Browsing online church services from my home, my relationship to faith is changing. Photo: Prospect composite
In the tenth plague of the Book of Exodus those who did not want their firstborn to die smeared the blood of a sacrificial lamb on their door, so God—hands cold with wrath—would pass their home over.
I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in plagues. But if I thought that it would lessen the chances of someone I love dying of Coronavirus, I would smear the blood on the door. Every night I watch the 5pm press conference, and lurch between panic and dread. Why are more people driving, slick with germs? Why are cases rising in the Midlands? It makes me want to gnash my teeth and rend at my hair, Old Testament style. I increasingly fear that this pandemic will make a believer out of me—temporarily, at least.
Science—not religion—is what will end this crisis. We don’t need blood on the door, we need a vaccine. For the bulk of us who know nothing about medicine we smile blithely, with a baffled respect for it, assured that—as if by magic!—it will grant us long lives. Like faith in god, this demands you serenely accept that which you cannot see, hear, or touch. We simply have to trust those with expertise, as we should. But in an era when faith in experts is diminished, this might prove difficult for many. You don’t need me to lecture you on fake news. You get the picture.
This isn’t helped by the dead-eyed pragmatism that a pandemic demands. When doctors talk about ‘triaging’—including giving priority care to those with a higher chance of survival—we shudder. Number 10 have categorically denied that strategist Dominic Cummings said of herd immunity that “if that means some pensioners die, too bad.” Regardless of what was or wasn’t said, the story took hold because it hooks into the whispered fear that scarcity of resources will force us to make choices that seem practical now, revolting later.
We need badly to maintain our trust in the present strategy and coming cure, but terror loosens the senses, and sometimes it feels like we are fruitlessly blundering in the dark, with no end in sight. Our situation, we are told, is “unprecedented.” There is no real timeline. Stay inside the house, half-blind, mad with hope.
In these circumstances, there is something seductive about organised religion. ONS statistics show that the overall number of people who identify as religious in the UK is declining, but if you’ve had a faith-based upbringing—and many have—flirting with the idea can feel reassuringly like a return to something. Those who grow up with faith comment on the ease of slipping back into its rituals, falling prey to its charms - you know the psalms, the songs, even a whiff of incense transports you back to a time when you weren’t locked in the house, frantically googling ‘what constitutes dry cough?’ Now that many places of worship are live-streaming their masses I'm suddenly spoiled for choice, a sort of ecclesiastical Tinder: Durham Cathedral, St Mary of the Angels, maybe even the Papal mass, as a treat. If you are isolated there is something soothing in the notion that you sit and chant and kneel in unison with thousands of others, alone but together, bound by something huge and shared.
One of the biggest challenges people face in quarantine is the lack of structure—the sense that we’re all drifting through an endless Wednesday. The devout don’t have this problem. Heeding the salat, the five calls to prayer, will certainly break up the day. The shabbat marks the weekend. Regardless of creed, organised religion can provide comfort and structure in a time when people sorely need both. The National Secular Society recently rammed its foot into its mouth complaining that religious staff are recognised as key workers—failing to grasp that religion answers an emotional need, and that in a time of crisis that need will reach a fever pitch. Not to mention the rising demand for their services at lonely, socially distanced funerals, where the family will grieve via Zoom. This is one of the failings of aggressive atheism; in dismissing faith as ‘illogical’ or trivial, its adherents totally miss the point that everything that makes life living—friends and family, bad contemporary art, pastries, kissing—are all ultimately pointless and irrational but they sustain us, keep us charging forwards.
It goes without saying that I would rather have my kidney taken out by a Dr than a priest - though the latter could, at least, deliver the last rites when he inevitably botches it. Nonetheless, it’s important to acknowledge that in the age of Covid, trust in both will comfort people—even rotten non-believers like myself. Atheists need to tone it down with the stridency, and for true believers to show tolerance to the returners and interlopers finding that they, too, want a little of what the religious have during this awful time. The grip of a crisis demands we surrender control—and quite rightly—to forces bigger than us: the long arm of a newly-paternalistic state, the unknowable complexities of science. Why not faith, too? Find comfort where you can; we're in this for the long-haul.
