**1. Introduction: The Moment of the Epidemic**

In *The Anthropology of Performance*, Victor Turner defines *social drama* as "a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type" (Turner 1988), and he delineates stages of the breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism. This essay is an invitation to see the play, analyze the actors and their settings, and inquire about the final acts. We are witnessing a drama on the national stage in which the COVID-19 pandemic and American religion are mightily engaged, just as all epidemics or natural disasters in history have produced social dramas in which religious and national cultures go up against cataclysmic disruptions and sometimes against each other.

A simple google search leads to a wide array of newspapers, journals, books, and government documents reporting on COVID-19 and religion interaction. A notable actor is conservative evangelical religion, but there are also surprises in the wings. In August 2022, Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times reported that a wealthy, liberal, upper-class population in the Bay Area suburb of Orinda, CA, gathered to proclaim "No Vaccines, Protect our kids, and "Our kids, our choice" (Frenkel 2022). Of course, requests for religious exemptions to vaccinations, masks, and restrictions to public gatherings are far more common on the evangelical right. Misinformation driven by anti-science, anti-elitist, and anti-government instincts gives rise to conspiracy theories. Ideological intensity disguised as religion reveals a Christian nationalism that sanctifies America as God's country, which exempts conservative religion from cultural norms and hallows conservative ideologies with a patriotic obligation.

But religion can also produce cooperation among government, culture, and churches in times of crisis. Cooperation may be rooted in many admired religious instincts, such as the sense of obligation to the whole human family; serving one's neighbor and the common good; charitable obligations to the poor; the religious support of institutions that aspire to serve the community; the increase in religious sensibility in times of common distress; appeals of faith to the support of vaccination; and even new discussions of Bishop Tutu's African ideal of *ubuntu*, "I am who I am because we are who we are" (Battle 2009). Both conservative and liberal religions struggle for space in the plot.

Lest we think of COVID-19 as a de novo occurrence, and in order to learn from the past, I turn to the concept of an epidemic as a widespread occurrence of infectious disease in a community at a particular time. The term "epidemic" evokes all the ways in which societies have responded to the catastrophic spread of disease. These responses represent challenges to religion and society, and the radical changes they sometimes produce have a long history. Epidemic becomes a signal for what we might expect today in the current moment of our own pandemic and a paradigm for coaching and cautioning church and society during the present crisis. In this respect, as Randy Shilts has noted, an epidemic is both a litmus test for learning what society currently values, as well as an indication of what power various actors have in the public space for shaping social values (Shilts 2007).

At least until now, the great influenza of 1918 was regarded as the greatest pandemic in American history (Barry 2005). But the most famous example of this model in Western history is the civilizational crisis of the plague in 14th-century Europe. Not an epidemic (or pandemic), but a natural disaster was the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which shook the easy conscience of the European Enlightenment and required fundamental re-imaginations of religion and culture.

Epidemics do not appear in a social vacuum. Problems and themes already pressing now make an accelerated appearance. One of these is government regulation and the administrative state. Indeed, it is now possible to suggest that the after-effects of COVID-19 may lie less for religion itself than for emerging political action through movements driven in part by an awakened conservative evangelicalism.

The drama is not over, but it may be abating as the infection rate and level of virulence of COVID-19 begin to oscillate. At its height, however, over a hundred books were written about "religion and epidemic". These ranged from angry volumes (Lugeons 2020) that curse the church for obstructing society's well-meaning response to the COVID-19 pandemic and ruining worthy efforts to equally angry responses, to government and science posing as all-encompassing religious-like worldviews (Habakus and Holland 2012; LeRoy 2022), to many volumes that picture the challenges of an epidemic, to the churches as opportunities for self-transformation, "reset", and modernization in its ministries.

#### **2. COVID-19 and Religion as Social Drama**

The COVID-19 pandemic and religion have collided to produce a social drama in which all of us are implicated as actors, and government, society, culture, and religion are the platform and wings of the stage. According to Victor Turner's theory (Turner 1988), we can expect "a sequence of social interactions of a conflictive, competitive, or agonistic type" and stages of the breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism. In such circumstances, it is not unusual to discover that the emperor has no clothes. In Hans Christian Anderson's tale, the weavers play on the emperor's vanity by saying the suit is only visible to people

who are clever and competent. In our time of COVID-19, a different game may be in play. When Dr. Fauci appears on the stage, not many are willing to acknowledge the clothes he is, in fact, wearing.

Social dramas occur within groups sharing common values and interests and a common history. Public reflexivity takes the form of a performance—not theatrical but political, cultural, and religious. The languages through which a group communicates within itself are not just talk, they are political action, graphic representation, symbols, and rituals. All are stepping into "liminality", Turner's term for threshold experiences, betwixt-andbetween (Turner 1969). Turner's anthropology of performance has taken the play off the stage and centered it in the commons. The performance is the making of culture, that is, the reinventing of new ways of being in the world, where power often changes hands. Rituals are staged actions in which individuals or groups perform themselves, as when the public health officials who rose to recognized prominence over the last three years appeared weekly to declare what was what, announcing a new order in which the masses chose to participate or not. Turner's theory invites us to keep our eye on the interplay of event, spectacle, culture, religious ritual, and audience so that we can see and not miss how we are performing the social drama in which we are involved.

The deployment of the idea of an epidemic serves as a challenge to religion and society, and is at the root of radical changes in culture and belief with a long history (Snowden 2019). Recent works follow the epidemic paradigm in coaching and cautioning the church on pastoral responses to the COVID-19 crisis (Danielson and Whyte 2021; Pless and Corzine 2020; Wright 2020). In *The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe*, James Belich traces how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age (Belich 2022). In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbors. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering but also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. Belich's book is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labor, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe's global expansion.

Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history's greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe's dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? He shows how the plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labor scarcity drove more use of wind power and gunpowder. Technologies such as water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new "crew culture" of "disposable males" emerged to man the guns and galleons. Setting the rise of Western Europe in a global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world. Who knew epidemics could be generative rather than degenerative?

Although Belich does not take up the question of how European Christianity responded to the Black Death, there is much information available elsewhere. An Honors Thesis by Mclaurine Zentner, "The Black Death and its impact on the church and popular religion" (Zentner 2015), nicely summarizes three issues: the severely weakened and compromised status of the church, the rise of traveling flagellants as an alternative (and heretical) religious response, and the persecution of Jews who were blamed for bringing on the plague. Of course, the official church's position was that the plague came as God's punishment for sins. People were admonished to pray, repent, and plead with God to stop the pestilence. But an increasingly secular church, and then one whose manpower was decimated by the plague, was not up to the task. The plague fully exposed the vulnerability of a Christian society. The black death contributed to the decline in confidence and faith of the laity towards the church. A church that had been turning towards wealth and

political power was now overwhelmed by the needs of the populace. A Christian society no longer seemed coherent. The clergy proved unprepared, and so a flagellant movement arose. Groups of men and women publicly flogged their bodies while they traveled to and from European cities, preaching their version of Christianity without the permission of the Church. When all else failed, Jews were attacked for having spread the plague. Nothing approaching this is present today.

A natural disaster is not unlike an epidemic in its effects. A famous disaster that similarly challenged the religious and social order of the day was the great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (Gibbons 2010; Molesky 2016; Paice 2009; Shrady 2009). It struck a land that was economically busy and deeply religious—with 40 churches, 90 convents, and a population with 10% of its members in religious orders. The earthquake struck on November 1, All Saints Day. Ten percent of the population died, and every important church was destroyed. But the European Enlightenment of the time had confidently posited a well-ordered universe. Its philosophers observed nature and used reason to deduce a clockmaker God. The German polymath Leibniz famously produced a theodicy in which we find ourselves in *the best of all possible worlds* (von Leibniz 1985). In his *Essay on Man,* Alexander Pope wrote: "One truth is clear: Whatever is, is right." All that crashed with the great earthquake in Portugal.

The *ars moriendi*, an elaborately ritualized art of dying, had been an important tradition in preparing for the ultimate journey of death. Now the clergy who coached this art were in disarray or absent without leave. Confessions were not heard. Boccaccio wrote that plagued bodies lay around like dead goats with no proper burial (Boccaccio 1995). Rituals failed the living and the dying, who no longer experienced the sacramental overlay of the church. Many parish priests fled, leaving no one to offer services, deliver last rites, and comfort the sick. Flight might have been intellectually explicable, but it was morally inexcusable. One dubious response was the provision of new papal indulgences, more expensive now and providing time off from purgatory. COVID-19 does not provoke quite this dramatic a civilizational crisis.

Since epidemics do not happen in a vacuum, it may be expected that latent themes in religion and society will now come to the fore. Before COVID-19 appeared, there was a simmering debate over government regulation and the administrative state. Contemporary government regulation, or government and science posing as the new gods, came forth as the triggers of conservative religion protesting masks, vaccination, and external controls over when and where religious groups could gather. Resistance to the big government was not a unique issue but had become a rallying cry ever since the Reagan revolution made a call for small government a theme.

We may consider another example in response to climate change, which also engages the debate over the role of government control and the administrative state in furthering the good of society—or spoiling it. Indeed, there is a significant argument on both the left and the right regarding this. Global warming, a catastrophe on the horizon, has been declared a hoax by some conservatives, while liberals advocate drastic government controls in response to the service of social justice and equity (Merrill 2022). In "Federalist Society: The Conservative Pipeline to the Supreme Court", Jeffrey Toobin has documented the history of the Federalist Society and its grooming of judges certain to assert small government and a deregulated capitalist economy (Toobin 2017). With this political backdrop, crises were bound to become triggering events. Upheaval, inevitably surfacing from time to time, gives way to a new round of societal decision making about governmental intervention, with the corresponding convictions of proponents and detractors there to determine the shape of the social drama.

#### **3. The Discipline of Sociology as a Way into Religion**

Beyond the utility of the epidemic as an interpretive concept and the latent themes which may underlie it, I turn now to the role of *sociological* understanding and to the entire enterprise of the sociology of religion, which promises to be a view into the interaction of COVID-19 and religion. Sociology is not a new partner in understanding religion. For the last fifty years, sociological methods have played a significant role in Biblical interpretation, becoming a key variable in historical-critical approaches and, more recently, in feminist biblical studies. For example, in *A Home for the Homeless: A Social-Scientific Criticism of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy* 2005, John H. Elliott (2005) discusses at length the role of the sociological method in his commentary on and grasp of the situation in the late 1st century when the letter appeared. Another example is the well-regarded work of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, *In Memory of Her: Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins* (Schussler Fiorenza 1994). After its promising origins in the late 19th century, the sociology of religion came into its own in the middle of the 20th century as a distinctive discipline and flourished in many universities, such as Berkeley, Chicago, and Columbia. Charles Glock and Rodney Stark were early practitioners of survey research (as now also practiced by the Pew Research Center), in which an issue is carefully defined, standardized questionnaires or interviews are constructed, and a statistically formulated sample size ("n") is identified—in order to gain a macro impression of the social-cultural landscape by carefully interviewing, or collecting surveys, about people and their preferences, thoughts, and behaviors in a systematic manner. In *Religion and Society in Tension* Glock and Stark studied religions' place in society (Glock and Stark 1965). In *American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment,* the first of three volumes in "Patterns of Religious Commitment", Glock and Stark startle their readers with the contrasts in beliefs, practice, and experiences revealed among eleven major Christian denominations that are compared (Stark and Glock 1968).

In this setting, American civil religion has become a much-developed and argued phenomenon rooted in sociology. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already coined the term in chapter 8, book 4, of *The Social Contract* (Rousseau 2019). The concept of "civil religion" built bridges between sociology and religion and referred to the implicit values of a nation, as expressed through public rituals, symbols, and ceremonies on sacred days and at sacred places. But much more recent and influential was Robert Bellah's 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America" (Bellah 1967). Bellah saw civil religion as an institutionalized collection of sacred beliefs about the American nation. But Bellah wanted to raise the prophetic role of civil religion which challenged "national self-worship", calling for the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it in terms of which it should be judged.

Bellah considered the significance and possibilities of civil religion, to which he kept looking for its best example. Relying on the requirements of "virtue ethics", Bellah wrote *Habits of the Heart: Middle America Observed* (Bellah et al. 1988). This is a longing for a democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditions. Later he returned to civil religion in *Varieties of Civil Religion* (Bellah and Hammond 1982), in which he once again examined the force of religion in politics and society. But he was always a realist and a prophet. Along the way he kept picking into a too easy going civil religion and wrote his anguished *The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial* (Bellah 1992). This was a caution about the encroachment of a secular world order and a plea that the religious dimensions of American society, as distinct from its churches, must also have their own integrity and the same care in understanding that any religion requires. This would suggest that in a time of epidemic, it is not just a vigorous churchly presence which is called for, but the constructive presence of religion in the national psyche. From the powerhouse at Berkeley of Glock and Bellah came their most distinguished student, Robert Wuthnow, who examined the human response to existential threats—once a matter for theology but now looming before us in multiple forms (Wuthnow 2010). Nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming: each threatened to destroy the planet, or at least to annihilate our species. Freud, he notes, famously taught that the standard psychological response to an overwhelming danger is denial. In fact, Wuthnow writes that the opposite is true: we seek ways of positively meeting the threat, of doing something—*anything*—even if it is wasteful and time-consuming.

Wuthnow began to turn to small community life, as in *Small Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future*, in which he showed the fragility of community in small towns (Wuthnow 2013). Almost anticipating the fractures in society this pandemic would open, he wrote *The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America* (Wuthnow 2018). What is fueling rural America's outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Wuthnow shows that rural America's fury stems less from economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. In the rituals and public performances of COVID-19, where was small-town America? Protesting vaccinations and masks? Wuthnow would come to argue, in *What Happens When We Practice Religion? Textures of Devotion in Everyday Life,* that throughout the past few decades, the study of religion has shifted away from essentialist arguments that grandly purport to explain what religion is and why it exists (Wuthnow 2020). Instead, using methods from anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and sociology, scholars now focus on what people do and say: their daily religious habits, routines, improvisations, and adaptations.

By 2020 Robert Putnam was producing a revised addition to his highly influential *Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community* (Putnam 2000) to address social media and the internet. Simply put, everyone once bowled in leagues, but no longer. Now we live disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures. Our shrinking access to the social capital that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health. One might add that there is insufficient social capital to be spent on COVID-19. Between his two editions, Putnam wrote *American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us* (Putnam 2012). Based on vast survey research, this is a sweeping look at contemporary American religion and assesses its sociological causes. Unique among nations, America is deeply religious and religiously diverse, but in 2012, it was already undergoing seismic shocks. Today, and not only because of COVID-19 but possibly accelerated by it, the deep and sharp divisions between neo-conservative evangelicalism (with aspirations to become a political movement) and mainstream Catholicism and Protestantism are most noticeable in the American drama.

This was all in keeping with the classical preoccupation present in Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's 1966 (Berger and Luckmann 1966) major treatise on the sociology of knowledge, *The Social Construction of Reality*. Berger and Luckmann posited three stages in social construction: *Externalization* posits society as a human product. *Objectivation* sees society as an objective reality. *Internalization* finds humans to be a social product. Many conclusions arise: Society is a habit. If we define certain situations as real, they become real in their consequences. Religion could be thought of as successive definitions of a situation. Concepts do not have an independent reality.

One can see how rich the background detailed above is as an interpretive backdrop for thinking about the interface of plague and religion. From the seminal works just mentioned, we might pause to reflect: The Bible itself originated amidst defining social circumstances, and its interpretation is aided by the insights and approaches of sociology. Questions characteristic of the sociological approach emerge. How is reality itself, and therefore also religion, a social construction, and is it the case that once we define certain situations as real, they become real in their consequences? The original scholarship of survey research, now a mainstay of the Pew Research Center, opened up access to endless data and reflection about the role of religion in American life as well as called to attention American civil religion as the conceptualization of how religion may clothe American society and nation with ultimate meaning, and vice versa. Will our practice of "bowling alone" continue to shrink our access to the social capital that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing?
