This unique volume brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on the religious, cultural, and political landscape at an inflection point in our nation’s history. As the editors point out, the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a rare, universally felt stimulus for Americans of all walks of life. At the time of this writing, the virus has claimed over 833,000 American lives—a number far higher than the estimated 675,000 from last century’s 1918–1919 influenza pandemic and exceeding the 651,000 combined American battle deaths from every war conducted from the American Revolution to Desert Storm in 1991.1
Prior to the pandemic, the American religious landscape has experienced high levels of change and churn. Religious adherence has been on the decline, with approximately one-quarter of Americans—and about four in ten adults under the age of thirty—now claiming no religious affiliation, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s (PRRI’s) 2020 Census of American Religion. Political partisanship has polarized denominations and churches, sorting the religious landscape along ethnoreligious lines; white Christian groups generally lean Republican, while nonwhite Christians, non-Christian religious groups, and the religiously unaffiliated each consistently leans Democrat.2 In addition to the highly divisive 2020 presidential election accentuating these fault lines, the summer of 2020 also saw some of the largest and most widespread protests for racial justice in American history. Like an X-ray, the COVID-19 pandemic sent a current into this highly volatile cocktail, fluorescing to reveal the inner workings of religion and culture in America.
This volume is unprecedented in its breadth, gathering into a single volume the analysis and insights of more than thirty social scientists with expertise in political science, sociology, religious studies, public health, journalism and communications, psychology, and women’s studies. Written in real time during the pandemic and grounded in public opinion survey data from early and late 2020, this volume promises to be the benchmark against which future analyses of religion, culture, and politics in this critical time in our nation’s history are measured.