**1. Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic has both highlighted and exacerbated the sharp divides in America that have been present since the country's foundation. From the systemic issues of race and class division to the urban/rural divide, political partisanship, and religious identity, the pandemic affected many aspects of American social and political life. Joining scholars such as Sandro Galea who have interrogated the social and systemic forces that shape health in America, I aim to question the role that religions played and continue to play in communal identity-making during the pandemic, and how such identities, particularly in the US, shaped both conscious and unconscious ideological responses, stymying public health efforts to significantly slow the spread of COVID-19. While individuals from the full range of representative belief systems and identities refused vaccination for myriad reasons, the group that did so most prevalently, as detailed later in this article, was that of white Evangelical Christians (Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: American Attitudes on Vaccination Mandates and Religious Exemptions (Wave 3) 2021). Many, but certainly not all, of the white Evangelical Christians who did receive vaccines remained silent about their vaccine status, while publicly espousing or passively assenting to anti-vax rhetoric. While of course white Evangelical Christianity is not a monolith, a significant percentage of the population of white Evangelical Christians did demonstrate anti-vax and anti-mask stances, and often refusing to socially distance. Not all white Evangelical Christians adopt an anti-vaccination stance, and many did, in fact, follow the public health

**Citation:** Brown, Julia. 2023. In God We Trust: Community and Immunity in American Religions during COVID-19. *Religions* 14: 428. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14030428

Academic Editors: Andrew Flescher and Joel Zimbelman

Received: 8 October 2022 Revised: 7 November 2022 Accepted: 17 March 2023 Published: 22 March 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

guidelines put in place by the CDC (Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: American Attitudes on Vaccination Mandates and Religious Exemptions (Wave 3) 2021; The Coronavirus Pandemic's Impact on Religious Life n.d.), but they are not who I am writing about in this article.

By looking at both the sociological data collected across the pandemic and the multifaceted nature of identity's role in decision making, this article identifies and ponders the power of religion as a cultural force. I posit that the boundary-making practices of religion and of communal and national identity created the complex and often contradictory set of moral practices that led many white Evangelicals to disregard public health policies surrounding COVID-19, despite the presence of radically different attitudes and responses from individuals who are representative of other strands of American Christianity and other religions. In particular, religions serve as the basis for a cultural community which in turn influences political views and enables in-group thinking. This groupish behavior as seen in white Evangelical Christians is then used to advance partisanship between religion and science as well as left- and right-wing political parties. It is this partisan thinking that led many to behaviors counter to reasonable health indicators.

Before exploring religious identity-making in relation to the pandemic, I would first like to account for the complex nature of a public health response and communicable disease. There is no one thing alone that caused the United States' devastating response to COVID-19 (Lewis 2021; Galea 2022; Simmons-Duffin 2022; Dias and Graham 2021; Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: American Attitudes on Vaccination Mandates and Religious Exemptions (Wave 3) 2021; The Coronavirus Pandemic's Impact on Religious Life n.d.). Rather, "health is the state of not being sick to begin with, and it is shaped by social, economic, environmental, and political forces" (Galea 2022, p. xvi). As public health scholar Sandro Galea (2022) points out, the American health care system has developed as a response to acute care illness, not as a preemptive public health system that seeks to ensure the health of Americans. Further, the decentralized nature of public health programs in the United States led to 50 states adopting as many approaches to stop the spread. America entered the pandemic with flawed systems that made health a commodity to be distributed unequally, with people of color and those of lower socioeconomic status least likely to have access to the resources necessary to live a healthy life. The pandemic, thus, struck those communities hardest.

Why then, one might ask, have I chosen to focus on white Evangelical Christians in this paper? Disease does not obey boundaries, class, or the color divide—public health means focusing on the health of all. If one group of people decides against following public health guidelines, especially in the case of a communicable disease such as COVID-19, it could put everyone at risk. While this is not unique to white Evangelical Christians, the fact remains that they were the most likely of any group to view COVID-19 as a non-threat, or worse, as not being real, and they were more likely to identify their faith as reasoning for these views (Dias and Graham 2021; Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: American Attitudes on Vaccination Mandates and Religious Exemptions (Wave 3) 2021). This noted, understanding why certain people choose to ignore these guidelines can further our knowledge on how to reach such communities and prevent the spread of future pandemics. Religion in America is positioned as both a social and a political force, and is therefore an especially rich area of study for COVID-19 response and public health.

As a complex and varied set of practices, religions have had both positive and negative effects for individuals during the pandemic. On the whole, individuals who prayed about COVID-19 were more likely to participate in risk-mitigating practices such as mask wearing—with the notable exception of white Evangelical Christians with belief in religious nationalism (Corcoran et al. 2022; Perry et al. 2020). Belonging to a community with a durable and tested shared religious identity provides a support system, with many individuals turning to religious leaders and other congregation members for guidance and care (Keshet and Liberman 2014; Krause et al. 2002). For example, in many Jewish communities, the sense of belonging provided by religion played an important role in building resiliency during quarantine (Frei-Landau 2020). Malaysian healthcare workers who practiced religion were less likely to exhibit symptoms of anxiety and depression throughout the pandemic (Chow et al. 2021). Likewise, research has shown that in America, religion has provided comfort in the face of growing anxiety throughout the pandemic. Yet, this same comfort also made a uniform public health response difficult in the United States, as many individuals and their communities were led to believe that COVID-19 might not be a threat or as great a threat as some surmised (Schnabel and Schieman 2022). Individuals with white Evangelical Christianity as an identity marker were significantly less likely to comply with public health policies (Funk and Gramlich 2021; Jackson 2021; Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: American Attitudes on Vaccination Mandates and Religious Exemptions (Wave 3) 2021; Schnabel and Schieman 2022; The Coronavirus Pandemic's Impact on Religious Life n.d.). Religious nationalism in the United States affected government policy to forgo mandated public health measures, with Evangelical Protestant officials more likely to be exposed to and align with religious nationalist ideals (Adler et al. 2021).

While much research has been done on the role of religions in shaping health practices during the COVID-19 pandemic, the primary methodology to study their response to the pandemic has been survey based with quantitative analysis of the results (Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: American Attitudes on Vaccination Mandates and Religious Exemptions (Wave 3) 2021; Chow et al. 2021). Though this research is helpful in determining the role of religious identity during COVID-19, it does not adequately address the potential reasoning or justifications behind these ideological responses, nor does it identify and explain different models of religious pandemic response. My exploration of pandemic response through the lenses of Lauren Berlant's concept of "cruel optimism" and Roberto Esposito's delineation of the relationship between community and immunity offers one explanation of the ideological responses, while my close reading of *Love in the Time of Cholera* provides a different response model.

Berlant's cruel optimism conceptually explains attachments, or objects of desire, to which the subject attributes a "cluster of promises" (Berlant 2011). The belief, or optimism, in the attachment is that it will make possible a dream or a goal the subject desires. The cruelty of such a bargain surfaces when the desire is either not fulfillable or, when fulfilled, is harmful to the subject (Berlant 2011). The communal identity associated with Evangelical Christianity became one such attachment.

To better understand how community affected immunity, and vice versa, I turn to Esposito. While I will be using Esposito's philosophy to discuss literal viral immunity, it is important to note that he is conceptualizing immunity in the abstract as a general term. Tracing the etymology of the words, Esposito suggests that community and immunity are related in that communities are bound by common laws, and immunity places individuals outside of that structure. To be immune, then, in an abstract sense, is to isolate oneself from a community. This concept can be seen not just in medical discourse, but in legal and political discourses as well. For example, the person who testifies in exchange for not being charged with a crime, or the person who holds a nationalist anti-immigrant stance, respectively. Esposito (2013) also posits a solution—a reframing of community as something that cannot exist without first achieving immunity—which I will return to in a close reading of *Love in the Time of Cholera*, immunity being the key that reopens the borders of the individual.

To better reach a multiplicity of populations in the responses to health crises, we must understand the roles religions play in individual and group decision making. Drawing from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's *Love in the Time of Cholera* as a historical case study, I compare Garcia Marquez's depiction of religion's identity-making power during the cholera pandemic at the end of the 19th century to current experiences of white Evangelical Christians in America during COVID-19, particularly those who refused to mask up, quarantine, and/or receive vaccination. Because the focus of *Love in the Time of Cholera* is, as the title suggests, on interpersonal relationships with the cholera pandemic as a backdrop, it gives

unique insight into religious identity, community, and health. Garcia Marquez's novel suggests the possibility of a less partisan relationship between science and religion and allows us to envision what might be if we can highlight shared sets of values rather than focusing on difference.

## **2. American Identity and Religions in COVID-19**

In the era of COVID-19, religious identity has taken the fore in public debates on risk-minimizing practices surrounding the pandemic. This stems from the paradoxical relationship between community and immunity that emerged from overlapping national, political, and religious identities. In America, the overwhelming view is that political decisions are made secularly and are empirically grounded, established by listening to the data points provided by scientists and responding to them appropriately. However, not every American citizen has the same relationship with scientific information, as many distrust science whether due to religious belief or other cultural ideologies. This complication is exacerbated by the reality that science communication is constantly providing us with new data—data which can be difficult to decipher for the layperson (Chan 2018; Dias and Graham 2021; Glass 2019; Olagoke et al. 2021; Payir et al. 2021). As Esposito, paraphrasing philosopher-anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, states, "In a situation of excessive environmental impact and pressures, institutions are charged with exonerating man from the weight with which the contingency of events saddles him. This requires a kind of 'plasticity,' or a capacity to adapt to a given situation so as not to expose the individual to an unbearable conflict" (Esposito 2013, p. 40). If one institution—say, one of science or reason-based political policy—fails to adapt, and an individual finds the divide between lived experience and policy (or belief and policy) too great, they will turn to an institution that better protects them from conflict. In the United States, we see this turn away from science and toward religion in the behavior of white Evangelical Christians (Plohl and Musil 2021). Such a response, very much a symptom of an ongoing distrust of the scientific community due to an in-group mentality and differing value systems, one that has essentially placed science and religion at odds with one another, dates back as far as the Scopes Trial in the 1920s (Evans 2013). The public trial pitted science against religion, sparking speeches such as "The Bible and its Enemies", and resulted in a decades-long debate about whether the Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools was constitutional (Adams 2005). This ongoing moral debate regarding the history of evolution and current iterations around stem cell research and human cloning laid the groundwork for the evangelical response to COVID-19 by, as some believe, engraining distrust of science in the identity of Evangelical Christianity (Dias and Graham 2021). Further, as nation and religion are tightly bound in terms of identity, in-group members demonstrate political behaviors they perceive to match their own religious values—values which the current Republican party touts as foundational to their platform and traditionally "American" in nature (Glass 2019).

American national identity is founded, as many history textbooks would tell us, on religious freedom (or, perhaps more accurately, freedom for the particular religion of Puritanism). The first amendment of the Constitution expressly legalizes freedom of religion in the free exercise clause, and arguably the separation of church and state in the establishment clause, yet historically, these have been unevenly addressed by the Supreme Court. However, the upshot of both the constitutional recognition and establishment, as well as the attention to their construal over two and a half centuries, is that religious belief and cultural expressions have solidified themselves in the fabric of American culture to a degree not matched by other existing democracies or industrialized societies. The tie between religion and American identity is also evidenced in more recent history. For example, in the 1950s the Census Bureau debated for nearly a decade on whether religious affiliation should be included as a census question (Schultz 2006). On one side of the census debate was the recognition of the evolving presence of religious pluralism in the culture; on the other, a number of Protestant Christians who feared plurality was a façade—that the real agenda was to de-Protestantize America (Schultz 2006).

In the mind of these Christians, the fear of pluralism was justified, and highlights a similar concern that exists among various groups today, in that religious identity and national identity, alike, are concerned with the formation (or disintegration) of boundaries. These boundaries play a role in the formation of communities, and "Members of a community are such if and because they are bound by a common law" (Esposito 2013, p. 14). For a nation, such boundaries are drawn on maps, and by the laws instituted through political regimes. In the case of religions, this "common law" is that of their particular belief set defined as a shared "method of valuing" (Pecorino 2001). However, religion as an identity-making practice is not as simple as volitional membership in a group. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz argues, religion is a cultural system; it "provides a blueprint" by which individuals can shape their lives. In other words, religion provides structure and meaning through which individuals shape their reality, contributing to the structure of religions reciprocally (Geertz 1993, pp. 92–93). Religion's status as a cultural system makes religion a powerful factor in other aspects of identity, particularly political ideology. In a call to attend to Western religions' role in sociological phenomenon, Glass states, "As a social "glue" that allowed diverse individuals to see common purpose and affiliation, religion both defined a set of social values to be realized through social life and norms to be followed to achieve those values. The downside, however, of any bonding ideology is the in-group mentality it creates and the prejudice it incites against other value systems and behaviors, producing conflict both internally and externally with other social groups" (Glass 2019, p. 10). In the United States, as previously mentioned, religion and national identity are historically bound to one another. The in-groups created often run along these identity lines, and the values, or "common laws", which define them. Yet, researchers such as Glass show that political identity should also be factored into this equation. Rather than secularity determining political law, religions play a major factor in political ideology.

As debates about mask and vaccine mandates arose, COVID-19 became not just an issue of public health, but a political issue steeped in religious and nationalist ideals. Religion often influenced the pandemic response, not just of the American people, but of government officials (Adler et al. 2021). It is difficult to separate the threads of politics, nation, and religions in behavior, as identity is a complex formation of many facets of an individual's life. Whereas previous debates between Evangelical Christians and scientific reasoning have been relatively harmless in terms of immediate and widespread health outcomes, the pandemic posed a different kind of problem, one with direct consequences both inside and outside the religious community. Despite the scientific data that show the efficacy of quarantine, vaccination, and mask wearing in preventing the spread of COVID-19, white Evangelical Christians have been resistant to comply with these risk minimizing practices.

We can see this resistance in the reported numbers of vaccine refusers across identity groups. Data collected from November of 2021 by PRRI show that, at 25%, the percentage of white Evangelical Christians who refuse to get vaccinated again COVID-19 was higher than that of any other religion (Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: American Attitudes on Vaccination Mandates and Religious Exemptions (Wave 3) 2021). Other research has shown the difference to be even greater, with the percentage of vaccine refusers among white Evangelical Christians as high as 40% (Funk and Gramlich 2021). Moreover, only 63% of white Evangelical Christians reported that they always wear a mask—significantly less than other religious identity groups in the United States—while 75% believed that churches should be allowed to hold in-person services (The Coronavirus Pandemic's Impact on Religious Life n.d.). While mask-wearing policies have lifted as the vaccine proves effective and COVID-19 becomes endemic rather than a pandemic, a lack of mask wearing during in-person events at the time this data was collected turned every service into a potential super-spreader event. In the crisis time of COVID-19, such actions had dire consequences, the repercussions of which are still felt today. Many of the areas that experienced the highest infection rates also had a higher population of Evangelical

Christians, most likely due to the refusal to follow public health guidelines (Jenkins 2021; Gonzalez et al. 2021).
