We don’t understand religious freedom. COVID-19 proved it.

Religious freedom has been a hot topic in the United States for decades. But the pandemic offered a crash course on the topic.

Even during the early months of the pandemic, many called the global outbreak of COVID-19 an apocalyptic event. This was not only in the sense that it was a cataclysm that stopped societies in their tracks and cost millions of lives. It was also in the ancient Greek sense of apokálypsis, or a revelation of some great knowledge or truth—not necessarily a pleasant one.

In the United States, this took the form of the fragility of our structures: Lockdowns shattered the job market, eliminating access to health care—more urgently needed than ever—which is overwhelmingly tied to jobs that were now gone. Resistance to social distancing protocols revealed not a pervasive, deferential concern for the well-being of one’s neighbor but a strident, nihilistic libertarianism that called for the weak to be sacrificed for the convenience of the strong.

 

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