Abstract
Religious responses to COVID-19 as portrayed in a major news source raise the issue of conflict or cooperation between religious bodies and public health authorities. We compared articles in the New York Times relating to religion and COVID-19 with the COVID-19 statements posted on 63 faith-based organizations' web sites, and with the guidance documents published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) specifically for religious bodies. We used computational text analysis to identify and compare sentiments and topics in the three bodies of text. Sentiment analysis showed consistent positive values for faith-based organizations' texts throughout the period. The initial negative sentiment of religion-COVID-19 coverage in the New York Times rose over the period and eventually converged with the consistently positive sentiment of faith-based documents. In our topic modelling analysis, rank order and regression analysis showed that topic prevalence was similar in the faith-based and public health sources, and both showed statistically significant differences from the New York Times. We conclude that there is evidence of both narratives and counter-narratives, and that these showed demonstrable shifts over time. Text analysis of public documents shows alignment of the interests of public health and religious bodies, which can be discerned for the benefit of communities if parties are trusted and religious messages are consistent with public health communications.
Highlights
Religious institutions have been much in the news since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic
Accurate, targeted messaging is essential for public health. Media portrayals of these two opposing narratives can shape the actions of both public health officials and religious group actors. To accurately describe these narratives in the media, we studied articles on religion and COVID-19 in the New York Times (NYT), and compared their characteristics with text obtained from public health authorities and religious and faith-based institutions
In this study we ask, 1) can we identify and describe a dominant narrative of religious disregard for public health, and a counter-narrative of religion’s more cooperative role in the pandemic in online text? 2) Do those themes develop over time as the cases and deaths increase? 3) What is the prevalence of topics in the entire body of text, and can differences in the prevalence of topics be seen among the sources? Our computational text analysis provided us with some clear and somewhat surprising answers to these questions
Summary
Religious institutions have been much in the news since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some very early outbreaks were traced to religious groups. In South Korea [1] the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu was the source of an outbreak in late February that infected hundreds of church members. In Washington State [2], after a lengthy choir rehearsal at a church, 45 singers became ill with the coronavirus and two died. In rural Arkansas in mid-March, a pastor and his wife tested positive; 92 persons had been exposed to them; 38% were confirmed.
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