Covid 19 and the Church

In my last post I discussed the phenomenon of hyperreality as it pertains to the Coronavirus. Clearly, there are elements of the real in what is happening today. There is a virus that can make some people quite sick; it can even on occasion lead to death. This is reality.

But history will likely not judge what happened in 2020 in terms of the pathology of the virus. What happened in 2020 was a coordination by the governments of the world to enact draconian measures in response to the threat of the virus, measures incommensurate with that threat. Businesses around the world have been shut down, schools closed, routine medical treatment ended, beaches and parks blocked off, mask wearing prescribed, personal freedoms compromised, and the hospitality industry completely decimated. The pain of all of this blends so seamlessly into the underlying Covid threat that it appears to people as one thing. Nobody is responsible. Covid-19 causes all of this.

The Covid-19 panic of 2020 has hit the Church very hard. Traditionally, to be a Christian has meant to be connected corporeally with a community. While the Church continued to gather during the Black Plague, somehow Covid-19 has given it an excuse to no longer bring its people together corporeally. Once can, of course, watch church on YouTube.

To be clear, many churches have tried to meet during the Panic of 2020. But their meeting has sparked moral outrage. How can these people get together and spread the virus? The hyperreal world in which we now live believes that going to church and risking the spread of the virus puts others at risk, and thus it is morally wrong. How could one do this to one's neighbors?

At the beginning, watching church on TV is not so bad, I suppose. One does not have to get the kids ready; one can stay in one's PJs and watch the liturgy. But, of course, Joan is providing special music and we don't like how she sings so we fast forward through that. And congregational singing really does not work watching church, so we fast forward through that. Those long pauses between liturgical events we can skip, and singing the liturgy in one's PJs does not really work . . . So we listen to the readings and catch the sermon. It is 30 minutes or less! The three hours of getting ready for church, driving there, experiencing it, talking to people afterwards, and driving home has now become 30 minutes.

But one can read the lessons on one's own and maybe even find a couple of nice sermons on-line on the text. One really does not need to listen to one's own pastor. In fact, there are thousands of pastors across the world one might find on-line, and one could listen to them. Maybe one does that at 11:00 Sunday night. In fact, one might get up on Sunday morning, forget one's mask, go fishing and take one's Bible and read the texts -- or not.

If anybody believes that the Church has not been deeply hurt by lock downs, they are not thinking clearly. Estimates are that up to 33% of people will not go back to church once they are out of the habit of going. Indeed, if pastors so easily gave up on corporeal gatherings, maybe corporeal gatherings are really not that important after all. Every time church leadership suggest that actually getting together at church is not ultimately necessary, they sign to all that the whole institution of church-going might simply be one thing among other things. If one can be a responsible Christian by staying home and watching church on YouTube for 30 minutes, then why go back again?

So the hyperreality of the Covid Panic of 2020 has accomplished something that has not happened before. While the Church always met through the reality of wars and much deadlier plagues, today's Covid-19 hyperreality has given it permission to simply stay on the sidelines and honor the mandates of health officials.

But a church on the sidelines witnesses to all that the threat of physical sickness is, after all, much more important than spiritual sickness; it tells everyone that the life and death matters of the spirit are secondary to physical health and well-being. It declares that what is going on at Church is "really not that important."

The hospitality industry has been decimated by the hyperreality of the Covid Panic of 2020. They might recover someday. The Church, however, has been even more deeply affected, and I am not sure it will recover -- at least in the North Atlantic countries. I don't see how many small congregations who have shut their doors in the name of the public good will have the requisite capital and tenaciousness to open their doors again. After all, if our ultimate concerns are able to be halted by a this virus, then maybe they are really not that important. Maybe Feuerbach and Marx were on to something when claiming that religion is finally ideological and expressive of our fundamental alienation.

It is, after all, a matter of causality. It makes all kinds of sense to quit gathering together in Church if viruses have causality and God does not.

Hyperreality and the Covid Panic of 2020

I want to address the postmodern notion of hyperreality in relation to the current Covid-19 panic. Hyperreality occurs when consciousness is no longer able to distinguish a simulation from reality. What is real, and what is fictional blend together seamlessly so one cannot ascertain where reality ends and fiction begins, and vice versa. Since physical reality and virtual reality -- and perhaps human intelligence and artificial intelligence -- become mixed up, people often find themselves actually preferring the virtual and artificial to the real.

The Covid-19 panic plague of 2020 is real, of course, to some degree. Sometimes people do die from the illness, and some people with the illness get very sick. One can do the numbers and see some effect on world health during this outbreak. Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that if everybody were to wear a mask, the incidence of transmission might fall by some not clearly defined percent. (It would be great to have real numbers!) So there are elements of the real in the Covid Panic of 2020. People die, people get sick, some are sick enough to go to the hospital, and universal mask-wearing might lower the incidence of transmission. This is reality.

Now let us move to the virtual, the artificial and the fictional. While decisions in previous outbreaks were made in the context of the other affairs of humanity, e.g., people marrying, people dying, people going to school, people running businesses, people running for public office, the situation this time is very different. Very early on draconian measures were adopted by governments throughout the world to combat this "threat," measures that often limited the freedom of individuals to deal with the "threat" in their own way. Routine medical care was shut down for millions of people as clinics and hospitals waited for the hordes of infected patients to come. But, in general, the apocalyptic run on hospitals never materialized. The education and play of children was curtailed even though they were at very low risk. Businesses were locked down by governments arbitrarily in the name of the public good. A new morality developed. "Do you wear a mask?" If yes, you care about people. If no, you don't.

Never before in human history has an outbreak been hyped like this. People began to fear, and they even begin to hate those who don't fear. The actual threat of the illness is not at all commensurate with the response, it seems. But this cognitive dissonance does not affect most people, because most simply live the hyperreality of the Covid plague, a reality where one must do whatever is possible to save human life.

The French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard introduced the phenomenon of hyperreality. Consider Walt Disney productions -- at least in its heyday. Clearly, Disney movies are simulations of the real. But Disney's emphasis on dreams and childhood became, says Baudrillard, the American dream itself. The "outside world" of which the Disney world simulates is now merely a simulacrum. The symbolism and signification of the Disney world does not track reality, but becomes the preferred world in which people live. Once this happens, the outside world is made the simulacrum; it itself becomes a mere simulation of the world of dreams and childhood.

This is what has happened. The Covid 19 panic driven by the media and cable news has circled the globe and the hyperreality of a "Covid Pague" has replaced for many what is really happening "out there." The narrative of the virus and its devastating effects is preferred by many to the much more mundane world of a new virus which can be deadly at times. Lock downs, moral shaming and pride, and protecting the public replace the much more mundane story of what is happening on the ground. In our hyperreal land, the President has the power evidently to cause the virus or stop it.

You can live the hyperreal if you want to, folks. It is supported by the media and clearly presupposed by many of our politicians. It is, after all, rather exciting to have a hyperreal war rather than a real one. Not many die in the former, and yet one still can "live the war." It is also more exciting to live a hyperreal plague than the mundane real one. After all, in reality the Covid 19 virus is likely to finish at less than 1/150 times as deadly as the 1918-19 flu worldwide. Over and against the commonplace, it is stimulating to "live the plague," to think and act in all ways as if it were extremely deadly. Living the plague makes it much easier to change the world profoundly in the face of "humanity's greatest menace."

Baudrillard simply has this nailed. I hope you see it. Please don't nail the messenger.