A global project to examine the changing role of religion in public life during the Covid pandemic has concluded that it accelerated secularisation.
Academics from Canada, Germany, Poland, Ireland and Northern Ireland, looked at the place of religion in health services including the vaccination programmes, liaison with governments over closure of places of worship and social care, and digital innovation where online worship and prayer transformed religious practices. Their report, The Changing Role of Religion in Societies Emerging from Covid-19, is here.
Gladys Ganiel, a professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, told a Religion Media Centre briefing that there was optimism in Ireland at the start of the pandemic that Covid might reverse the trend of secularisation, but this was not the case.
Instead, academics had observed a continuation of trends in secularisation, with decline in religious practices among Christians caused by the closure of places of worship, which had not rebounded after the pandemic. There is a continuing decline in the number of people affiliating with a religion, alongside a rise in non-religion.
However, where the academics had studied the impact on Muslims, they found no reports and no evidence of a decline in attendance.
Religion and healthcare
During the pandemic, a stereotypical view emerged in society, that there was vaccine hesitancy or resistance within religious groups. Some Catholic church leaders had said certain vaccines were unethical because they involved using cells from aborted foetuses. This played into the prevailing discourse that science and religion are incompatible.
But documents from official religious organisations did not take this line. There was strong support for the science. In Canada and Poland, bishops’ conferences quickly backtracked on this, and Pope Francis also spoke out, so that vaccinations were seen as the common good.
One outcome, Professor Ganiel said, was a greater willingness among religious organisations to use scientific and moral reasoning, alongside theological language, to justify claims.
Religion and governments
The researchers found changes in the way religious groups interacted with secular governments, which varied among countries where religion had a constitutional status, and those without.
Solange Lefebvre, a professor at the University of Montreal, said inter-religious dialogue took a significant and central place during the pandemic, and this was related to whether religion had a constitutional status in the country.
To stay neutral, governments had a relationship with many religions at the same time. This illustrated the importance of religion, but not the pre-eminent place of any one religion. State and religion remained separate, a feature of secularisation, but that did not mean there was no conversation between them, she said.
The church in Poland, for example, asserted its authority by complaining that places of worship were shut while sports grounds, theatres, cinemas or bars were allowed to open. Slawomir Mandes, a professor at the University of Warsaw, said there were complaints that this was a distortion of religious freedom.
Similar arguments occurred in all countries where places of worship were shut, with religious organisations complying but disagreeing.
Professor LeFebvre said here was a paradox. The pandemic made religion more visible, but the ban on worship led to an acceleration in churches closing, according to a bishop she interviewed for the project.
However, one benefit in Canada was that the new conversations between church and state led to a new importance for religion, as politicians discovered religious officials could act as mediators: “A lot of politicians and public health officers do not know much about religion. This was a discovery for a lot of them,” she said.
Falling church attendance
The academics reflected on the continuing impact of falling numbers in congregations following the closure of churches. Professor LeFebvre said she had been told that worshippers did not return to church after the pandemic because they were angry that the church complied and had allowed themselves to close down.
Kerstin Radde-Antweiler, a professor at the University of Bremen, found people saying they did not return to church because something else had taken over in their lives. Looking after people in the community, which began in the lockdowns, was continuing, and they did not need to go back to church to join social projects because they already had substitutes. The reasons for the fall-off has been a missing conversation, she said, with questions about what went well, but also what went wrong.
Digital innovation
The third area of research was on digital innovation for worship, when places of worship were shut. In Poland, the churches were never closed, but numbers were limited so there was still online innovation. Marta Kolodziejska, also a professor at the University of Warsaw, observed that some Catholic bishops went to great lengths to issue instructions on how to take part in online worship, for example when to kneel or whether to sing along.
Catholics had also reported that people were hopping between denominations to find alternative worship, but people preferred to stay local.
She had found that people who “sat on the fence” — nominal Christians — were more likely to leave churches, but not necessarily religion.
In Ireland, Professor Ganiel said some church leaders thought the rise of online worship had led to a decline in church attendance and they were not happy about that. Researchers found that transmission of services stopped at various points after the pandemic.
But the digital innovation was also seen in an increase of horizontal, social media networks amongst laypeople. For example, a Catholic church started an online prayer group which has been taken over by laywomen and the parish has a different model of operating now.
Professor Radde-Antweiler said community was found to be much more important in a digital environment because there was a sense of authenticity. This was found particularly among refugee communities. It was striking that the language used by religious organisations online became more secular, responding to the predominant discourse on health and politics.
Summing up, Professor Mandes said: “The pandemic in general accelerated secularisation in terms of religious practices. We have seen the decline in the participation in masses, especially among young Poles and among the urban population. It’s important to highlight that this trend did not start during pandemic. It simply accelerated a longer trend.”
Commenting on the research, Dr Joshua Edelman of Manchester Metropolitan University said it had shown that religion was a very powerful source, important to people’s lives, and governments needed to understand how that social force works — and that involved the digital world.
Although people may think they know how religion plays a role in civic life, he said, they do not: “The role that religious institutions can play, and religious people can play, may be both broader and different that what they were in the past, and that’s a challenge.”
View the briefing or listen to the podcast via links on our website here
