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By José Barrera Blanco
During the worst moments of the pandemic, religious minorities developed alternative responses and solutions to the closure of worship spaces and the socio-economic and emotional impact among their adherents. They also proved to be key actors in civil society by intensifying their social work with the most vulnerable populations.
The serious consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health and the consequent social and health measures aimed at curbing the transmission of the virus provoked a profound crisis in all areas of collective life. More than two years after the official declaration of the pandemic on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organisation, some of the regulations of everyday life that were present until a few months ago seem to us today to be elements of the distant past, while the permanence of other social changes introduced by the pandemic situation, such as the transition of the work model towards telematic work, has been normalised. In order to understand the challenges posed by the crisis and to learn lessons that will help us to face similar situations in the future, public institutions and the scientific community must look back at the needs and problems experienced by different groups in civil society, including religious minorities.
Although we cannot affirm that religion has been an invisible dimension in the social imaginary during the COVID-19 crisis in Spain, general interest has been directed, at best, towards the phenomenon of belief and spirituality in an abstract sense, raising questions raised by existential fears and uncertainties in the face of an unprecedented social event in recent history: Does the pandemic prove the existence of supernatural forces? Why does God allow evil in the world, is it a punishment of humanity, and does faith function as a relief and relief? However, unlike in other areas, there has not been widespread societal concern about the effects of the pandemic on the lives of religious people and their prayer communities. In the case of religious minorities, this general lack of interest has been compounded by a different kind of concern, harmful to religious diversity, spread with little truth by some media outlets, about the danger to public health posed by some religious communities and spiritual groups as sources of contagion and disseminators of so-called ‘denialism’ about vaccination, prevention measures or the very existence of the virus.
The recently published report by the Pluralism and Coexistence Foundation ‘The impact of the COVID-19 crisis on religious minorities in Spain: challenges for a future scenario’ aims to find out precisely the hidden and real side of the transformations derived from the pandemic in the Spanish religious context. During the year 2021, the members of the research team interviewed forty-six representatives of religious entities from different minority confessions (i.e. non-Roman Catholic) to find out their assessment of the impact of the crisis on their communities and the strategies deployed to deal with it. In this way, the report identifies the present and future needs of religious minorities and the challenges posed by the new scenario for institutions committed to religious pluralism. Before explaining the main results of the research, it should be stressed that the organisations interviewed not only understood and scrupulously followed the socio-health recommendations, but also actively collaborated with public administrations and civil associations to alleviate the multiple effects of the crisis on the population. Contrary to the discourse that stigmatises diversity, religious organisations prove to be fundamental agents of the social fabric in dealing with collective traumas.
THE CONFINEMENT OF WORSHIP: CLOSURE OF CENTRES AND ALTERNATIVES
Although differences in terms of size, organisation, budget, etc., between religious communities explain the unequal impact of the crisis, there is a common element that underlies the description of the multiple difficulties experienced by all of them during the pandemic: the fundamental role of the place of worship and the consequences of its closure. Although Royal Decree 463/2020 of 14 March, which declared the state of alarm, did not suspend religious ceremonies and meetings, attending them was not considered as a justifiable reason to circulate on public roads. In addition to this legal circumstance, the health situation led entities to close their premises and churches of their own free will even before the Royal Decree came into force. This was a necessary but deeply painful decision because the place of worship is the core of community life, not only because of its social use, but also because the practice of many confessions can only take place within it. In addition to the communal and ritual aspect, the closure brought serious economic consequences in communities where there is a culture of giving when attending the worship centre and in those that finance themselves through holding activities. In contrast, the decline in income was smaller or even non-existent in communities funded through fees or tithes and remote payment systems. Along the same lines, another factor explaining the different impact of the COVID-19 crisis is related to the tenancy situation of the premises: communities that own property had fewer financial problems than those in a rental situation. Among the latter, renting the property is the main budget item, which is why, in the face of economic vulnerability, the loss of the worship centre was one of the greatest fears during the crisis. In some cases, the fear materialised and the communities had to leave the premises, being hosted in solidarity by sister communities.
During the first months of confinement, the religious minorities’ solution to the closure was, as in so many other areas of collective life, the use of online communication technologies. Videoconferencing became in a few weeks the fundamental device to replace physical space and restore worship: collective chanting by Hindu groups on Google Meet, evangelical church services streamed on Zoom, Friday sermons by imams posted on Youtube and so many other activities that demonstrated the creative resilience of Spain’s religious minorities. However, not all members were able to adapt to a sudden and rapid digital move. On the socio-economic level, many households today still cannot afford internet or do not have functional electronic devices to follow worship online. Regarding the generational factor, some older people found for the first time in their lives the need to use computers and smartphones to be able to follow their religious practices. This digital divide has given an unexpected prominence to young people in their communities, who have become indispensable technicians for the implementation of online religious services and trainers of members with less experience in the use of new technologies. In this sense, the digitalisation of activities has encouraged intergenerational solidarity and family participation in the services. Paradoxical as it may sound, worship centres were closed but also multiplied by turning homes into small domestic temples. As one of the Muslim women interviewed said of Ramadan 2020: “we prayed more at home, you feel it more, you see your family close to you […] It was very nice, with your nephew next to you, your mother, you live it closer”. During house confinement and subsequent restrictions on gathering at home, religious practices in the family were reduced to the nucleus of cohabitation and could only be shared with other relatives through video calls and mobile messaging groups. However, religious uses of the home go beyond the nuclear family, as evidenced by groups of Buddhists, Baha’is, Hindus or Evangelicals who meet regularly in the homes of some of their members, or celebrations such as the Christian Christmas and the Jewish Brit Milah. In these cases, the small size of the domestic space to maintain interpersonal separation and the prolonged restrictions on meetings between non-cohabitants had the opposite effect of what was reported above: the home was, in this case, the space of worship that had to be closed.
With the gradual reopening, the full digitalisation of the activities gave way to a hybrid format of meeting, i.e. part of the congregation started to attend in person while others followed the online broadcast. The digital move, despite its limitations, was viewed positively by communities that experienced an increase in attendance, adding followers from other parts of Spain and the world. Online communication made it possible to reinforce transnational identity, sharing their worship with family and friends living in other countries and even holding joint ceremonies with foreign communities of the same denomination. Transcending territory and bringing members together through the internet has been especially useful for those minority denominations with a large geographical dispersion of their membership, as is the case of the Christian Science Churches in Spain. In this way, the hybrid format made it possible to recover the importance of the face-to-face celebration while retaining the advantages granted by digital tools, and it was also an effective strategy in the face of the capacity restrictions that prevented many small centres from being able to host all their members in person. Faced with these spatial limitations, another less common alternative was to move the activities to outdoor areas such as parks and squares, thus reducing the chances of contagion. However, the ban on mass gatherings and the precaution against contagion meant that religious activities that took place on the streets and in the natural environment before the pandemic, such as the evangelistic work of many Christian churches, traditional pagan worship services or the annual parade of Krishna devotees (Ratha Yatra), were cancelled until the end of 2021. Furthermore, the attacks on religious freedom that religious minorities in Spain continue to experience condition the visible and safe use of public space, according to the representative of the Reform Jewish Community of Madrid, a circumstance that increases even more the importance of having one’s own space. In the same vein, the virtual public space is not a safe place for the Jewish community either, as shown in the 2021 report on anti-Semitism by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), which warns about the growth of anti-Semitic hate speech on the Internet during the pandemic and the spread of conspiracy theories that point to this religious minority as the culprit of the COVID-19 crisis.
SOLIDARITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY AND WITH THE WIDER SOCIETY
The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the importance of the emotional dimension in the understanding of health, and new responsibilities and leaderships emerged among religious minorities along these lines. The impossibility of celebrating rituals, socialising and coming together at such a difficult psychosocial time for the population posed a challenge for communities, which were severely limited in their ability to support their members when they needed them most. Thus, alternative initiatives to accompany situations of grief, illness or anxiety were developed with varying degrees of planning: from the formal establishment of specific groups of psychologists to support ministers of worship, to the spontaneous dissemination of positive and motivational messages via mobile messaging. Unwanted loneliness was a major concern that was addressed in some communities with personalised follow-ups and frequent telephone and home visits, as was the case with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Solidarity aimed especially at older and vulnerable people was also expressed in other day-to-day accompaniment, such as the purchase of food and medicines, and assisted travel to health centres and vaccination points. In communities with a high percentage of migrants, these solidarity mechanisms have been mainly oriented towards bureaucratic and employment advice and the provision of basic material resources. Religious minorities saw the COVID-19 crisis as a test of community strength and acted as fundamental supports in the lives of their faithful, adapting and updating their resources to the particular needs they identified.
However, solidarity did not end at the borders of their communities but extended to the most vulnerable groups in the wider society. Many organisations have long experience in assistance and humanitarian work and activated their own logistical and volunteer networks to help during the emergency. Collaboration with municipal administrations and public centres in the production, donation and distribution of health material was a constant in the early stages of the pandemic, when it was in short supply. To name but one, the Church of Scientology donated masks, gloves and hydroalcoholic gels worth 100,000 euros to hospitals and nursing homes. Other work provided by the communities to those most in need included food and clothing deliveries, letters to hospital patients and health care workers, and support in finding accommodation and employment. In the face of the stigmatisation suffered, religious minorities have a strong sense of social and moral exemplarity which makes their solidarity works a common phenomenon in many localities of the Spanish territory that did not suffer during the confinement and restrictions, but rather intensified.
Although religious minorities responded to the COVID-19 crisis in a generally effective and imaginative manner, it is clear that the degree of impact varied greatly between communities. The category ‘religious minorities’ is a huge conglomerate of entities with very uneven capacities. Just as the effects of confinement were much more severe in less affluent households, neighbourhoods and localities, the closure of worship centres, the cancellation of religious celebrations and other preventive measures particularly affected religious communities that do not belong to a federative structure to rely on and have a small membership and fewer resources. The strategies described above, such as digital relocation, alternative use of public and domestic space or internal solidarity, are conditioned by the material possibilities of each community. In this sense, without collective organisation and the emergence of individual leaderships (people with faces and names who have multiplied their efforts during the emergency), the effects of the crisis would have been much more serious. Apart from underlining the exemplary and good work of religious minorities during the pandemic, institutions and professionals committed to religious pluralism must now learn lessons and clarify what initiatives can be taken to foster a context of resilience that protects religious diversity in the face of the challenges ahead.
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