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.