In April 2020 a consortium of European and American scholars came together to host a webinar series on Covid-19, Religion and Belief that offered hundreds of academics, civil society, government, and religious leaders a space to reflect upon some of the consequences of the pandemic and its effects on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). Using a cross-cutting approach, we looked at the impact of the pandemic at the intersection of religiosity, religious freedom, civil rights, the economy, and humanitarian aid.

The aim of our concluding webinar on 9 July was to take stock of good practices and lessons learned and try to imagine what the world will look like six months from now. To make our concluding reflections available to a wider audience, we have compiled the written reflections from all four panelists: Brett Scharffs, Pasquale Annicchino, Judd Birdsall, and Marco Ventura. These posts were first published on the blog of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU.

Brett G. Scharffs

Director, International Center for Law and Religion Studies and Rex E. Lee Chair and Professor of Law, BYU Law School[1]

As the global pandemic has raged on — shutting down businesses, cancelling events, and isolating loved ones—we’ve sadly realized that so much of the good in life happens when we are closer than six feet apart. And yet, times of crisis also provide an opportunity for innovation, adaptation, and reflection.

The Coronavirus Stress Test

As I noted at the beginning of this webinar series, Covid-19 is a kind of stress test — and it’s a test that many of our U.S. institutions have been failing.

As for Congress and the President, I have to give them very low marks. Congress has managed to pass several sizeable appropriations, but otherwise seem missing in action. The President has mostly wanted to move beyond the crisis.

The media has also performed poorly, bifurcating into the predictable anti- and pro-Trump camps that distorts everything. I doubt there is any American institution that will have more difficulty regaining trust and credibility than the media. Even legacy providers such as The New York Times and CNN have been deeply tarnished.

The courts have been doing somewhat better, largely by deferring to the political branches of government. Churches and religious organizations have been mixed, but they have performed well in regards to being good citizens, exercising restraint, and offering humanitarian support.

As seen with the killing of George Floyd and its aftermath, the police have performed poorly. It is noteworthy that nearly everyone immediately saw racism and systemic patterns of police misconduct in the George Floyd video, rather than something more isolated.

Public health officials, unfortunately, have also earned poor marks. As a group, they seem to go from treating gatherings as completely unacceptable to acceptable overnight (that night was May 25th, Memorial day, the day George Floyd was killed). As enormous public protests arose, a thousand public health officials wrote an open letter^[2]declaring that police misconduct and systemic racism was also a public health crisis that justified ignoring social distancing and other health guidelines. After that, the public’s willingness to heed and take seriously public health officials (as well as other politicians and the media) evaporated like morning dew with the rising of a summer sun.

Individuals’ responses have already been mixed throughout the crisis, and the tendency towards overly politicizing everything has been strong. The President has turned wearing a mask into a political referendum—where wearing a mask is a sign of weakness and capitulation, and many have followed his lead to devastating effect. Where I live, we have the very strange experience of walking around a grocery store with a mask on while receiving glares of contempt from people who refuse to wear one.

Throughout everything, I keep coming back to one word: Trust.

Most of our institutions have taken a beating during the pandemic and trust, both individual and institutional, once lost, is difficult to reclaim. This worries me deeply.

Human Rights and the Pandemic

In the wake of the pandemic, we have also seen human rights problems arise globally. Religious minorities have been used as scapegoats—blamed for the coronavirus, or disproportionately held accountable for its spread. Differences and discrimination regarding access to governmental services have become more apparent, as well as differential impacts on different communities.

We have also seen differences in primary and secondary effects. Men are more likely to die from coronavirus than women and children, but when it comes to secondary effects of the virus, women and children are more likely to suffer from domestic abuse as well as social inequalities. The heaviest burden falls on the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions that exacerbate the illness.

Beyond masks, hand sanitizer, and social distancing, our legal toolkit provides a number of time-tested tools for responding to Covid-19—especially when it comes to finding balances between public health and freedom (including religious freedom). The basic tools are: the rule of law, non-discrimination (treating similarly situated religious and non-religious institutions and people similarly), reasonable accommodation, and the compelling state interest test (where important public interests such as public health are measured against something like a necessity test—is there a less restrictive means of vindicating the interest?).

While these tools are familiar, our ability to use them skillfully is much less evident. We need policy makers and public officials at every level (not just courts) to become more adept at utilizing these tools.

2020 Vision – Midyear

When we began this series 14 weeks ago, the watchwords were “flatten the curve.” Three months ago, I accepted the conventional wisdom that this was a matter of all of us sacrificing and acting responsibly for a short time, and then the worst would be over. We did not flatten the curve, however, and the worst—at least here in the U.S.—does not appear to be over. We are experiencing not so much a second wave, but a surge in the first wave that is far worse in the number of infections (the bad news) but lower in mortality rate (the good news). Covid-19 is a stealthy and sneaky foe—many cases are asymptomatic, there is a long gestation period before symptoms manifest (a period when you can still spread the disease), it spreads easily, and it affects people very differently. For the small percentage of people who get very sick, it is a terrible disease and a terrible way to die. For many, the process of recovery is slow and difficult.

Looking Forward

As with so many others, our work at the International Center for Law and Religion Studies has moved almost entirely online. I’ve been very pleased with our efforts (together with our fantastic partners) here in these webinars; our teaching programs have taken place or are taking place online in places as varied as Vienna, Indonesia, and China; we continue to work on law reform projects online in places such as Uzbekistan; our Religious Freedom Annual Review was run as an online event, and reached many tens of thousands of people (rather than the usual 500); and our work with our 16 summer research fellows has been incredibly rewarding.

So what’s my outlook moving forward? Well, I remain deeply committed to the human dignity initiative, emphasizing human dignity for everyone everywhere, and I believe the message of that initiative remains more relevant than ever. For me, that is the simplest formulation I can come up with: All of us, in each of our spheres of influence, must strive to protect and promote the human dignity of all people in all places. Human dignity for everyone everywhere.

I’m not by disposition a “glass half full” person (indeed, I am given to melancholy), so I’m having to work hard to remain optimistic and hopeful. However, I do believe that if we work together, listen to each other, try to be compassionate and patient with each other, things will work out. I am a person of faith, and I believe (at times it seems against available evidence) that love is the strongest power in the universe—stronger than indifference and ignorance, stronger than anger and rage, stronger than hatred and fear, stronger than the coronavirus, or economic turmoil, or racism.

Love will win. I believe it. My challenge is to act as if I believe it.

 

[1] Thanks to our Center Summer Fellow, Lauren J. Malner, BYU Law School JD Candidate, 2022, for her help with this summary.

^[2] Mallory Simon, Over 1,000 health professionals sign a letter saying, Don’t shut down protests using coronavirus concerns as an excuse, CNN (June 5, 2020) https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/health/health-care-open-letter-protests-coronavirus-trnd/index.html.

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Pasquale Annicchino

Senior Research Associate Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies
and Visiting Researcher Institute Religious Studies-Fondazione Bruno Kessler

 

COVID-19 has been a massive socially disruptive fact that has forced all of us to confront unforeseen challenges in our personal and professional lives. During this webinar series we have discussed many of these challenges through the interactions we have fostered with our speakers and participants. Here I will focus on the legal, technological, and epistemic dimensions of the relationship between the pandemic and religious freedom.

Global Human Dignity

Only a few days after the skyrocketing increase of the contagion, Yuval Noah Harari published an article in the Financial Times highlighting the challenge that the diffusion of the pandemic was bringing to the world. I think that the two main challenges to which Hariri pointed remain valid now, a few months after the beginning of this terrible journey.

According to Harari, “In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance of the state and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.”[1] Let me focus on the second first. What we have learned in the series is that COVID-19 has brought many states to the same dilemma: how to balance different civil rights? How to cope with a difficult epidemiological situation without compromising fundamental rights and freedoms?

This balance has not been the same around the world. I would argue that it does not need to be the same, as if the policy options available would be the necessary consequence of cartesian logic. Different societies and different polities respond to different value choices and options. However, I think that we have seen an abuse of this necessary relativism. I think we should continue a global conversation for a minimum dignity threshold for individual human rights that states should not be allowed to violate in the name of national security or a collectivistic understanding of rights. Such faulty theoretical constructs are generally used to justify serial violations of rights in the interest of majoritarian opinions. Global Human Dignity should therefore remain a guiding light.

Pandemic Law

The first choice that Harari underlined was between a “totalitarian surveillance state and citizen empowerment.” This choice highlights one of the must fundamental paradigmatic shifts brought to the protection of civil rights, including religious freedom, that we have seen in recent times. The capability that public and private organizations have to collect personal data and profile individual behaviors is, in many parts of the world, getting out of control.

While many responses to COVID-19 have been taking place within the framework of what I would call “The Law of the Pandemic” (more or less ordinary legal tools stretched to reach certain goals), in the future many states will have access to an increased range of technological tools that challenge the traditional relationship between public authorities and individuals and private institutions. We need to ask whether the private institutions collecting vaste amounts of data on individuals and then sharing them with governments are really private companies or functionally a branch of the public administration. We still live in a world were these boundaries are not clear and gray areas continue to increase: it’s the Pandemic Law.

A New Epistemology for Law and Religion?

It is exactly because we are moving towards a new paradigm that a mainstream Church and State approach, which has guided many of us on religious freedom issues, needs to be challenged and updated. This is even more true when religious groups themselves embrace technology and innovation as we have seen during the pandemic[2].

As Andrew Sarazin, President of the Templeton World Charity Foundation, has recently argued: ‘The printing press was a highly disruptive technology when it was invented by Johan Gutenberg in 1440, and it allowed for the mass distribution of the vernacular Bible that fueled the Protestant Reformation. We may be approaching a similar moment now when the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic combines with the power of digital technologies and the Internet to radically reshape religious life.’[3] It is therefore time for scholars to engage in a very much needed reflection on the categories that we use to analyze the role of religion in society and its relationships with power, both public or private.

Looking Forward

I will build on the experience of the webinar series for a book on which I am currently working tentatively titled Global Law and Religion: The Rise of the Civilizational State. Many of the reflections collected during the series will surely influence my writing. I have also benefitted from the series for the two courses on Global Law and Religion that I will be teaching in 2020-21. Most of all, I’m hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel and real global solidarity.

 

[1] Yuval Noah Harari, The World after Coronavirus, Financial Times, 20 March 2020.

[2] Many researches pursued at the Centre for Religious Studies at FBK follow this approach.

[3] Andrew Serazin, Is it Finally Time for Religion to Embrace Technology?, Medium, 7 July 2020.

 

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Judd Birdsall

Director of the Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University

 

Dramatic moments and extreme cases often help to clarify issues, expose boundaries, and create opportunities for fresh thinking. The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of those moments for a whole range of issues, including issues related to religion.

As I reflect on the past several months of the pandemic and on the 14 weeks of our webinar series exploring the religious dimensions and religious freedom implications of the lockdown, I am struck by three main observations.

First, the lockdown has provided a civics lesson on the permissible limitations on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB). Second, the varied religious responses to the pandemic have reminded us of the “ambivalence of the sacred.” Third, the lockdown has had significant—and divergent—impacts on levels of religiosity. Let’s explore each of these observations in turn.

A Civics Lesson on FoRB

The COVID-19 lockdown has led to the most severe, widespread, and instantaneous restriction on communal religious practice, perhaps in world history. Governments all over the world have, at roughly the same time, closed religious sites and banned religious gatherings. This is unprecedented.

Of course, these restrictions have been put in place to protect public health and are therefore legitimate in principle. But there have been vigorous debates about these restrictions and even been calls for civil disobedience from some religious voices.

Many organizations have contributed to the debate with helpful statements and reports clarifying when limitations on FoRB are permissible and when they are not. One of panelists from our third episode (dealing with religion, COVID-19, and civil society), was a representative from the Conference of European Churches. Very early in the lockdown period his organization released a statement accepting temporary restrictions on religion as necessary to fight the virus while also calling for ongoing scrutiny of state mandates.

In June the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom published an excellent legislative factsheet outlining the international legal norms that govern limitations on FoRB. The factsheet reminded us that public health is indeed a permissible ground for restricting FoRB. But all public health limitations of FoRB must be clearly written in law, necessary for achieving a public health goal, and non-discriminatory in intent and application.

Ambivalence of the Sacred

In addition to its civics lesson on FoRB, the pandemic has also reminded us of “the ambivalence of the sacred”, to use the phrase coined by Scott Appleby in his eponymous 1999 book. Appleby’s primary scholarly focus in the book was violence and peace—why certain religious groups justify using violence while others, often from the very same spiritual tradition, eschew violence and promote peace. During the months of COVID-19 we’ve seen the sacred ambivalence at play as religious groups and individuals have responded in constructive and less than constructive ways.

Most religious and belief groups have responded to the crisis by amplifying messages around personal hygiene and social distancing as ethical imperatives. They have accepted the closure of their facilities and ban on gatherings for the greater good. They have respected science and science-based policy. They have shown great creativity in finding virtual ways to hold services and address the needs of their adherents.

Sadly, but predictably, some groups have not been so commendable. They have been focused on their own liberties, dismissive of risks, distrustful of expertise, and have amplified disinformation and conspiracy theories.

The attitudes and behaviors of unhelpful groups are worrisome for FoRB and religious tolerance. A society’s support for FoRB and its tolerance of religion is linked to perceptions of whether religion play a constructive or destructive role.

The Pandemic’s Impact on Religiosity

In our very first webinar in the series I focused my comments on how the virus and lockdown might impact religiosity around the world. I noted that disasters tend to heighten religiosity. People flock to religious sites and gatherings for spiritual comfort, material aid, a sense of community, and to make sense of the tragedy. But because of the lockdown—and the leading role of scientists and medics rather than theologians and clerics—I speculated that COVID-19 might not have a typical impact on religiosity.

In light of research and reflection published since the start of the pandemic, I would want to update and nuance my initial reflection. We are seeing different impacts on religious institutions and religious individuals.

In April our website, Religion & Diplomacy, published an article by the American economist Brian Hollar, asking Will COVID-19 Cause a Religious Recession? Hollar suggested that,

social distancing may rapidly translate into rapid reduction in the social benefit of being involved in church. If this pandemic lasts more than a few weeks, some very critical social capital might be lost which may impact churches long-term after they attempt to re-gather once the social restrictions from the pandemic lessen.

Hollar also noted that with COVID-related economic downturn, tithing will inevitably decrease. Large churches with significant overheads will be severely impacted. So will smaller churches with older congregants who are more likely to suffer the worst of the coronavirus and less likely to engage in online services. Hollar’s article has become our most read article in our site’s history, receiving more views than all of our other articles combined. That suggests his thesis has resonated with the observations of others—and the fears of religious institutions.

But we have also published the findings and analysis of Danish economist Jeanet Bretzen showing that there has been a massive surge of interest in private devotion during the lockdown. Bretzen found that Google searches related to prayer have risen to highest levels ever recorded. She argues that this use of the Internet is an example of religious coping—turning to religion to cope with adversity.

So, it appears that the coronavirus has brought about divergent trends in communal and personal religiosity. It will be interesting to track how these trend lines evolve and impact each other in the months and even years ahead. Only when the pandemic is truly over and all social distancing measures have been dropped will we be able to more fully assess the longer-term impact of the virus on religiosity.

And the same goes for religious freedom. The creativity and energy with which most religious groups have provided spiritual and practical support, even in the midst of a deadly pandemic and unprecedent restrictions, is a reminder of how important it is to protect the freedom of religious and belief groups to serve their communities.

 

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