Since the end of January, religion and coronavirus have had a variety of occasions to interface. The Islamic State called the pandemic a ‘divine retribution’. Feng shui masters ascribe it to a preponderance of the metal and water element over fire in the early year of the Rat. Large religious gatherings have been finger‐pointed as major clusters of diffusion of the virus in Singapore, the City‐Island‐Nation‐State where I am writing down these thoughts, in neighbouring Malaysia, as well as in South Korea. Since then, the fabric of gatherings, the sense of togetherness, the meaning of congregation, the ritual praxis of pious bodies have changed dramatically across sectarian boundaries. Some gatherings went digital, live‐streaming functions, broadcasting rituals, offering baptism on Zoom, confessions via Skype, Virtual Reality pilgrimages and online registrations for worship of the ancestors. Other religious communities resist the prohibition to congregate, inevitably attracting scorn and condemnation as superstitious, irrational, fundamentalist, while poignantly showcasing conflicting ideologies of healing and unequal epistemologies. When (it feels like ages ago) we were still able to assemble in private and public gatherings, some communities adopted hygienic measures for safety which changed their liturgy – Catholics applying holy water with disposable q‐tips, Hindus sharing prasad on platters rather than hands, and a long series of etcetera. Others, more recalcitrant to change, proclaimed that they will still kiss their Torah, touch their Pir’s shrines or, in the case of the Greek Orthodox community, sip from the same spoon for ‘this cannot be the cause of the spread of illness’.1 Ritual innovations might outlive the duration of the pandemic and become the new praxis. Digital sacraments and new re‐mediations of rituals are most probably there to stay. Religion scholars are now forced to rewind their ‘embodiment’, ‘sensory’ and ‘material’ turns (see Thomas Csordas, Birgit Meyer and so on) and devise new methodologies to study the disembodied and desensorialised religious phenomena that have appeared after COVID‐19.At a time of overwhelming distress, when biomedical science fails to provide for certainties and cures, the power of interpretation, rationalisation and moral justification in the hands of charismatic religious leaders is immense. Competing systems specialised in establishing relations with the cosmos and the non‐human have reassuring answers and persuasive explanations, which will shape the behaviour of numerous people, their choices, consumption, diet and beliefs. When a (vegetarian) Hindu leader gathered a number of followers for a gaumutra drinking session, he explained that the virus is an avatara descended to restore the universal balance which deteriorated because of the increasing numbers of meat‐eaters. Several Indic gurus stated that the virus is the result of collective negative karma and urged for a return to a more holistic and sattvik lifestyle. Vedic astrologers agree in saying that the pandemic will subside in the summer, while some audacious ones forecast that the crisis will be over by 11
May. In a time of desperate need for hope and comfort, spokespersons of influential traditions are providing for a rationale, an overarching order, even a date to look forward to.I portray this concocted mosaic of religious responses and ritual innovations at the time of the COVID‐19 pandemic in order to draw attention to the return of religion and spirituality in otherwise secularist spheres dominated by institutionally sanctioned biomedical worldviews. Those who believed in the devolutionary theory by which education and technology will make religiosity disappear, as if they belonged to two fundamentally opposite categories of reality, are resorting to predictions and divinations that do not emerge from quantitative data and empirical lab‐based rationalities. It is of fundamental importance in such an extraordinary time for social scientists to step aside from their niches of specialisation and take a post‐secular view to look at the bigger picture of a dramatically changing world – a world of fragile certainties and desperate calls for comforting predictions.