Abstract
Academic studies of the relationship between religion and pandemics have been emerging since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of these studies have been conducted in Euro-American contexts, with little attention paid to non-Western cases. This article provides a local case study from China, the earliest epicenter of the pandemic. The study focused on a Catholic community in rural China, Little Rome, through the lens of lived religion, exploring the relationship between religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants in our ethnographic study indicated that the Church plays an essential role in responding to the pandemic. In contrast to conventional studies of lived religion, in this ethnographic study on Catholicism in China, we contend that while the study of the lived experience of individuals is central to the lived-religion approach, more attention needs to be paid to the role of religious institutions such as the church, which mediate relations between individuals, society, and other social institutions. This article also argues that investigating different places and cultures can provide rich data for understanding the dynamic and diverse relationship between religion and the pandemic.
Highlights
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019, which was later officially named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO), was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020.1 This is a public health crisis that endangers all human society and occurred at the start of the second decade of the 21st century.In the COVID-19 pandemic, mass gatherings have become one of the most dangerous factors in spreading the disease
We argue that research should focus on both official and more fluid, unofficial religious expressions (Orsi 2003); religious institutions need to be included in the analysis of lived religion (Edgell 2012; Ammerman 2016; Vejrup Nielsen and Johansen 2019)
In the course of this study, we interviewed one priest serving abroad, three priests serving in other dioceses in Hubei Province, and six Catholics stranded in different places due to the pandemic
Summary
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019, which was later officially named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO), was declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020.1 This is a public health crisis that endangers all human society and occurred at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. Adherents of religions in many countries were concerned that the tightened social control policies implemented by the state would interfere with and contradict the principle of freedom of religion This concern has caused some to violate government regulations in the pandemic, and their behavior has increased the risk of virus transmission (DeFranza et al 2020). Researchers from The Netherlands have found that religion is in part responsible for the direct and indirect spread of the virus through rigorous statistical analysis, and have called for more attention to be paid to the religious factor in the pandemic (Vermeer and Kregting 2020). The pandemic seems to have empowered the Chinese state’s authority in its institution of top-down social control (Zhou 2020) In this context, the survival of religious organizations in China largely depends on government policies (Qiang and Lu 2020), exhibiting limited social functions (Hu and Sidel 2020). Returning to the level of everyday life and observing the experiences, emotions, and practices of rural Catholic communities in China during the pandemic, this analysis aimed to deepen the understanding of lived religion and capture the culture and reality of the “survival” and “revival” of religion in contemporary China (cf. Yang 2012)
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