**5. Are Religious Representatives Permitted to Be Actors with Something to Say about COVID-19?**

We have seen how the discipline of sociology opens up our understanding of religion, particularly with the idea of the "social construction" of religion. This concept does not weaken or negate the spokesperson for religion as an imaginative actor or one who takes the initiative, interrupts the flow, or is driven into new space by its theological motivations. Yet we may have to grant that such a figure can be an independent, imaginative actor—with a theological agenda.

But what if that person is all dressed up but not allowed to go anywhere? What if they are quarantined in homes or church buildings? What if they are denied room to be present and active in public life? Richard John Neuhaus takes up this question in *The naked public square: Religion and democracy in America* (Neuhaus 1984). He describes the empty and uncomely condition of today's public space doctrine, which has been developed without consideration of religion and religious values. In the face of a secularism which disdained religion, Neuhaus calls for an activist religion that acts out its values and aspirations precisely in the public square and not just in the confines of church buildings. Admittedly, he made this argument in light of neoconservative Christianity, as seen in the years he edited the journal *First Things.* But that is not the only direction to go in Christianity, as becomes evident if we pay attention to the social justice characteristic of the Sojourners movement, a vigorous example of an Anabaptist movement as well as the leftist or social gospel which actively contends with the state (Heinz 2020, 2022).

So illuminative was the term "the naked public square" that religion's forced isolation from the public square as a result of the latter's domination by the religion of secularism became a major trope. The earlier prominence of concern over church and state issues and the fear of religious establishment gave way to vigorous assertions of the free exercise of religion as just one of the "discourse communities" contending for public space in postmodern times. The decline or elimination of the God hypothesis had seemed to become the default worldview of science, modernism, the Enlightenment, higher education, and even government. Religion would have no role in shaping the public conversation and public policy. But then changes ensued. A telling historical example is the silencing of church bells following the French Revolution. This became a contest for presence in the "aural landscape". Eventually, the sound of church bells returned, and religion was no longer silenced. It could be heard again.

In the post-modern world of multiple discourse communities, religion is one of them both left and right. In *A Secular Age* (Taylor 2007), Charles Taylor argued that both secularism and religion are more fluid concepts than lately acknowledged. According to Taylor, postmodernism is both post-religious and post-secular. Secularism is not the absolute assertion of nothing but just another competing something. Taylor's challenge to the concept of "immanent frame" protested that all the available windows permit only one way of seeing. Loss of transcendence became another dimension of modern life.

The secularization thesis in the social sciences had been based on a single global idea of religion, a definition of secularity as the absence of religion, and then the triumph of instrumental reason. To this extent, it became the subtraction of religion from the public square. This is the understandable key to conservative evangelicalism's feeling of displacement and loss of heritage. Religion seeking its place may feel it is coming upon a total secular occupation of the public square. Secularism as an all-embracing meaning system escapes the Establishment Clause because it claims to be no religion while, in fact, functioning as an absolute claim-making religion. Thus, as Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon note, the church must contest for the right to speak its own language, in its own dialect, to tell and be its own story—in public (Hauerwas and Willimon 2014). Religion is one of the stories jostling for acceptance in a post-modern age, one of the master narratives. In this context, many religious studies scholars suggest that religion, and other worldviews, be tested by their "adequacy to the human condition". Bold religious leaders insist they, too, have something to say when it comes to subjects, including the subject of COVID-19.

A world disenchanted may become disenchanting. A world without the depth of the sacred can become superficial, without ultimate comfort. If late capitalism is the only ideology left standing, how well does it pass the test of responding to a pandemic? Is economics all anyone has to say? How adequate to the human condition is it? A reduced social imaginary is secularism's result in the Western Master Narrative. Matter minus spirit. When religion returns to the public square, it questions this hermeneutic and exposes its inadequacy and challenges its sufficiency for human meaning.

What if a dissenting church is the only meaning system left standing to offer a counterstory to that of late capitalism or scientism and the challenges of the epidemic? In this context, the Roman Catholic Declaration of Religious Freedom in 1965 argues not merely for courts to be neutral toward religious freedom, but nurturing and enabling (but without privileging one particular religion). Religion would like to be the yeast that leavens the commons. It does not concede that only politics, not religion, is the realm of cultural power.

So religion claims the right to be a social movement in the public square. St. Francis and the current Pope Francis saw that you have to see something and be something and do something—if you are to be a disciple of Christ (Pope Francis 2020). But the religious may lose their nerve. Consider the "God-gap among Democrats", fearful of being too assertive but perhaps catching up, as depicted by Amy Sullivan in *The Party Faithful*: *How and Why Democrats are Closing the God-Gap* (Sullivan 2008). Or the hopeful prodding of Brian McClaren, in *The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian* (McClaren 2017), which wants to display better ways to be Christian (and become the Church 2:0!).

When churches or individual religious actors decide they have something they must say or do, they may remain individual prophets called by and responding to sacred *texts*. But it may have been perilous contexts that called them forth. (These are sometimes called "Bonhoeffer moments" to refer to the Lutheran theologian and martyr who felt called forth by Nazi Germany to form the "pastors' emergency league" and become the "confessing church".) When I wrote my dissertation on the Bay Area Jesus Movement in the 1970s, I practiced participant-observation in a Jesus Movement in Berkeley that sassily called itself the Christian World Liberation Front (Heinz 1976). Although its early leadership originated in the conservative evangelical student ministry Campus Crusade for Christ (now called CRU), it quickly moved leftward, certainly in its style, but also soon enough in its political and religious message. It was a good example of how well-sighted individuals can turn

themselves into movements that bring new blood into a Christianity in need of cultural transfusion and radically new religious vision and of how re-discovered Biblical texts achieve relevance in new contexts. They become what the times require. There is a "history of effects" (*Wirkungsgeschichte*) going far back into the Hebrew Bible, picking up again in the New Testament, and then persistently breaking through in new ways throughout the history of Christianity. Sociological analysis cannot miss how new religious movements rise up at opportune moments and change the course of religious traditions, equipping them for radical change as a new and necessary environmental response, thereby changing the course of society and culture as well. The Christian World Liberation Front moved to Berkeley from California beaches, introduced guitars to worship, appointed themselves to preach on the Berkeley campus, and could have petered out there. But they transformed much of American evangelicalism and became a yeast in American Protestantism. They became pastors and professors and college presidents, and even Orthodox bishops. Last year they met in Berkeley to celebrate their 50th anniversary.

And yet American history displays a series of "great awakenings", periodic revivals that stirred individual hearts and refreshed the commonwealth. These did not necessarily call for resistance to government but may have implied stirring the government—and especially tens of thousands of camp followers—to religious values. The more "individual religion" was expressed, and this was typical of the several awakenings, the less likely such hearts were to resist the government or challenge social norms.

#### **6. Turning Right or Left?**

Therefore, when actors and movements are born, when the religious feel called to respond to a crisis like COVID-19, do they turn right or left? To take an extraordinary individual, Martin Luther King, Jr. began as a black evangelical, practiced moving to the center, and ultimately moved to the left—both calling for radical social justice for the poor and then, when he saw the connection, opposing the Vietnam War. To the outside observer, of course, religion may turn right or left. While many, like Bishop Tutu, or social gospelers, would expect religion to be communal, constructive of societies that become commonwealths in which much "social capital" is traded and committed to building up a community, in some other religious communalism libertarianism rings the bells.

Once, it was thought that Ayn Rand's philosophy, for example, was inimical to religion and its commitment to the community. Religion would stand up in favor of social construction for the good of all. Meanwhile, Rand's hero in *The Fountainhead*, Howard Roark, seemingly expressed a worldview opposite to religion: "I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need" (Rand 1996). Rand's world is defined as a battle between *creators and parasites*. The creator is self-sufficient, self-motivated, and self-generated. He lives for himself. The parasite lives second-hand and depends on others.

A principled conservative religion that instinctively resists government encroachment on the commons and believes social justice is a leftist cause may resemble the libertarianism of Ayn Rand. When Paul Ryan, whose hero was Ayn Rand, was still the Speaker of the House, the Georgetown Jesuit faculty admonished him that his social and economic philosophy was in clear opposition to the social theology of the Catholicism he also claimed. The welfare of the commons far exceeds the claims of the individual entrepreneur. A common trope one sees on Facebook depicts two libertarians looking out their window during a severe blizzard and pronouncing, "Here comes that socialist snowplow again."

On the other hand, perhaps it is a government that has recently come to be libertarian in denying its responsibility to serve the commonwealth. The legacy of economic theorist Milton Friedman, and every "rational actor" following in his train, declares that the only responsibility of a capitalist economic system is to achieve maximum profits for its shareholders and renounce all claims from so-called "stakeholders", which is to say the entire commons. An epidemic is likely to surface debates about the meaning and demands of

the commons. Both conservative evangelical religion and Republican politics may share a libertarian view (Heinz 2020).

A piece of good humor in recent decades is the counselor who says she would not do "marriage counseling" because marriage is an abstract construct devoid of personal or social reality. She only does "individual counseling"—meeting men and women who happen to be married separately. Indeed, the very word *social* has become suspicious, as in neo-conservative religion's certainty that "social gospel" must imply "cultural Marxism". Conservative evangelicals commonly denounce social justice as a possible Christian aspiration. Religion as a source of spiritual and psychological comfort remains a major theme, both to the left and the right, and evangelicals are often leaders in "world relief" organizations such as Franklin Graham's *Samaritan's Purse.* But religion as a source and motivation for public benevolence and building community may split the right from the left, despite that almost all world relief organizations, liberal or conservative, enthusiastically apply for and accept government funds allocated to worldwide economic and famine and medical relief organizations, which have long appeared on the right and the left, among evangelicals and social gospelers.
