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Coronavirus Disease 2019
Secular vs. Religious Responses to COVID-19
The differences are stark.
Posted June 8, 2020 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Back in mid-March, nearly 40 percent of congregants who attended services at a small church in rural Arkansas came down with COVID-19, and a few subsequently died. In April, at least 70 people who attended a church in Sacramento caught the virus, and a pastor in Virginia who piously defied social distancing orders within his flock died from COVID-19. “I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus,” he had proclaimed before his demise.
More recently, at the end of May, the Idaho Falls Potter’s House Christian Center held a multi-day, in-person worship revival; at least 30 of those who participated subsequently acquired COVID-19. A week earlier, 40 parishioners who attended a church service in Frankfurt, Germany, tested positive. A popular preacher in Cameroon who preached to hundreds—and claimed that the touch of his hands could cure the virus—died from the virus on May 16. In South Korea, it was just announced that the virus has erupted among some churches in Seoul. In Israel, the worst hot-spots for the virus appear to be concentrated in the most devout or fundamentalist religious communities.
What is going on here?
While most religious people, communities, and congregations have taken COVID-19 seriously and have followed recommended social distancing practices, many of those pushing hardest to denounce or limit social distancing are strongly religious. The fact is, this pandemic has brought into stark relief the underlying differences between a staunchly secular worldview and a fundamentally religious worldview.
Secular people—that is, atheists, agnostics, humanists, etc.—do not necessarily believe in God, an afterlife, or in any supernatural claims. In the view of many of them, this natural world is all there is. This life, this time: that’s it. As such, secular people do not have faith in any saviors who can suspend the laws of the natural world to relieve those in need. Nor do they believe that there is any deity out there who will respond to prayer. As such, many secular people put their faith in the potential of humans to do good and seek justice. They tend to place their hope in the rigorous, empirical study of the natural world in the hopes that such study—known as science—can discover ways to improve and even save life.
In contrast, religious people—be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Mormon, Sikh, etc.—tend to share an implicit belief in the existence of God (or gods) who may respond to properly-conveyed prayers, a belief in some form of afterlife, belief in disparate supernatural claims, and they may see this material world as but one realm of existence among far more majestic, meaningful, or transcendent realms. As such, for many, a portion of their attention is focused on beseeching a deity for help, employing prayer and other spiritual means to solve problems, or channeling financial resources to spiritual leaders. Furthermore, suffering in this life—and even death—while not necessarily welcomed, can be seen as, nonetheless, transitory phenomena leading to a more glorious existence.
The results of these different orientations can, sometimes, literally be matters of life and death. We see this in terms of the current COVID-19 pandemic.
For example, the strongly secular are more likely to accept the findings and dictates of science while the strongly religious are more likely to ignore or distrust such empiricism, favoring instead faith. According to a recent study done by Brett Pelham, Americans living in highly religious parts of the country were markedly less likely to look up scientific advice regarding best-practices for staying safe in the face of the current pandemic than Americans living in highly secular parts of the country. When he controlled for educational attainment, the correlation still held.
According to a recent report, those states that are providing the best support systems to protect their at-risk populations from COVID-19 tend to be the more secular states with lower rates of church attendance and faith in God—states such as Vermont, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Maine—while those states with the worst support systems are nearly all states with highly religious cultures, such as Tennessee, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Furthermore, those states allowing religious exemptions for social distancing are, perhaps not surprisingly, those with the most religious populations and leaders, while the more secular states aren't offering the same exemptions.
Internationally, we see that those developed countries with largely secular populations and secular leaders—such as New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan—are, on average, doing a much better job handling and even defeating COVID-19 than those developed countries which contain strongly religious populations and strongly religious leaders, such as Brazil, the U.S., and Iran.
To be sure, being religiously-involved has been correlated with many health benefits, especially in societies lacking a well-functioning welfare state that provides free and excellent health care to all citizens. For example, here in the U.S., people who attend church regularly tend to live longer and report lower stress levels.
But what we see today is that the strongly religious appear to not be faring as well as the strongly secular in the face of this global pandemic. In this instance, the widespread assumption that religious faith is a force for good while atheism is detrimental simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
