Much of Donald Trump’s evangelical base of support comes not from “value voters” or nostalgic “white Christian nationalists” as much as “prophecy voters,” those charismatics who see the president as an anointed leader who will have a part in bringing God’s kingdom to earth. This group is likely to continue to influence and reshape the Christian right during the 2020 elections and beyond, writes Damon Berry in Nova Religio (May 11), a journal on new religious movements.
According to Italian journalist Iacopo Scaramuzzi (writing on his Facebook page), the coronavirus epidemic has succeeded in pushing reforms into the Catholic Church in a way nothing else has—with laypeople organizing their own domestic liturgical life and a variety of creative responses to an unexpected situation preventing the gathering of faithful in places of worship.
While the Jehovah’s Witnesses have not assigned a unique prophetic significance to the coronavirus outbreak, the pandemic has confirmed their end-times beliefs, created new interest in the religion’s teachings, and strengthened its online presence and innovations, writes George D. Chryssides on the blog CennSam (April 30, 2020) of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements.
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that the sources of religious support for many Americans are less focused on clergy and more on chaplains and more unconventional spiritual-care providers, according to sociologist Wendy Cadge writing in the Atlantic magazine (May 17, 2020).
The restriction of various Muslim practices dictated by the coronavirus pandemic may have long-term effects in the Islamic community in Belgium, according to several papers written by scholars associated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Islam in the Contemporary World (Catholic University of Louvain).
The spread of the coronavirus in Russia has provoked a mood of apocalypticism as well as resistance to shut down orders in the Russian Orthodox Church, according to several reports. The New York Times (May 5, 2020) reports that the “clash between faith and public health has been particularly divisive in Russia, where memories of religious persecution in the Soviet Union have made priests and their flocks highly sensitive to any limits on their rituals.”
The coronavirus pandemic in Japan has highlighted the differences between traditional and new religions and has also shown the strong hold that healing rituals still have in a secular society, according to a special report published in the Asia-Pacific Journal (May 1, 2020). Japan did not take the early precautions against the spread of the virus, but among the groups responding the earliest were new religious movements.
Indian Muslims are facing a new wave of discrimination and stigmatization as the coronavirus has spread throughout India. The German newspaper Deutsche Welle (May 14, 2020) reports that “After the Indian government linked hundreds of coronavirus cases to a Muslim gathering in March, social media users began spreading angry messages and sharing fake news articles purporting that Muslims were conspiring to spread the virus.”
Due to the (mostly unintentional) role of some religious groups as super-propagators of the virus (along with secular types of gathering), religious meetings—especially large ones—are being seen as potential sources of trouble. When it comes to individual attitudes and practices toward social distancing, there is not a great difference between those from various religious and non-religious groups.
Seemingly practical and public health issues such as lockdowns and decisions to ease restrictions on religious institutions during the coronavirus crisis have been enlisted into the protracted culture wars between religious conservatives and progressive and secular critics. The protests to open society back up during state-directed lockups does not have a large religious component.
