COVID-19 and the Palliative Force of Religion

To contain the dangerous multipliers of coronavirus in Nigeria, religious organizations are swiftly adapting to a new reality as the pandemic upends the communal observance of religious rituals. Christian organizations, Islamic institutions, and the priests of traditional religions are each offering new spiritual counsel on the ways to observe religious rituals without physical presence at a sacred site. Historical and modern responses to pandemics are fraught with tensions between the scientific demand for truth through reason and experiment, and the religious appeal for consolation and revealed truth.

Although the belief in religious causation is pervasive in Africa, it is important to avoid one-sided depictions of African etiologies of diseases. Historians of religion and medical anthropologists such as David Westerlund in his book ‘African Indigenous Religions and Disease Causation’ identified three causation of disease etiologies in Africa: religious, social and natural causations. Religious and social causations are personalistic etiologies that presupposes a belief in supernatural causes of diseases. Natural causation, on the other hand, is based on the belief that diseases do not stem from the machinations of an angry deity, but rather from natural forces such as cold, heat, wind, germs and worms in the body, hereditary factors and other toxins. This article examines the belief in religious causation as it plays it out during the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

The proponents of faith-centrism interpret pandemics through the prism of cosmic fear and apocalyptic visions. It is a period when some people seek solace in religion for psychological and emotional support. For people of faith who are increasingly anxious and unsure about where to turn at a time of grave uncertainty and confusion, religion is conceived as a fundamental source of comfort, spiritual healing and hope. In the time of pandemics, people of faith ask deeper spiritual and philosophical questions: Where is God in all of this? Why is this happening? Is this God’s retribution for our earthly sins?

To find meaning in religion in a situation marked by suffering and tribulation, people of faith often adopt self-blame and personal guilt as coping mechanisms for reconciling their belief in God’s benevolence with the mystery of evil, and the question of theodicy, or of why God allows bad things to happen to good people. Since all sickness and all health is believed to be shaped by God’s will, it is most convenient for people of faith to explain away pandemics as a divine punishment for the sins of humanity, for our impiety and disobedience. For believers, the ultimate antidote for pandemics, therefore, will come not from vaccines or antibiotics but through renewed faith, repentance and seeking God’s forgiveness...