Brynn Anderson/AP Photo
President Trump has urged religious groups to defy the orders of governors in their states and resume indoor worship.
During a cholera epidemic in 1832, President Andrew Jackson refused to accede to demands from religious leaders to declare a day of national fasting and prayer. “I could not do otherwise,” he declared, “without transcending the limits prescribed by the Constitution for the president; and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government.”
Untroubled by limits on presidential powers, Donald Trump has done the opposite, embroiling religion in the response to COVID-19. In March, he issued a proclamation asking Americans to pray in the face of pandemic, and on Friday he said he would “override the governors” if they did not open places of worship this weekend, although he has no legal authority to issue an order of that kind.
Trump wants to stir up his supporters against Democratic governors and public-health officials, even if it means exposing churchgoers to the risk of infection. That risk, as a number of international and domestic episodes indicate, is serious.
The most dramatic example of a church acting as a superspreader comes from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Daegu, South Korea. According to a reconstruction of the disease’s early spread published in The Washington Post, there were just 39 cases in all of South Korea when Patient 31, a 61-year-old woman, became the first member of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu to test positive.
Within two days after Patient 31 tested positive, 15 more people connected to the Shincheonji church were confirmed to have the virus, as well. A month later, thousands of people with connections to the church would test positive for the virus.
While the virus ravaged the church, more than 100 new cases had been confirmed in surrounding Daegu, as well. The disease appeared in hospitals, housing for the elderly and other churches. Most of these additional clusters were near the Shincheonji church.
A little over one month later [on March 25], the cluster at the Shincheonji church accounted for 5,080 confirmed cases of covid-19, more than half of South Korea’s total.
Other examples of religious communities acting as superspreaders come from rural Arkansas in March, Sacramento in early April, and the Hasidic community in Brooklyn over the same period. Just this past week, a church in Ringgold, Georgia, that had reopened shut down again after a cluster of cases emerged in the congregation.
A well-documented case of contagion, involving a choir rehearsal on March 10 at a Presbyterian church in Mount Vernon, Washington, helps explain why indoor gatherings in churches present a high risk even with social distancing. The 60 singers who showed up that evening spent two and a half hours rehearsing; three weeks later, 45 had been either diagnosed with COVID-19 or become ill with its characteristic symptoms. Two of them died.
As a biologist explains in an analysis of the case, the choir created exceptionally favorable conditions for the infection to spread:
Singing, to a greater degree than talking, aerosolizes respiratory droplets [with viral particles] extraordinarily well. Deep-breathing while singing facilitated those respiratory droplets getting deep into the lungs. Two and half hours of exposure ensured that people were exposed to enough virus over a long enough period of time for infection to take place.
This is why the new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control for religious communities recommend that they “consider suspending or at least decreasing use of a choir/musical ensembles and congregant singing, chanting, or reciting during services or other programming, if appropriate within the faith tradition. The act of singing may contribute to transmission of Covid-19, possibly through emission of aerosols.” [Update: This language was cut from the CDC site after being originally posted on May 22.]
CDC also recommends that religious groups “consider temporarily limiting the sharing of frequently touched objects that cannot be easily cleaned between persons, such as worship aids, prayer rugs, prayer books, hymnals, religious texts and other bulletins, books, shared cups, or other items received, passed or shared among congregants as part of services.”
As these guidelines imply, in-person religious ceremonies have distinctive features that magnify viral contagion. But when the Department of Justice warned California last week against maintaining limits on places of worship, it ignored these differences, claiming the state was violating the First Amendment since it had allegedly not shown why “gatherings with social distancing for purposes of religious worship” were materially different from “interactions in offices and studios of the entertainment industry, and in-person operations to facilitate nonessential ecommerce,” which were not subject to the same limits.
Literally idolized by regular churchgoers, Trump has egged them on, encouraging them to view public-health restrictions on in-person gatherings as a form of persecution.
Now, with Trump urging them on, pastors in California and religious groups in Minnesota are saying they will defy the orders of governors in their states and resume indoor worship. Other churches have already sued states over the issue. To be sure, the majority of religious leaders don’t oppose COVID-related public-health restrictions. Peter W. Marty, the editor and publisher of The Christian Century, writes that “the move to reopen churches” involves “more politics than religion, more culture-war-wedge issue than substantive faith.” The lawsuits being filed by churches “play well among those who like to promote the idea that Christians are a persecuted and victimized people.”
But the resistance to public-health limits on religious gatherings has been building for some time. A survey of 3,100 Americans conducted March 23–27 by Paul A. Djupe of Denison University and two other political scientists asked respondents whether they were still gathering in person for worship and would want their congregations to defy a government order to stop doing so. Only 12 percent of all respondents reported their congregations were still conducting in-person worship, but 20 percent of regular churchgoers reported attending in person. Churchgoing conservative evangelical Christians were much more likely than non-evangelicals to favor defiance of public-health restrictions on in-person ceremonies.
As the political analyst Ed Kilgore observed in mid-April:
… among some conservative Evangelical Christians, the belief that traditional worship forms are literally sacred has overlapped with hostility to secular authorities, particularly those not aligned with them on political and cultural issues. There is, in fact, a strong religious flavor to the never-suppressed and now rapidly growing movement of resistance toward coronavirus lockdowns.
Regular churchgoers are also especially likely to believe that Trump has been chosen by God to lead America, an idea that Rick Perry and other prominent conservative Christians have repeated. Surveys conducted by Djupe and his colleague Ryan P. Burge show that, as of 2019, 29.6 percent of white Protestants who attend church weekly believed that Trump was “anointed by God” to be president. By March 2020, that proportion had risen to 49 percent.
Perhaps even more surprising, 49 percent of other weekly churchgoers also believe Trump has been anointed by God, according to Djupe and Burge’s 2020 survey. The proportion of Americans who believe God has chosen Trump to be president varies directly with how often they go to church and, among Republicans, how often they hear clergy say that Trump is the anointed one. Djupe and Burge contend that this “phenomenon … is sweeping American religion” and cite a widely circulated internet meme showing Trump’s hand being guided by Jesus.
Literally idolized by regular churchgoers, Trump has egged them on, encouraging them to view public-health restrictions on in-person gatherings as a form of persecution. Unwilling to wear a mask in public to protect against the virus, he wears the mask of piety instead.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic began in predominantly Democratic urban areas, it has been moving into rural, Trump-supporting counties. For four weeks running, according to an analysis on May 20 by the demographer William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution, the counties newly designated as having a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases were more likely to have voted for Trump than for Hillary Clinton in 2016. If this pattern continues, the COVID-19 pandemic may follow the same geographic and social route as the opioid epidemic, moving out from the cities into rural areas, possibly changing its racial and ethnic profile as well.
In that context, the defiance of public-health limits by conservative religious leaders could have devastating consequences for their congregations. Conservative attitudes toward opioid addition miraculously changed as its prevalence shifted. The same might happen in connection with COVID-19 later this year—but too late for those already infected.
In the meantime, many Democratic officials and public-health leaders may be inclined to duck a fight over limiting religious gatherings. For example, while Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan has extended her state’s stay-at-home order through June 12, she has said religious groups gathering together would not be subject to penalties. Leaving the choice about in-person worship to religious leaders may be the easy way out politically. But if churches act as superspreaders, many more Americans may suffer and die unnecessarily, thanks in no small part to their misplaced faith in Donald Trump.
This article has been updated. For more, see “Do Churchgoers Have a Right to Risk Infection?”
