Defiant Worship: Religious Liberty Talk and Rights in COVID-19 Pandemic Times
This article draws on interactive social media content collected from Facebook and Twitter during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to examine responses to the public health measures that restricted indoor forms of religious assembly. Restrictions on indoor religious gatherings...
| Authors: | ; |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2022
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| In: |
A journal of church and state
Year: 2022, Volume: 64, Issue: 3, Pages: 479-505 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Religious freedom
/ COVID-19 (Disease)
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| IxTheo Classification: | SA Church law; state-church law |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article draws on interactive social media content collected from Facebook and Twitter during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to examine responses to the public health measures that restricted indoor forms of religious assembly. Restrictions on indoor religious gatherings were challenged in courts and their constitutionality was addressed by the Supreme Court over the summer of 2020. This historic period, with lockdowns, testing, contact tracing, and vaccines—not to mention its prohibition on public gatherings—provides a unique opportunity to assess religious liberty claims during a nationwide public health emergency. Taking advantage of this rare opportunity, the article offers a critical analysis of religious freedom discourse engendered by the coronavirus pandemic. We adopt a fairly unconventional approach to explore social media content for the meanings given to religious freedom in this historic moment. Our core focus is discourse related to what we describe as “defiant worship”—actions taken by pastors and congregations that violated state mandates about indoor religious gatherings. Our findings contribute to a growing body of secondary literature that deconstructs assumed binaries between secular and religious, legal and lay, and public and private spheres. Religious freedom is not a sui generis phenomenon with a portable essence across these spheres, but is formed at their junctures ... |
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| ISSN: | 2040-4867 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: A journal of church and state
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jcs/csac001 |