Religion After Pandemic
Lost means gone — it also means dislocated
During a Freeing Jesus event hosted by a Seattle church, a man asked: “What do you think is going to happen with churches after the pandemic? How is Christianity going to be changed by this?”
The question startled me. I was focused on my new book and not talking about the future of faith. I quickly pivoted back to Jesus. And the questioner just as quickly pivoted back to “What’s going to happen after the pandemic?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Nobody knows.”
Since the publication of Christianity After Religion in 2012, people have asked me more questions about church, faith, and the future than I can possibly remember. I’ve learned a thing or two about conversations regarding the future.
1. No one knows what the future holds, not even the most intuitive historian, skilled trend spotter, or well-trained futurist.
2. Time is an odd thing. We experience it (mostly) in terms of change and chronology. But in sacred perspective, time exists differently. Indeed, theologically there is no past, present, or future. God holds time without reference to what has been and what will be.
In other words, I’ve become more modest when speaking of the future of faith. Even though I am happy to engage these questions, I think a more fruitful course (at this moment) is to focus on now.
Truth is, we don’t even know where we are in the course of the pandemic. Perhaps the best way to understand this moment is that we are nearing the end of the beginning. Millions of Americans are vaccine-hesitant (or vaccine-denying), and billions of people around the planet are suffering from resurgent strains, lack of adequate medical intervention, and no vaccines. COVID isn’t through with us yet, even while here in the United States, we see a bit of light on the horizon.
Instead of navigating all those unknowns, it seems a wiser course to focus on what we do know. And what we know is what we’ve been through – and how we are continuing to struggle.
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So, what have we been through?
It is quite striking how people use the word “lost” and “loss” to describe the last fourteen months: we’ve lost friends and relatives to death, we’ve lost a year of our lives, we’ve lost income, we’ve lost a sense of security, we’ve lost our ability to move freely through the world. We’ve lost a lot.
My clergy friends speak of grief and lament — perhaps the post-COVID church will be one marked by that sad journey. But I think that “grief and lament” lacks specificity. It is hard to grieve millions of people (even when necessary to do so), and it is hard to grieve the hundreds of millions of lost years of our lives (even when the sadness of that is weighty). We need to grieve what is gone, yes. But that is not the only task ahead.
Lost doesn’t just refer to what is gone. It also means that which is mislaid, out of place, dislocated. Sometimes lost just means that we’re lost. And that is the other task for the post-pandemic world: to help others find what has been lost, to point the way beyond the thicket. We need to find ourselves again; we need to be relocated in the world.
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We’ve been dislocated in four major ways:
1) Temporal dislocation
We’ve lost our sense of time as it existed before the pandemic. How often have you thought: What day is this? What time is it? Did I miss an event? What month is it? That’s temporal dislocation.
2) Historical dislocation
We’ve lost our sense of where we are in the larger story of both our own lives and our communal stories. History has been disrupted. Where are we? Where are we going? The growth of conspiracy theories, the intensity of social media, political and religious “deconstructions” – these are signs of a culture seeking a meaningful story to frame their lives because older stories have failed. That’s historical dislocation.
3) Physical dislocation
We’ve lost our sense of embodiment with others and geographical location. For millions, technology has moved “physicality” into cyber-space and most of us have no idea what to do with this virtual sense of location. Without our familiar sense of being bodily in specific spaces, things like gardening, baking, sewing, and painting have emerged as ways of feeling the ground and the work of our hands. We’ve striven to maintain some sort of embodiment even amid isolation. But the disconnection between our bodies, places, and other bodies has been profound. That’s physical dislocation.
4) Relational dislocation
We’ve lost our daily habits of interactions with other humans, the expression of emotions together in community. Have you worried you won’t know how to respond when you can be with your friends without distance, with no masks? How it will feel to be in large groups again? How will work or school feel back in person, with others at the next desk or waiting on customers face-to-face, or in the first in-person meeting? What happens when the plexiglass comes down, the mask is off? That’s relational dislocation.
With these dislocations in mind, the task comes into focus. Surely, religious communities need to be about the work of relocation – finding what has been lost, repairing what has been broken, and re-grounding people into their own lives and communities.
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The word religion is believed to have come from the Latin, religare, meaning to “bind” or “reconnect.” Religare is about mending what has been broken, recovering what has been mislaid, and reconnecting that which is frayed.
What is the future of religion post-pandemic? Well, it depends. It depends if we continue to insist on the other definition of religion — as obligation to a particular order of things (like doctrine, polity, or moral action— a “bounden duty”). If nothing else, the pandemic has revealed that particular orders of things can be upset, overturned by the most unanticipated of things. If religion is about maintaining a certain order of liturgy, dogma, or practice, well, then, we can consider religion one more pandemic loss.
If we think of religion in terms of religare, however, the task of the post-pandemic church — the work of finding, repairing, and relocating — is clear. We must reconnect ourselves and others with time, history, physicality, and relationships. In this sense, the future of religion has never been brighter — our lost world needs finding. Pandemic dislocation calls for guides and weavers of wisdom. We don’t need to return to the old ways, we need to be relocated. We need to find a new place, a new home in a disrupted world.
And at the very heart of finding our lost selves is relocating our hearts in and with God. There is a journey beyond the pandemic, and we will find the way a step at a time. We haven’t been to this particular future before. And we will need one another to get there.
This blog is reprinted with permission from Diana Butler Bass's newsletter, The Cottage. It is published twice a week and covers issues of faith and politics, religion and culture, and spiritual practices. To read more or sign up, please click here.