Conclusion

AMANDA FRIESEN AND PAUL A. DJUPE

Two years after the first novel coronavirus cases were discovered in December 2019, there have been 260 million recorded cases and over 5 million deaths worldwide, with almost 50 million cases and 800,000 deaths in the United States.¹ Though there are global disparities in vaccine availability and access, all Americans over the age of five are eligible, and most can easily access their first round of shots as well as the booster. Around 60 percent of all Americans are fully vaccinated, with 69 percent having at least one dose.² Globally, about 50 percent of the population are vaccinated, with wide disparities due to supply and access and, more often than not, vaccine hesitancy and suspicion. Protests have erupted in several European cities as governments circle back to shutdowns in the wake of waves, new variants, and hospitals over capacity. Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are overwhelmingly concentrated in the unvaccinated. Public health campaigns continue to wage war against misinformation and conspiracy theories. Those vaccinated and even boosted with a third dose also grow tired of the ongoing travel and social restrictions, delays in non–COVID-19 medical care, and the overall persistence of a pandemic that could be better curtailed with cooperation from their fellow citizens. Choosing whether to wear a mask has become a kind of political statement—a shorthand for who to trust, who is a fellow partisan.

It is in this morass that religious communities make decisions about whether to continue to operate, their role in the health of their congregants, and whether to advocate for or against pandemic protocols or remain silent. It is important to remember that in the early days, almost all houses of worship closed, following public health orders (or suggestions in a number of states). That is, the default setting for most congregations was compliance. Many opened again in the fall along with the rest of society. What we haven’t known in a systematic way until now is whether clergy stoke these fires, attempt to counter, or remain completely silent. Most appear to have remained silent as only a minority of people report hearing their clergy address the pandemic (see Chapter 6).

Their caution is reflected in the engagement of clergy, which was not nearly unanimous, at least according to those who attend worship services. But this is also what we know about clergy—they face theological limitations that undermine political engagement (Guth et al. 1997; Jelen 1993) and talk about political issues less or at least in a more qualified manner when facing a divided congregation (e.g., Djupe and Neiheisel 2008). The strong, often partisan reactions to the pandemic likely put a lid on how clergy could engage, effectively limiting the public health role of religious institutions. And this comes on top of the contingent that has openly opposed public health measures and are now handing out letters of support for those seeking religious exemptions to vaccine mandates (Bailey 2021).

We can look at this from another angle, which is to start with the degree of threat to a community and gauge the degree of religious engagement with the pandemic. This, then, is one enduring puzzle of the pandemic. The media was full of stories about how racial minority communities were hit hard by the virus, now backed by scientific research (see Chapters 5, 6, and 12), but clergy engagement did not mirror that pattern—frequent attenders across racial and ethnic groups heard their clergy address the pandemic at similar rates. That’s curious and not just because the pandemic hit racial minority communities harder. Primarily Black churches also do not suffer the same problems facing political disagreement that other clergy face. That is, since the Black community is almost unanimously Democratic and Black clergy have a long tradition of engagement with pressing problems, why were their rates of addressing the pandemic so (relatively) low? One reason may be the degree of prosperity gospel belief that pervades the Black community (see Chapter 1), but more systematic study is required to make that determination.

We can see the weakness of religious institutions in U.S. pandemic society from the perspective of political theorists from Tocqueville to Neuhaus, who have argued that democracy is only possible within the confines of shared religious values—referred to as the “sacred canopy.” Political decisions need “moral legitimation” (Neuhaus 1984), which most often still means a grounding in religion. In response, Ted Jelen (1991) wondered if such a consensus ever existed, and we would add that the pandemic tore gaping holes in that narrative on several fronts. The elevation of radical individual freedom has never had a basis in a world religion but was espoused as religious freedom by those opposed to vaccines. Moreover, it became clear that values, shared or not, were not the operative force as they yielded to institutional interests. The elevation of threat served to keep members beholden to religious and political elites, some pandemic entrepreneurs found an incentive to keep their doors open in opposition to health orders, and still others downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic, at least until they caught the virus themselves, when many changed their tune.

This argument about the weakness of the sacred canopy approach can likely be pushed one step further using the pandemic. At one time, religious involvement was a marker of community integration, which is why religious involvement historically has had such a strong relationship with political participation, civic involvement, civility, and pro-sociality (e.g., Saroglou et al. 2005; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). But the pandemic appears to show that for a good number of religious adherents, the implicit connection to the community has frayed, perhaps on purpose as Chapter 1 shows. Some worldviews urge an exclusive orientation, keeping society at arm’s length. Some worldviews have routed adherents to networks and news sources that are far removed from fact and perniciously promoted the pandemic through conspiracy theories and undermining public health officials (Chapters 2, 9, and 10). And, of course, a sizable contingent of Christian nationalists are fighting against the changing nature of society, which may include the scientific community, looking to enshrine the power of Christian conservatives (Chapter 4). We believe it’s fair to say that there is no sacred canopy in the United States, if there ever was one.

Each phase of the pandemic, naturally, has generated new responses from the state and religious groups. The vaccination stage, arriving for most in early 2021, was no different, featuring large numbers of conservatives and especially religious conservatives raising opposition, even a year into vaccinations (PRRI 2021). As a religious historian describes, Bible passages have been “lifted out of context and repurposed to buttress the anti-vaccine movement” (Fea 2021). He also notes that this is nothing new among evangelicals in the United States, whose individualistic faith allows or even promotes “free-wheeling” theological innovation to support preferred outcomes. No small number of religious entrepreneurs have fueled this process and have often attracted large followings. We continue to see evidence of this process unfolding to disastrous public health consequences during the pandemic.

From an academic perspective, one way to read this evidence is a strike against capturing general measures of religiosity. Indeed, from the chapters in this volume, it seems problematic to make blanket assumptions about what the religiously involved experienced or thought. Specific messages and religious beliefs seem to offer much more explanatory power but also enable observers to assess the degree of theological innovation. For instance, there is a wide gap among the unvaccinated, with opposition to vaccination much more likely from their personal religious beliefs versus the “teachings of their religion” (PRRI 2021). Yet widely applicable religiosity measures are still valuable to capture, in part because they offer a way to index the effect of the pandemic on the populace. It interrupted attendance, at least early on, but appears to have had only a marginal effect on belief and affiliation. Of course, these results are not independent of what congregations did—whether they remained open, offered online services, and found creative ways to maintain community.

Our communities were not only beset by pandemic waves. As Vegter and Haider-Markel demonstrate, COVID-19 spread in a year with unprecedented national and international Black Lives Matter protests and a contentious, competitive presidential election (see also Chapter 9). Messaging around racial justice swirled with pleas to “flatten the curve” as centrist Democratic candidate Joe Biden campaigned on unity. While one side responded to 2020 with an ethic of care, the other followed their leader President Trump in downplaying the pandemic, continuing to support police and their actions, and questioning the legitimacy of the election. The latter issues clashed as insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol and its police force on January 6, 2021, claiming election fraud. Christian nationalism reverberates through all these debates, as religious language, imagery, and justification bolster claims that to be American is to be Christian, white, and Republican (Chapter 4). Antipathy toward the Left also surged as frustrations grew around antivaxxers and the “big steal” election conspiracies. Though it is interesting that most people would still offer to save out-partisans, though not Muslims, with their “lifeboats,” as Miles and Tucker report in experimental work in Chapter 14.

As evidenced by our chapters on religious freedom and debates about in-person services, 2020 set the stage for more legal arguments about face-to-face worship that are playing out in state legislatures and the courts. With a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, we are likely to see continued deference to religious freedom claims playing out at the highest levels. Interestingly, those claims have limits as the Supreme Court recently refused to block New York state’s vaccine mandate for health care workers that allowed no religious exemptions (Totenberg 2021). Perhaps this decision, though without a formal opinion, starts to clarify the importance of religious burden, which Reinbold discusses in Chapter 8. Successful challenges to state closure orders were brought by religious institutions with an emphasis on liturgy, not those with more individualistic faiths (see Chapter 7 for more). Perhaps the individualistic claims of burden suffered by vaccine mandates are not sufficiently credible to the court. The pandemic is certainly providing them a rich set of cases with which to clarify their views.

We noted in the introduction that the pandemic offered conditions rarely available to researchers: “Everyone is thinking about and reacting to the same thing [and] that thing—the coronavirus—is quite literally ‘novel.’” If there was one overarching theme to this volume, it would be the importance of context. As Miles and Tucker argue, “Context determines which identities are salient at any given moment.” The role of context is not limited to identity salience, clearly, providing the information, interests, and actors that make up choice scenarios. It has probably never been as important to document individual contexts as well as their understandings of those contexts—perceptions vary widely. What are individuals hearing and facing, and what do individuals think they are facing?

Beyond how religious communities can help or hinder efforts to stem the COVID-19 tide, the pandemic also may have long-lasting impacts on religious life. If we were in the stereotypical coma for a few years, we might not know there was a pandemic from one perspective—surveys in 2021 are reporting a steady rise in religious nones with numbers we could have projected in 2019 (e.g., Smith 2021). It’s not that there weren’t disruptions during the pandemic; it’s that U.S. religion was generally resilient and responded favorably to political and religious encouragement. Then President Trump encouraged people to attend, and so did a small minority of clergy—those parishioners attended in person at much higher rates early in the pandemic (see Knoll’s Chapter 16).

The pandemic offered a quite different crisis than previous research had studied, such as 9/11 or natural disasters. Beyerlein and Klocek (Chapter 15) do not see the surge in individual faith that attends such catastrophes and, instead, find individuals picking their way through the pandemic with many online, a small minority of intense believers stubbornly attending in person, and stable rates of private prayer. Perhaps the difference is that the pandemic was largely invisible to most, it decimated communities in slow motion, and some of the most personal impacts came from public health officials (e.g., orders to close). It’s entirely possible that the pandemic break early on put some play in the joints and allowed more people to rethink their congregation ties, to try out new congregations, or to cut their congregation loose. Those decisions were likely already in motion, however.

There are so many reasons why a resurgence in interest in religion in minority communities is happening now. Of course, some of the reasons have to do with the Black Lives Matter protests that energized the world to reconsider racial justice. But others argue, rightly, that we don’t understand American religion unless we understand race, racism, and racial dynamics in its many forms that permeate American society and politics (see, e.g., Yukich and Edgell 2020). From our perspective, quite a bit of conventional wisdom about the Black community is stuck in a civil rights frame of mind—clergy are expected to be some form of MLK Jr. representing the Black community in full prophetic mode.

While there is some evidence that minority clergy are more likely to represent their congregations in public affairs—that is, as representatives—than whites, that leaves a lot to be explained. Minority Christians are also concerned with teaching the gospel, though it’s important to remember how much variation there is among Christians, not to mention the non-Christian religions in the United States. The prosperity gospel, a belief system that is not conducive to following public health orders, has a huge following among African Americans (see Chapter 1). But they are all also concerned with maintaining members against loss to other congregations, which means proving their value on a weekly basis. It’s hard to prove your worth if the congregation is closed, so at least some frustration with public health orders was natural. Olson finds minority congregations more likely to be meeting face-to-face early in the pandemic (Chapter 12; see also Chapter 15), which could be the result of the prosperity approach, the religious economy pressures, or some other force. Minority religion is not the same as their white brethren, even within the same religious tradition, but religion in communities of color is also not uniform and solely cut from the civil rights movement cloth. We have much to explore, and the pandemic investigations of minority religion in the United States provides further impetus to do so.

Colloquially, the terminology “in the before times” has developed to describe normal activities before the pandemic. In the “after times,” then, do we expect any of these pandemic-induced alterations to remain? For example, with religious communities investing in online infrastructure and improving their virtual service delivery, will this continue once there is no longer COVID-19 spreading concerns? For the elderly or those with disabilities, facing inclement weather, and busy with children, perhaps virtual services will become a way to stay connected to their religious community when they may have otherwise fallen away. Conversely, is there a set of leavers who were just hanging on to church membership that used the pandemic as a way to cut the final thread? Fortunately, researchers are closely attuned to these sorts of questions amid most likely unprecedented data gathering across the social sciences. We’ll soon find out.

In the end, we hope this volume has shed light on the continuing role of religion in American public life and how these communities, their leaders, and beliefs shape and are affected by large-scale societal disruptions like the pandemic. We believe they also show the efficacy of continued social-scientific research in such times as especially illuminating about the efficacy and role of religion in public life.