Higher power: cower in place 38

– in which Dorn looks at another tool in the covid fight.

On a recent Zoom chat, one of the people mentioned that he had been out from work for the past week with a bad cold. I hope you don’t have “the big C” I quipped, then immediately worried that he might think I was asking if he had cancer. He didn’t misunderstand me, of course—it was obvious to all that I was asking if he had contracted COVID.

I’ve had cancer on my mind lately because a few days earlier we ended our six-month record of not entering any other buildings by visiting a dear friend in hospice. When we got there, her unmasked husband hustled us into the living room to say high to visiting family members, all unmasked, before heading to the back yard for an all-too-brief visit. Her spirits were high, though her energy was low, and it was good to see her. Still, afterward, we were rattled by the idea that we had gone into a house full of unprotected individuals who had gathered from all over.

I can totally see why corona­virus pro­tection wasn’t high on the minds of our friend and her family—they had bigger and more immediate concerns. But it wasn’t just pre­­occupation, they seemed genuinely un­worried. They are Republicans, so they might have some skepticism about the covid’s conta­gious­­ness and severity anyway, but more important, I think, is that they are devout Christians, and their faith is allowing them to see the bigger picture in a way I cannot.

I’ve heard some faith leaders try to explain the covid epidemic. The more sensational consider it a message, warning, or punishment from God for some discretion that the speaker, coincidentally, also thinks punishment-worthy.

More commonly, the message is to have faith that even the covid is part of some master plan that is a mystery to us mortals. The question of what caused the epidemic is left to natural science to explain. In this regard, the religious approach to covid is pretty much the same as the 17th century approach to the plague, as I discussed here. Daniel Defoe wrote of the Great London Plague of 1665:

We must consider it as it was really propagated by natural means, nor it is all the less a [divine] judgement for its being under the conduct of human causes and effects; for, as the Divine Power has formed the whole scheme of nature and maintains nature in its course, so the same Power thinks fit to let His own actings with men, whether of mercy or judgement, to go on in the ordinary course of natural causes.

Now, as back then, prayer is encouraged, to avert the disease, or to understand it, or simply to make one’s peace with the epidemic and its ravages.

An interesting paper was published online by Jeanet Bentzen recently on VoxEU, in which the author measured the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on prayer by counting Google hits. In her abstract, she writes:

In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using daily data on Google searches for 95 countries, this column demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis has increased Google searches for prayer (relative to all Google searches) to the highest level ever recorded.

Strong words indeed! But Bentzen’s data seem to bear her out. Google searches related to prayer follow an annual cycle, peaking around the most common religious holidays (Easter, Christmas, and especially the start of Ramadan). One of her graphs shows the normalized fraction of Google searches for prayer from the beginning of February 2020, when the world was just learning about covid, to April before the expected seasonal spikes for Easter and Ramadan:

To provide a sense of the magnitude of the prayer searches, Bentzen compared them to other searches that had massive increases this year as the world was shut down. The increase in prayer searches was greater, she found, than the increase in searches for takeout food, and was even in the same ballpark (about 1/8 the size) as the increases in internet searches for Netflix.

Of course, googling prayers is not the same as praying, any more than googling Netflix is the same as subscribing to it. A recent Pew survey addressed self-reported changes in actual prayer behavior. It found that over half of all U.S. adults say they have prayed for an end to the spread of the coronavirus. Among those who said they’ve prayed were Americans who don’t identify as Christian or any organized religion, and people who say the rarely or never pray.

I fall in the categories of people who don’t identify as Christian, and of people who rarely or never pray, so I can’t speak from personal experience about the place of prayer in the country’s response to the pandemic. But that could easily change, if the threat of covid became more personal. There have been times of great stress, when someone in my family has been sick or injured, where I’ve felt the emotional need to pray just in case, and I have done it, fervently and with all my heart.

But for now, I’m concentrating on staying healthy, being careful and listening to the medical experts. For those who can also draw on a higher power to get you through the pandemic, more power to you.

Thanks,
Dorn
10/4/2020