Part 4 of 4-part series: Spiritual Dimensions of the COVID-19 Pandemic
By Mark Kutolowski
You can listen to the audio version of this blog on our podcast page.
One of the scribes...asked Jesus “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “The first is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” - Mark 12:28-31
-------------------------------------------
“She-ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad”
(‘Hear O’ Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One’)
So begins the Shema, recited daily by devout Jews. It’s considered by many to be the single most important prayer in Judaism. According to the Gospels, Jesus declared it to be the most important commandment of the entire Torah. It affirms that God is One, the Source of all, and that only God is worthy of the full devotion of the human heart, soul, mind and strength. It’s the essence of all monotheism, the belief in the oneness of God.
In my years of giving spiritual direction, I’ve come to see a very practical application of the Shema. There is no single thing more uplifting and spiritually transformative in the life of a directee than when they commit to seeking God alone, and allowing all other desires of their heart to be subsumed beneath this one great desire. When this happens, rapid growth occurs in short order, as their heart and life are continually reordered by the love of God. Finite things take their proper order in their life, and they grow in the peace, joy and tranquility of placing their trust in the One who is eternal. As God is infinite and uncontainable by the human psyche, as soon as a person trusts in God alone, their psyche is dethroned from its domination of their awareness. They begin to experience the limitless mystery of light, life and love that is the Realm (or ‘Kingdom’) of God. The Realm was always present, but it’s only when we trust in God alone that it’s reality shines forth in our consciousness.
Similarly, I’ve seen that there is nothing more limiting to spiritual growth than when someone is pursuing any thing as a source of ultimate security, identity or goodness. By thing I mean any object, any status, any idea, any relationship, any physical, psychological or emotional state, or any experience. If there is anything in particular that a person clings to as a source of ultimate value, they lose the ability to rest in God. The greater our attachment, the less access we have to the Realm of God. It’s a cruel irony, because when we’re attached to any thing this way, we mistakenly believe the thing is the key to our happiness, security, and peace. Yet our grasping at the thing is precisely what keeps us from the true happiness, security and peace of the Realm of God. Some of my greatest sorrows in life are when I am counseling a person who seeks peace, yet remains committed to their attachment to a thing – and I am powerless to help them when they refuse to let go.
While my own experience is embedded in my devotion to the Christian path (with its foundation in Judaism), when I look out at other traditions I see a similar insight at the core of Islam (The foundational proclamation that “There is none worthy of worship except Allah….”) and also of Buddhism (Buddha’s second noble truth: “The cause of suffering is attachment”). Each tradition has something of this insight, expressed within its own theological perspective. From my own experience, from my observation of others, from my own Judeo-Christian tradition, and from my study of other world religions, I’m convinced this is a spiritual law that transcends the bounds of any particular tradition.
There’s another, closely related spiritual law that I also see at play in both my own heart and in the hearts of others. That is: We all worship something. Put in another way: There is always something sitting on the throne of our hearts. If the ‘thing’ is not really a ‘thing’ at all, but the in-finite God, then we are free. But if God is not on the ‘throne’ of our hearts, then we can be assured that something else has taken up residence in this most precious location. Whenever my heart is not worshiping the infinite God, it turns to worship something else, and this is where my slavery begins.
At this deeper level, there are no atheists. We all have our ‘little gods’. We may call them attachments, addictions, or idols, but the end result is the same. We all have things we prefer on the psychological level over God and the fullness of life. What makes a spiritually proficient person more free is that they have begun to recognize their inner idols and are consciously working to let go of them and allow the Infinite One to occupy the throne of their heart.
This pattern is true on the level of whole populations, as well. Ancient kingdoms from the Middle East to East Asia to South America all had their temples and offered sacrifices to the gods. Empires from ancient Rome to the Incas instituted emperor worship. In the supposedly post-religious modern age, the architects of the aggressively secular French Revolution quickly set up the ‘Cult of Reason’ to replace the exiled God of Christianity. The Soviet Union had profoundly religious devotion to its founders, the events of the revolution, and the state itself. Similar practices continue to this day in communist China. Christian nations were not immune to this pattern, and often developed a spiritually disastrous blending of religion and the state, equating devotion to the state with devotion to God, including the ‘Sun King’ of France and the Tsars of Russia.
COVID and the Rise of Pseudo-Religion
What does all of this have to do with COVID? Far more than I would have imagined at the start of the pandemic two years ago! In times of relative stability, our inner idols can retain their spheres of control while operating largely below our conscious awareness. It’s precisely during times of stress and disorder that our idols become more obvious. As our anxiety rises, we can notice our urge to grasp at outward symbols of security. In these times, we tend to shore up our inner idols, and even adopt new idols to protect us from the fear of facing the unknown. I addressed how this dynamic plays out at the individual level in detail in the first post of this series, COVID Upheaval, Fear and the Temptation of Idolatry.
This same dynamic takes place in groups, whether families, towns, political parties, or nations, during times of tumult and disruption. Sometimes the collective grasping takes on surprisingly religious forms, and this has taken place over the past two years of the COVID pandemic. I had initially intended to write a three-part essay series about COVID and spirituality, ending on a hopeful note in the last post on a Christian vision of health. However, as I did background research on the COVID situation for the first three posts, I regularly came across overtly religious messaging about COVID coming from the government and media. I kept seeing terms like ‘believe,’ ‘have faith,’ and ‘salvation.’
We live in a supposedly post-religious world, and yet the deep structures of religion persist in every human psyche. When we pretend we have no Higher Power, we invariably transfer our sense of ultimate authority over to some other entity that is beyond us. It might be the state, the market, or ‘The Science.’ It might be some charismatic leader, expert or authority figure. It might be an ideology or a ‘tribe’ of like-minded believers. Our sense of peace, security and well-being becomes fragile – for it is dependent on a limited, finite thing to provide an unlimited good. It cannot possibly provide what we seek, yet we cling to it ever more tightly, having faith that it is our source of ultimate security. On the individual level, I call this kind of grasping idolatry. On a collective level, I call it pseudo-religion.
The Latin root of the word ‘religion’ is religare, which means ‘to bind,’ or ‘to reconnect.’ True religion is a system for reconnecting human consciousness with Divine consciousness. It provides a way for human beings to find freedom through rooting our identity in the Infinite. Pseudo-religion is the phenomena of binding human consciousness, through our deep religious impulses, to finite things. It is a sort of institutionalized idolatry, that offers false security and serves to blind us from the true security that comes from God. In this time of cultural upheaval, pseudo-religion is on the rise.
My hope in writing this post is that it will help us to recognize the rise of pseudo-religious phenomena over the past two years. With awareness, I believe it is possible to remain spiritually free even as these energies are at work in society at large. Without awareness, we can easily get caught up in collective thought in a way that is destructive to our spiritual lives. Keep in mind as you read these next sections that my intention is not to offer an opinion about how our society or government should respond to COVID. My goal is to point out some of the rising thought-forms that are detrimental to spiritual freedom.
What are some of the forms of pseudo-religious phenomena in these times of COVID? Or rather, what limited, partial goods have been elevated to a ‘divine’ status in the eyes of those seeking ultimate good in them?
Deification of Points of View[1]: In a healthy society, where people are operating from the rational mind or the spiritual mind, we can have different ideas, and discuss these with one another while continuing to value the humanity and complexity of all people involved in the discussion. Both the dominant, mainstream COVID narrative and the counter-narrative have developed and hardened over the past two years into self-contained, self-reinforcing belief systems. Each narrative has taken on aspects of fundamentalism, similar to fundamentalist religious movements. For those who are fully identified with the narratives, there’s an ultimate trust placed in one’s pre-existing beliefs, and all new data is filtered in through this belief. No new information can shake the belief, because the belief has become the reference point through which the truth content of any new information is judged. I’ve even seen media references to the need to ‘convert’ the unbelievers of one’s own family (for their ‘salvation,’ of course). This illustrates how the points of view around COVID have been raised to a pseudo-religious status and given ultimate value.
Once this type of identification with a ‘deified’ point of view has been established, it is extremely threatening to have one’s point of view challenged – as it challenges our very identity. In contrast, one of the features of spiritual maturity is the ability to remain emotionally present with people who hold a wide diversity of viewpoints, including those opposed to one’s own. This is possible because when one’s trust is in God, no idea can threaten one’s ultimate sense of security.
The Vaccine(s): The COVID vaccines have become perhaps the most emotionally charged and controversial component of the two years of the pandemic. For some who are strong proponents of the vaccine(s), they have clearly taken on a pseudo-religious status. I decided I had to write this post when I first saw the image of the ‘Christ Redeemer’ statue outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil with the words ‘Vaccine saves’ projected across the outstretched arms of Christ. Jesus Christ has apparently lost his job to the new COVID vaccines!
The vaccine as object of pseudo-religious devotion is one of the more bizarre and spiritually revealing aspects of the past two years. It reveals our proclivity to idolize symbols of security rather than trust God in the face of uncertainty. Time and accumulated data have made it clear that the COVID vaccines are not sterilizing like a traditional vaccine. They lessen symptoms while failing to prevent infection, and are effective for months, not years. That is to say, they are a partial good that provides real, but limited, benefit. When they first were made available, the mainstream media promised that they would prevent anyone who received them from being infected by COVID (In the words of Rachel Maddow, ‘The virus stops with every vaccinated person’). They took on the pseudo-religious role of ‘savior’ in the popular imagination and promised to end the pandemic. When some people received their vaccine doses, they posted videos of themselves dancing with joy and adulation. Evangelization, by public health messaging and by devout individuals, was both widespread and intense. In my area, it quickly became publicly acceptable to ask someone their vaccine status at the beginning of a conversation – much the way a devout evangelical might ask a new visitor to their church ‘have you been saved?’ One public figure, Stephen Colbert, even orchestrated a liturgical dance to honor the vaccines. The failure of the vaccines to deliver their originally promised function (sterilizing immunity) did little to change their ‘divine’ status for those fully committed to vaccines as the way, and the only way, forward.
Some of the most powerful advocates of the vaccines have spoken in strikingly absolutist terms about their blessings. Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, publicly stated that ‘There is no other company that can claim to have done so much good to humanity as we have done.” He later declared that those who oppose the Pfizer vaccines (‘spreading misinformation’) are criminals who are causing the deaths of millions. In the rising pseudo-religious sentiment, opposing vaccines or vaccine mandates are the new heresies, and Bourla and his peers are playing the role of Grand Inquisitor.
Kathy Hochul, Governor of New York, was even more overt in her religious language, preaching from a church pulpit that the vaccines were a gift from God, that those who were not getting vaccinated were opposing God’s will, and that she needed people to become her ‘apostles’ (her word) to get this word out. I’ve heard of some priests and pastors using similar language about the vaccines being gifts from God. Of course, there are also plenty of ministers on the side of the counter-narrative, where the vaccines – or vaccine passports- are attributed Satanic power and considered the ‘Mark of the Beast.’
Accompanying this sort of pseudo-religious sentiment has been the pernicious creation of a new dividing line among people – ‘the vaccinated’ vs. ‘the unvaccinated’. Instead of being full human persons who have decided to receive a vaccine, we become a new class of people, ‘the vaccinated.’ Instead of being fully human people who have chosen not to receive a vaccine, we become ‘the unvaccinated.’ One’s identity is subtly tied to one’s relationship to a medical product. Again, it bears a striking resemblance to the way fundamentalist religious adherents of many traditions divide the world between ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers.’ In my community I’ve known of friendships that have ended in both directions – that is, people who identify with the new vaccines refusing to socialize or maintain fellowship with ‘the unvaccinated,’ and people who identify with rejecting the new vaccines refusing to remain friends with ‘the vaccinated.’ For the ‘true believers,’ the vaccines have taken on the role of a sort of sacramental rite of initiation into a new class of humanity. I’ve driven by lawn signs proclaiming the vaccination status of the houses’ inhabitants (does this mean that the angel of COVID death will pass over these houses on Passover?). Governor Hochul modeled a ‘vaxed’ necklace that can be worn as a further confirmation of one’s vaccinated identity. All of these trends bear the pseudo-religious themes of glorifying group identity, and promoting ritual inclusion and exclusion.
‘The Science’: In regard to both COVID mitigation efforts (masking, social distancing, etc) and vaccination, the government and media advocated citizens to ‘follow the science,’ ‘trust the science,’ and even ‘believe in the science.’ This is the language of religion. Christians seek to follow the Way of Christ, to trust in God and believe in God. Faith, trust and following are appropriate for our relationship with God precisely because God is infinitely larger than the human mind. God cannot be comprehended, but we can be in a relationship of love with God. To love and relate to that which is infinitely greater than ourselves requires trust beyond the limits of the rational mind. To trust, follow, and believe in a human system is pseudo-religion. It’s also bad science, as actual science involves a method of inquiry that depends on an absence of belief to be effective. Scientists repeatedly test a hypothesis and try to prove it wrong, before accepting it as true. I believe the calls to devotion to ‘the Science’ are really a call to trust, believe, and follow the advice of the scientific experts of the dominant narrative. The push to trust, believe, and follow is an act of submission to an authority higher than oneself. In this case, the ‘Higher Power’ is the scientific authorities that craft and defend the dominant narrative. As Dr. Anthony Fauci infamously declared, ‘When people criticize me they are criticizing science, because I represent science.’ To reject their authority risks being labeled ‘anti-science,’ which is itself a form of excommunication from the dominant belief system.
Within this pseudo-religious context, to attempt to use one’s rational mind to question and review evidence is itself a dangerous act of unbelief. Ordinary people who question ‘the Science’ are ridiculed by the crowds on social media as being dangerously unqualified to have an opinion. Meanwhile, doctors are threatened with loss of their medical license for offering vaccine exemptions. Doctors are no longer allowed to use their own judgement in how to treat patients, but are required to follow the decrees of ‘the Science.’ Like any deity, ‘the Science’ asks for devotion from the masses, not critical inquiry. Big tech platforms like Twitter and Youtube now benevolently help protect ‘the Science’ by labeling and removing ‘misinformation’ that might cast doubt in the minds of ‘the faithful.’ This of course is done to protect them, which was precisely the reason for the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books from 1559 to 1966, and for Iran’s current Ministry of Islamic Guidance.[2]
The State and the Divine Ruler: After several centuries of limited government and liberal democracy, the West is also starting to return to a sort of pseudo-religious relationship with the state and with the ruling elite. Both the decrees of the state and the will of the ruler were seen as divine through most ancient empires. In recent years, the political right has flirted with a pseudo-messianic worship of authoritarian leaders – expressed most boldly in the QAnon ‘prophecies’ of Donald Trump as champion and savior of the United States. Pentecostal Pastor Paula White, when asked to serve in Trump’s administration, said “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God, and I won’t do that.” This has deep religious parallels to the archetype of divine king or hero-king in the ancient world. On the political left, we see a somewhat different expression in the near cultic devotion to bureaucratic experts and the will of the state. It finds expression in the willingness to give over basic liberties (the rights to free assembly, free travel, and free speech), and bodily autonomy if demanded by unelected public health authorities. Many of the ‘true believers’ in this rising pseudo-religious phenomena would advocate even more draconian measures of state control – a January 2022 Rasmussen poll found 16% of the US population (and 31% aged 18-39) in favor of the state removing custody of the children of people who choose not to receive a COVID vaccine. This deification of the decrees of the state, experts, and control has deep religious parallels with the role of priests in imperial religious cults in the ancient world. The priests, with their superior esoteric knowledge, dictated what was and was not permissible in society, and ordinary citizens were bound to obey without question. In both leader-worship and state/expert worship, we end up giving our will over to the ‘Higher Power’ of the state or ruler, in exchange for a sense of security. These are some of the same dynamics that are at play in many religious cults – worship of a ‘deified’ leader and the demand for uncritical submission to proclamations by the authority figures[3].
The Way of Christ in an Era of Pseudo-Religion
None of the objects of pseudo-religious devotion are necessarily evil in themselves. They become spiritually damaging when they are elevated into a perceived source of ultimate good, security, or peace. The problem is usually not with the thing but with our relationship to the thing. We can recognize when our relationship with a thing is distorted when it keeps us from loving and trusting in God, and from being in loving relationship with others. When I look around at my community and our world, I see a profound increase in fear, and a profound decrease in our ability to love and connect with one another. These are bitter fruits, and signs that our relationship with things is out of balance. Ideologies, medical products, scientific authority and leaders cannot give us lasting peace. They cannot give us the ability to love God or others well. They can be useful servants, but make very poor masters. Where then, can we turn to live in freedom in a time of rising pseudo-religion?
Jesus provided the answer in the passage that opened this post. When we commit our heart, soul, mind and strength to loving God, the One who is worthy of our worship, we are set free from slavery to all human ideologies, technologies, and authorities. When we worship God alone we can make use of all the goods of human culture and ingenuity without being enslaved to any of them. We remain free to lightly pick up or put down ideas, technologies, and allegiances, knowing the throne of our hearts is occupied by the Creator of all.
When we do this, we then become free to love one another. To love our neighbor as ourselves requires the inner freedom that is provided by serving God alone. When we align our hearts with Divine Love, we see the individual before us as worthy of dignity, love and respect. We see each person as they are, beloved in the eyes of God who is love. We refuse to see them through the lens of any label or ideology. When we live in Divine Love, there is no friend or enemy, no believer or unbeliever, no vaccinated or unvaccinated. All are simply human beings—beautiful and good. We are able to be present with the fears and folly of our fellow people, seeing them always through the light of God’s love and forgiveness.
When we love God with our whole being and love our neighbors as ourselves, we also refuse to identify any person with their ideas, even when we may vehemently disagree with them. When we see another person doing great harm (whether someone we know personally, or a public figure), we are called to love them, forgive them in their human frailty, and to pray for their well being. This is the fruit of rejecting pseudo-religion. We retain out ability to love both God and others in freedom of mind and heart.
What does this look like in a time of upheaval and uncertainty? I see an example in the life of the Christians of ancient Rome. In the Cyprian Plague of the 250s and 260s, so many people died in the city of Rome that dead bodies were dumped and abandoned in the streets. Both Christians and Pagans suffered equally in the plague. However, wealthy Pagans fled the city and poorer Pagans abandoned their sick relatives to the streets out of fear of contracting the disease. In contrast, the Christians stayed put, believing it was their calling to serve the sick and to suffer along with them. As St. Dionysius recorded,
“Most of our brethren were unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ.
And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves, and willingly receiving their pains…. Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner, including some presbyters and deacons and those of the people who had the highest reputation. This form of death, through the great piety and strong faith it exhibited, seemed to lack nothing of Martyrdom.”
This 3rd century Roman Christian community saw its primary duty as offering sacrificial love to their neighbors, of all and any backgrounds. They even considered it better to die in radical service than to neglect to care for their neighbors. This plague was a sort of ‘stress test’ for the Way of Christ in Imperial Rome. Emperor Decius issued a decree commanding citizens to sacrifice to the imperial gods, hoping to placate their wrath and end the plague. When Christians refused, they were harshly persecuted, and in some cases blamed for the plague. The Christian community refused to give in to the fear that overtook the wider society, and continued to love and serve their neighbors in the face of both the threat of disease and the threat of persecution. Other Romans were attracted to the peace and the hope they saw in the Christian community in the midst of the plague, and many converted to the new faith.
This remains the vocation of the Christ-follower in the 21st century. We remain called, in every age, to love God with our entire being, and to be bearers of God’s love, mercy and compassion to all. We may not be asked to risk our lives like the ancient Roman church, but we are all called to grow beyond our fears and love without counting the cost. Times of great stress and upheaval have historically produced the most saints. The tension of an era like our own seems to lay bare our personal and collective vulnerability, and simultaneously our need for divine assistance. In our culture, the primary obstacles to spiritual growth in the past several decades have been the false gods of excess – success, money, reputation, pleasure and pride. With the pandemic, these gods are fading into the background as the culture becomes preoccupied with the false gods of deficiency – fear, security, anxiety, safety, and medical purity. The outer conditions are changing, yet the call to reject all false gods and remain united to the Creator endures.
The divine commandments to love the Holy One with our whole being and to love others as ourselves remain through the ages. It is an eternal invitation, and the path to freedom expands as soon as we turn to seek God above all things. Let us keep our minds and hearts awake, and turn our whole being to the Way of Christ, the way of love.
[1]I’m indebted to our board member, Kathy Moore, for this term
[2]While our current, left-leaning US federal government has aligned itself with big tech to censor ‘misinformation’ online, right-leaning state governments have become more proactive in banning books from public schools.
[3]There are parallels between the COVID response and the first few years of the post 9/11‘War on Terror’. In both cases, a major, tragic event led to a society-wide rise in fear, followed by an increased willingness to blindly obey leadership and to restrictions on the basic rights of citizens in a functioning democracy.