiratory droplets—droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose) or contaminated objects or surfaces. The illness, at least those caused by the early variants, is characterized by fever, dry cough, fatigue, and shortness of breath and may progress to pneumonia, respiratory failure, and neurological symptoms that may be of short duration or turn into “long haul” cases. The novel coronavirus is clearly much more dangerous than the flu, both in how quickly it spreads and the severity of the illnesses that result. Moreover, it continues to mutate, with strains first identified throughout the world posing new threats and raising questions about the efficacy of vaccines created to work against prior strains.
Understanding, explaining, and responding to this (preventable?) catastrophe have pitted science against ideology, pushed tensions among people of faith, and drawn sharp lines between people and their governments struggling to respond in reasonable ways with lives on the line. Since it affected every aspect of our lives, there are so many ways to approach the pandemic and consider its implications. As social scientists interested in studying religion and society, we’ve been thinking and gathering data about the implications of the pandemic for our social institutions and individual behaviors as well as the reverse—how our social institutions shape the response to the pandemic.
We see the pandemic response as a massive collective action problem—individuals need to cooperate with others and their governments at a time when the individual costs appear high in terms of restricted behavior, and the benefits are distant and collective. Consider that the individual incidence of contracting COVID-19 is fairly low. So far in the pandemic, 45 million cases have been reported for the United States, which translates to 13.8 percent of the population as of late October 2021 via CDC data. But only slightly higher than normal population incidences overwhelm the health care system, and the fear of contagion deterred many from venturing into public.
Thinking about the pandemic in terms of collective action highlights core concerns in the social sciences regarding trust in others and in government, compliance with laws that are otherwise difficult to enforce, the availability and spread of accurate information, and the civil society forces that make or break effective governance. The questions almost ask themselves: Did religion promote public health measures and safe individual health behaviors? Was religion a force promoting cooperation with government or a divisive one? Did conspiracy theories flourish in religious circles? Did religion rise to the occasion and address problems facing their communities? That is to say, we believe that religion is a centrally important force in American society, which means we need to ask whether religion made the pandemic worse or helped keep it contained.
Considering some of the big stories about religion, society, and the pandemic will help give some shape to our inquiries. Ohio, like many states, locked down in mid-March leading to voluntary closures of houses of worship—Ohio remained one of the states that did not mandate closures of religious organizations. In hindsight, given what was to come, the decision to reopen in late May was a terrible one. Many churches reopened on Pentecost Sunday but in new ways. At one Catholic church in Columbus, “every parishioner wore a mask and ‘Love your neighbor’ signs encouraged physical distancing for safety” (King 2020). Other houses of worship limited gathering sizes through online registration; leaders excused members from attending if they felt sick and took temperatures of those wishing to attend. According to one pastor of a large congregation, “In my mind, the worst thing churches can do for the community is be a source of infection” (King 2020).
At the same time, a wide variety of incidents early in the pandemic made clear the risks generated by worshipping in person—a choir in Washington decided to meet for practice, which led to the infection of dozens and the deaths of two (Read 2020). This also applied to gatherings of church leaders. The historically Black Church of God in Christ (COGIC) denomination suffered heavy losses after church leaders gathered for conferences and continued in-person worship (Boorstein 2020)—dozens of clergy died of COVID-19. The Associated Press assembled a long tally of major religious figures who died during the pandemic (Crary 2020). Ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York continued to gather face-to-face and generated very high rates of transmission (Sales 2020).
During the pandemic, we learned that everything was going to be more complicated, with all new protocols designed to minimize the likelihood of virus transmission. Of course, this was true for houses of worship and perhaps in no ceremony was it more complicated than funerals, which could bring together diverse groups (e.g., coworkers, church members, family, neighbors) to grieve with little social distancing. To reduce the potential for the high number of funerals to become super-spreader events, guidelines from the Massachusetts Council of Churches encouraged moving funerals online, prioritizing ten people who should attend in person, avoiding hugs, and even delaying the ceremonies for the foreseeable future (Jenkins and Giangravé 2020).
The director of the National Institutes of Health and evangelical Christian Francis Collins went public at the end of 2020, looking to convince clergy to encourage the faithful to get vaccinated. His interview with the Washington Post revealed the stark realities in many American congregations. At a time when QAnon conspiracy beliefs had been raging like wildfire through conservative Christian circles (Djupe and Burge 2020), Collins pushed back: “The church, in this time of confusion, ought to be a beacon, a light on the hill, an entity that believes in truth. This is a great moment for the church to say, no matter how well intentioned someone’s opinions may be, if they’re not based upon the facts, the church should not endorse them” (Bailey 2020). Others agreed, arguing that religion would have to bridge the gap with science to defeat the pandemic, as it had with other epidemics (Marshall 2020).
Our Approach—Religion and Civil Society
The stories above highlight how much religion continues to be woven into American society. Of course, this is a descriptor of all nonsegregated societies—social ties are diverse and help spread ideas, information, norms, and even viruses throughout society rather quickly. As a result, the pandemic clearly could not be handled by disconnected individuals. It calls for a collective, institutional response to even know what the scope of the problem is, let alone how to treat it and deal with its lingering effects on every facet of society. In fact, it has required a level of cooperation that is perhaps unprecedented in world history, at least in some sectors. According to one investigation, “Never before, researchers say, have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single topic and with such urgency. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt” (Apuzzo and Kirkpatrick 2020). Leaving pockets of unvaccinated people simply creates the conditions for the virus to mutate and spread yet again across any country with a porous border (see the emergence and spread of the omicron variant in late 2021). However, many nations have continued to take a nation-first approach, though world powers are engaging in varying levels of “vaccine diplomacy” (Safi and Pantovic 2021)—gaining influence by sharing surplus doses of vaccine.
From some perspectives, problems of cooperation in the interests of society are just the sorts that religion solves. As Justice Black wrote in Engel v. Vitale (1962), “The history of man is inseparable from the history of religion.” That is, religion grew up alongside human civilization, in part because it systematizes responses to fundamental concerns that confront societies: “self-protection from humans and nature, disease avoidance, coalition formation, status seeking, mate acquisition and retention, and offspring care” (Johnson, Li, and Cohen 2015, 197; Kenrick et al. 2010). Since the pandemic has touched every part of our lives, it is easy to read that list with the pandemic in mind and recognize just how much has been disrupted but also how much may reflect on aspects of religious life and instruction.
In his travels around the United States in 1831, ostensibly to study American prisons, Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) observed all facets of American life, especially religion. While he believed in the value of free societies, he also anticipated great danger from the lack of restraints on individual actions. In the absence of governmental limitations, religion generated “habits of the heart” that “powerfully contributes to the maintenance of a democratic republic among the Americans” (Tocqueville 1835, ch. 17). Religion contributes answers to life’s questions that are “clear, precise, intelligible, and lasting, to the mass of mankind,” without which would lead people to “abandon all their actions to chance and would condemn them in some way to disorder and impotence” (Tocqueville 1840, ch. 5). This is no moderate, inclusive religion but a “dogmatic” one with “fixed ideas of God, of the soul, and of their general duties to their Creator and their fellow men” (1840, ch. 5). Put succinctly, religion circumscribes the limits of human and governmental action through its enduring influence on popular mores.
In modern terms, religion may help provide structure to society and rules helpful for human survival. For example, religious teachings and communities can denote what things are impure and disgusting and must be avoided (e.g., Graham and Haidt 2010; Djupe and Friesen 2018). Religions often have rules about food, clothing, and hygiene and cleansing rituals. But concerns about purity do not stop with pathogens and are often mapped onto traits of other people. That is, those outside the ingroup can be considered impure, even disgusting (Djupe et al. 2021), which can limit the radius of concern for others, increase blame of others for social problems, and decrease support for even equal citizenship for those outside the group (Bloom and Courtemanche 2015).
A particularly forthright example of this came from a woman interviewed by CNN (2020) as she came to worship at Solid Rock Church near Cincinnati, Ohio, in early April 2020—a time when upward of 90 percent of houses of worship had closed to in-person worship. She evinced no concern for the pandemic because she was “covered in Jesus’s blood.” And so were her fellow worshippers—they believed they were protected by the power of their piety, while others outside the group were clearly not.
The pervasiveness of the pandemic could not be better suited to stoking fears of threats from outside. And there was no shortage of elites doing just that. In 2020, there was a huge increase of prejudice and violence toward Asians in the United States, which can be linked to the anti-Asian, anti-Chinese rhetoric from former president Trump and others. They referred to the novel coronavirus as the “Chinese flu” and worse, claiming at times that the Chinese manufactured the virus as a weapon against the United States and the world (Singh, Davidson, and Borger 2020). But that’s not all. A year later found Texas Governor Abbott blaming immigrants for the spread of COVID-19 in his state, not his orders to rescind public health measures (Higgins-Dunn 2021).
This is not to say that the threats to us all were not real. They were. And they hit particular communities harder than some. Some states have had worse waves of infections, hospitalizations, and fatalities. But poor and racial minority communities were beset by greater problems—both health and economic—than whites. Many things are potentially to blame for the health disparities, including discrimination, access to health care, preexisting health problems, occupations that increase exposure, and housing arrangements (e.g., CDC 2021). Until the research in this volume, we did not know in a systematic way what pandemic role religion had to play in racial minority communities, attuned to the particular blend of religious beliefs and the special organizational role that houses of worship have often occupied.
The pandemic presented religion with a paradox. From the discussion above, it is easy to see how religion may provide the beliefs, practices, and social connections that are crucial to helping people weather life’s troubles and make difficult decisions. But how can religion continue to deliver these benefits when it is prevented from meeting? Put a bit differently, would religion continue to give structure to society without the same level of socialization pressures? Of course, religious groups did not stop meeting, but shifted online in a majority of cases. But as many of us found, meeting online isn’t quite the same as meeting in person. That may mean that some people decreased their religiosity during the pandemic. This might be the thesis advanced by a “religious markets” approach, where religious organizations compete for members with variable benefit packages meant to meet consumer demand. If people are not engaging the rich, small-group infrastructure of most houses of worship and are only hearing the music through tinny computer speakers, then they may drift away. However, there are reasons to think that people would turn toward religion in a crisis, even if socially distanced in most cases.
Data and Our Research Designs
The coronavirus pandemic has imposed a set of conditions rarely available to study—where everyone is thinking about and reacting to the same thing (though obviously perceptions of it vary widely). And that thing—the coronavirus—is quite literally “novel.” These conditions are important because they give us greater confidence in the statistical associations we find. The pandemic is not like abortion policy, where the same questions have been debated for fifty years. Conspiracy beliefs, such as that a lab in Wuhan, China, manufactured the virus, are brand new and therefore help us trace their causal pathways through the population. Moreover, state reactions to the pandemic have changed whether and how people worship, have incentivized some elites to mobilize resistance, and mostly have gained widespread support from religious (and nonreligious) Americans. The stark realities of the pandemic have exposed the fault lines between those willing to work with society and those who truly stand apart, self-sufficient in their belief systems.
One aspect of our collective investigations that helps enable comparison is that many are based on survey data gathered by Paul Djupe, Ryan Burge, Andy Lewis, and colleagues in the last weeks of March and October 2020. Both surveys included responses of American adults acquired through Qualtrics Panels—with minimal statistical weights, the data are representative of the nation’s demographics in age, gender, race, region, and education. They asked many of the same questions in the two surveys and attempted to include a very wide range of religious and political measures. Of course, the surveys are not conclusive efforts since they are both snapshots and do not follow individuals through time. But they are helpful given that March was really the beginning of U.S. federal and state efforts to confront the pandemic, and the third wave was in full swing in October. There are other data sets employed, not to mention different methodologies, which serve to provide more complete and diverse accounts of religion in pandemic society. We’d also like to point out that, throughout many chapters, authors point to further discussion and results made available in an online appendix.*
In This Volume
One of the values of this collection is the breadth and scope of how social scientists approach questions about religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep the individual chapters in conversation with one another, we organized the chapters around themes. In the first part, we investigate the reaction of religious communities to pandemic public policies. Numerous churches, well covered in the media, defied state government public health orders, but how common was defiance?
In particular, Djupe and Burge in Chapter 1 argue that the prosperity gospel is a powerful force that maximizes perceptions of the pandemic threat, decreases social trust, and augments defiance of state closure orders. Diana Orcés, Ian Huff, and Natalie Jackson (Chapter 2) piggyback on Chapter 1 to examine the link between the prosperity gospel and conspiracy theories—prosperity-believing individuals are more likely than the nonreligious to believe that COVID-19 was created in a lab.1 Both prosperity gospel views and magical thinking predict pandemic beliefs beyond partisanship and other group identities, highlighting the importance of analyzing orientations beyond typical religion and politics measures.
The perceived pandemic threat to personal health and safety and the increase in state-level restrictions could explain the major uptick in firearm sales, as Abigail Vegter and Donald Haider-Markel explore in Chapter 3. They find that evangelicals were more likely than all others to purchase firearms between March and August 2020, but they attribute these purchases to concerns over civil unrest in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and the impending election.
If it feels difficult to disentangle the politics of the events of 2020, it may be because one worldview appears to underpin much of the politics on the Right. Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry, and Joshua Grubbs in Chapter 4 further unpack defiance to demonstrate that Christian nationalist beliefs are related to individual pandemic precautions, attitudes about how government should respond, and explanations for the spread of the virus.
Minority communities were hit the hardest by the pandemic for many reasons—access to health care, jobs that did not allow social distancing, and other reasons. Was religion one of them? We also have strong expectations that minority religious groups will be leaders of the community, begging a constant comparison to houses of worship and clergy in the Civil Rights movement. Multiple chapters focus on minority religious groups. Dilara Üsküp and Ryon Cobb (Chapter 5) focus on health, looking to see if houses of worship in minority communities were taking the threat to their congregants seriously. If so, then frequent attenders should show greater trust in clergy and medical professionals.
Then, Chapter 6 steps back to inquire about a broader concern. We often see upticks in religiosity during crises as religious institutions attempt to meet the needs of the congregation, though that would be complicated by distancing orders in the pandemic. Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Natasha Altema McNeely, and Paul Djupe follow this tack, wondering if clergy messaging was proportionate to the pandemic’s impact as well as whether it affected pandemic behaviors, especially within the African American and Latino communities that were so hard hit by the pandemic. Surprisingly, they find few differences across racial groups.
Part II shifts gears to the courts and court of public opinion. In some cases, religious defiance went further as Christian conservative advocacy organizations rushed to defend it in court. None of them prevailed until the final Trump contribution to the court’s composition (Amy Coney Barrett) took the bench, but the dynamics are valuable to examine. Andrew Lewis and Daniel Bennett in Chapter 7 take up the politics of challenging public health orders as religious freedom claims, describing the actions of the Christian legal movement and using original data to show that Republicans are far more supportive than Democrats in preserving the religious freedom of holding in-person services during the pandemic. Building on these questions of religious liberty, in Chapter 8, Jenna Reinbold explores whether COVID-19 restriction protocols were actual burdens or mere inconveniences to clergy and religious institutions. That is, because sincerity of belief is necessary for religious freedom claims, should we consider worship attendance essential for these believers? Similar to Lewis and Bennett’s chapter, she highlights the court’s use of a political narrative of burden.
Angelia Wilson in Chapter 9 draws on her vast collection of up-to-date email communication from Christian Right interest groups to describe how they reacted to 2020: the summer’s George Floyd protests and COVID-19. Of course, they were framed as threats, a culmination of the many years of warning followers of the growing menace domestically and internationally posed by the Left. This is the job of any organized interest—to frame events in ways that will activate their base to maintain support and push for desired policy ends. Therefore, it is tremendously valuable to see the messaging that underpins the reactionary politics on the Right during the pandemic.
Of course, good conspiracy theories involve distrust of the media; in the case of the coronavirus, Republicans and other Far Right commentators peddled the notion that the media artificially inflated numbers to hurt Trump. In Chapter 10, Jianing Li, Amanda Friesen, and Michael Wagner show that this response was contextualized, with trust in Trump, news media, and the CDC varying by religious tradition and belief. There were consequences to this trust as evangelical Christians and those looking to former president Trump for pandemic information were more likely to underestimate the number of U.S. cases.
Part III reverses the causal arrow to examine how the pandemic (and pandemic politics) affected group and individual religious choices, behavior, and beliefs. The part starts with the effect on specific groups before opening up to track religious behavior across the pandemic.
For a variety of reasons, we would expect women clergy to respond differently to state public health orders—Cammie Jo Bolin and Kelly Rolfes-Haase use our late-March survey data in Chapter 11 to assess whether clergy responses are gendered. Indeed, in congregations where women leaders are present, individuals report more religious service cancellations and are more “likely to trust clergy to have their best health interests at heart,” as compared to those in congregations without women leaders. Then, in Chapter 12, Shayla Olson explores how religious affiliation and race/ethnicity jointly affect religious behaviors like holding in-person services, attitudes about the pandemic itself, and how the pandemic has in turn affected religious faith.
Generation Z is the least religious generation yet in the modern United States and appears to think about the implications of religion differently than their grandparents. Melissa Deckman and Stella Rouse (Chapter 13) draw on data from a survey of just younger Americans to investigate how their religious attachments are linked to personal pandemic behaviors and how this compares across racial and ethnic groups within this cohort.
It is easy to see how the pandemic could further divide society with threats in the pandemic lingering everywhere in the air. Using a creative experimental design, Matthew Miles and Justin Tucker in Chapter 14 test what demographic groups their participants are more willing to “save.” The results were surprisingly united but also predictably divided. Participants elected to save older Americans, regardless of religion, gender, or partisan leanings. Taking a closer look, however, reveals that participants with strong religious identities are more likely to save evangelical Protestants over Muslims.
With all of the discussions of religious liberty and reported rates of service cancellations, we close with two chapters that address the most obvious question that has not seen data analysis to this point—what actually happened to religious service attendance throughout the pandemic? Kraig Beyerlein and Jason Klocek (Chapter 15) focus on early in the pandemic to showcase the variety of effects of the pandemic on religious practice. And, as Benjamin Knoll shows in Chapter 16, though the majority of regular attenders were not present at in-person services after the COVID-19 shutdowns in March, those who continued to attend were younger, more likely to be encouraged to attend by their congregations, and believe in higher levels of perceived persecution by the Democratic Party.
We hope you learn as much as we did from these chapters. This one overwhelming, extended event, the pandemic, has touched every part of our lives and allows us to provide an unusually comprehensive portrait of religion in American public life. Religion promotes defiance and cooperation; it is weakened and strengthened; it is responsive and quiescent. Of course, there are forces that help explain how religion falls on either side of those coins, but you will need to read the chapters to discover them.
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* The online appendix is available here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/epidemic_among_my_people.