Healing, Faith and Fear: Church opening in the United States during COVID-19 restrictions

Presenting my 2020 pandemic project! During the pandemic Anne Marie and myself noticed that a number of churches (in the US) were opening despite public health stay-at-home orders.

As sociologists, we wanted to know what kinds of churches and why, so we got to work.

This paper are the results of that inquiry. We spent hours watching live broadcast YouTube sermons, and examining churches’ social media outputs as they pivoted to video. Even though the churches continued to meet during the pandemic, they also broaden their reach in the digital sphere. We also dug through legal filings, how they were funded, in addition to lot of reporting on the churches in this sample.

This article is forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. It was accepted in July and isn’t quite through production yet, but we feel the substance is interesting and timely and have made the pre-print available here.