Coronavirus

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The quest for religion and science coverage of COVID-19 -- in the same news report

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We are living in surreal times.

The world as we knew it just over a week ago has been brought to a halt by the COVID-19 pandemic. After the virus devastated China’s Wuhan province, it spread to Europe and now the rest of the world. Our daily lives have been disrupted in a way never seen in our lifetimes.

I have for weeks been concerned about the virus. Most of my family lives in Italy, a nation hard hit by it. My many uncles and aunts — all 65 and older and therefore more at-risk of dying — have not left their homes after the government imposed a national lockdown. What has happened in Italy and now the rest of Europe could certainly happen in the United States.

There has been some very good journalism being done. My go-to sources for news have been The Associated Press and The New York Times. For broader context and commentary have been valuable resources such as The Atlantic and The Economist. We must give these journalists praise and thanks for the long hours they have been putting in to inform us all. In a time where misinformation can lead to death, the press should be largely lauded for their efforts. I can tell you, as someone who covered a massive event like the Sept. 11 attacks and its aftermath, that newsrooms are in overdrive at this moment and will be for months.

While the aforementioned four media outlets — and the countless others — have done an exceptional job covering the pandemic, so have Catholic news organizations. For those across the Catholic doctrinal spectrum, the religious press has also done a wonderful job covering COVID-19 from a faith perspective. EWTN, with its TV and radio broadcasts as well as digital media, has done a wonderful job.

In particular, Catholic News Agency has updated readers with a constant stream of stories over the past few weeks.

The mainstream press, other than focusing on churches going remote during this time of social distancing (and the usual questions about Holy Communion from a “common cup”), hasn’t bothered much with the religion angle.


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Faith in quarantine: Why are some people praying at home while others flock to pews?

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To state the matter bluntly, the question of the day is: Who went to church-temple-mosque this past weekend and who did not?

The related question: “Why?” Why did believers make the decisions that they made?

This is one of those cases in which it is impossible to write a story that captures the whole picture, since we are talking about one of the ultimate local, regional, state, national and international stories of our news lifetimes.

Journalists can try to produce a news-you-can-use list that hints at the whole. Check out this Religion News Service feature: “Coronavirus shutdowns disrupt America’s soul, closing houses of worship.” That list of bullets is so limited, because producing a representative national list would be impossible.

Thus, others will focus on the larger story by looking at the symbolic details. With the resources of The New York Times, that looks like this: “A Sunday Without Church: In Crisis, a Nation Asks, ‘What is Community?’ “ This is a fine story, although, yes, its anecdotes and examples seem mainline and limited. But, again, the true picture is too big to capture.

Journalists do what they can do. Here is the thesis statement, in magisterial Times voice, free of attributions:

This week, as the coronavirus has spread, one American ritual after another has vanished. March Madness is gone. No more morning gym workouts or lunches with co-workers. No more visits to grandparents in nursing homes. The Boston Marathon, held through war and weather since 1897, was postponed.

And now it was a Sunday without church. Governors from Kentucky to Maryland to North Carolina moved to shut down services, hoping to slow the disease’s spread. Catholic dioceses stopped public Mass, and some parishes limited attendance at funerals and weddings to immediate family. On Sunday morning the Vatican closed the coming Holy Week services to the public.

The number of Americans who regularly attend a church service has been steadily declining in recent years. Many have left the traditions of their childhood, finding solace and identity in new ways. But for the one in three adults who attend religious services weekly, the cancellations have meant a life rhythm disrupted. And for the broader country, canceled services were another symbol of a lost chance to be still, to breathe and to gather together in one of the oldest ways humans know, just when such things were needed most.

For a similar take from a smaller newsroom, consult this multi-source National Catholic Reporter piece: “Worshippers go online, those at services keep a distance.”

My friend Rod “Benedict Option” Dreher stayed home (as I did) and watched a live stream of the Divine Liturgy from his Orthodox Church in America parish in urban Baton Rouge, La. In other words, one computer screen stands for legions of screens elsewhere. See: “View From Your Pandemic Online Church.”

But I was haunted by one passage in one story — another example of how The Age of Donald Trump has infected everything, when it comes to news. The fact that the story was valid only made it worse.


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Ryan Burge on unique coronavirus fears in pews of America's aging 'mainline' churches

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Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows that journalists often have to study the equation 1+1+X=3 and then find the missing X factor that produces “what comes next.”

What am I talking about? Journalists look at one set of facts in the news. Then they study another set of facts that we tend to take for granted or that we have pushed onto the news back burner. When you pay attention to where the two sets of facts overlap — #BOOM — you can see potential headlines.

Right now, the coronavirus crisis is creating all kinds of overlapping sets of facts and many are life-and-death matters. This is shaping the headlines and this trend will only increase.

However, after all of the COVID-19 stories I’ve read in the past week (while 66-year-old me has faced my usual spring sinus woes), none has hit me harder than a Religion News Service essay — “Why mainline Protestants might fear COVID-19 the most” — by political scientist Ryan Burge (also a contributor here at GetReligion). It’s crucial that he is also the Rev. Ryan Burge. He teaches at Eastern Illinois University, but he also a minister in the American Baptist Churches USA. Here is the overture:

I walked through the doors of First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, a congregation that I’ve pastored for the last 13 years, and shook hands with the 91-year-old greeter. Afterward, she said to me, “I didn’t know if we should shake hands today.”

I hadn’t even thought about it, but I know that she had.

COVID-19 has now infected more than 100,000 people, killing 4,000 of them across the globe. But, one of the real curiosities is that the mortality rate is dramatically different based on age. The disease takes the life of nearly 15% of the people that it infects over the age of 80.

I find that to be incredibly cruel, especially for my mainline church that has been dwindling in size and increasing in age at a stunning rate. Of our 20 or so active members, four of them are over the age of 90. Another 10 are in their 80s. If COVID-19 becomes a true global pandemic, my church would likely not fare well.


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Did I shake hands with the rector? COVID-19 hits a highly symbolic altar inside DC Beltway

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I know, I know. I couldn’t believe it either.

In terms of shock value in the Twitter-verse, the Washington Post team buried the lede in a timely news piece that ran with this headline: “For Georgetown churchgoers, a coronavirus self-quarantine is embraced as necessary.”

This is an Inside. The. Beltway. Story and I am perfectly OK with that. So see if you can spot the shocking symbolic detail in this overture:

The longtime friends were looking forward to their regular game of bridge at Washington’s posh Metropolitan Club on Monday afternoon, a bit of welcome routine in a world slowly spinning out of control.

The three prominent lawyers, C. Boyden Gray, William Nitze and Edwin D. Williamson, were well aware that the novel coronavirus was spreading, and that it had just made an appearance in Maryland with the announcement of the state’s first three cases last week. They never imagined, however, that the District’s first confirmed case of covid-19 would arrive at their doorstep: the 203-year-old Christ Church Georgetown, an affluent Episcopal congregation co-founded by Francis Scott Key and attended by a bipartisan collection of well-known Washingtonians, among them Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

You can just hear the gasps from readers across America who do not understand the role that Georgetown plays in the DC political ecosphere.

Yes, Tucker Carlson and his family attend an Episcopal parish. If I remember correctly, they have been members of this parish for quite some time.

It’s a Washington thing. Lambs and lions (who is who depends on the biases of the observer) may occupy the same pews. It’s all about location, location, location. And as any editor inside the Beltway will tell you, the Episcopal Church retains its clout, serving as a kind of “NPR at prayer” (a label created by my Orthodox priest, a former Episcopal tall-steeple clergyman).


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Helpless in Seattle: How journalists are/are not covering coronavirus, churches and conferences

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Here’s a dispatch from the center of the evolving pandemic — which where I live.

When the national epicenter for the coronavirus is 13 miles away from one’s home, life becomes a place somewhere between Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and Gabriel Garcia Márguez’s “Love in a Time of Cholera.”

If you live in major urban areas — think New York City and greater Washington, D.C. — you can expect to see these patterns sooner, rather than later. What’s in your newspapers this morning?

Back to Kirkland — the expensive suburb (described here by the Los Angeles Times for those of you who have never been). Kirkland is merely one of several cities on Seattle’s Eastside where this thing has hit. Kirkland used to be the place we’d go for some beach time on Lake Washington when I was in high school. It was unglamorous and kind of shabby until the tech boom hit, Microsoft moved into neighboring Redmond and Google began gobbling up reams of office space in Kirkland, sending rents soaring.

Living two suburbs away as I do, I can say that the pall over Kirkland is now upon us all. Visiting local stores is like entering the Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen the shelves at Trader Joe’s so empty. Target has zero, I repeat zero, cough drops. Lines are forming at the local Costco first thing in the morning so folks can get toilet paper. The King County bus system greets you with hygiene announcements when you board.

We will get to religious groups and coverage in a moment. Hang in there with me.

Traffic for the past few days has been delightfully free of gridlock but it feels, writes one Seattle Times columnist, like Seattle is being symbolically quarantined from the rest of America. Conventions, conferences and meetings are being cancelled left and right. The Seattle-based Alaska Airlines put lots of flights on sale, begging folks to fly or buy before the end of March. But interestingly, while one school district has totally shut down, the others are not.


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