 |
| People wearing masks at a church service. Image source. |
So I saw this article from Christianity Today, The Curious Case of Coronavirus Contagion in Church, about a research study on whether or not people in the US who attended church during "lockdowns" were more likely to get covid. As an ex-evangelical math nerd, I was ALL OVER IT. Like, you guys, this is THE EXACT THING I am interested in.
Christians always say "prayer works"- which I take to mean "prayer [if done correctly, feel free to add all kinds of criteria here about how to do it correctly] will cause God to take actual real actions in the world [not just psychological stuff in the pray-er's own mind, but affecting reality in ways external to the pray-er] to cause things to happen- or at least to change the probabilities that things will happen", for example, if you get a bunch of people to pray that a sick person will get better, then there is a higher probability that they will get better, compared to if people weren't praying for them. I am very interested in the question "what kinds of statistics and overall trends in the world would we be likely to see, if it is indeed true that 'prayer works'?"
Back in 2016, I wrote Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk, where I said that, if it's really true that "prayer works", then we need to harness that power by figuring out what the biggest dangers are in people's lives, and specifically praying against those things. As a first step, I looked up the stats on causes of death and found that heart disease is the biggest killer, with 23.53% of deaths- so, let's spend 23.53% of our prayer time praying against heart disease. And so on, building a model from there for how to pray most effectively. But Christians don't actually pray about the things that truly pose the biggest danger; we pray about things that we happen to be worried about. It's about our feelings, not about which things are truly harmful in reality (and we can know which things are truly harmful in reality by looking at statistics).
Inexplicably, my post did not go viral and cause Christians all over the world to say "this blogger is absolutely right! I need to make sure in my church, we pray that people don't get into car accidents driving home from the grocery store 100 times more often than we pray for people to have a safe flight!" Or, alternatively, to say "wow if we follow this 'prayer works' logic then it leads to the conclusion that we are safest when we are constantly imagining what kind of horrible tragedies might happen to our families and praying against them, and I can't believe in a God who would want to destroy people's emotional health in that way, therefore I refuse to believe 'prayer works.'" (Which is the conclusion that I myself hold. I don't believe "prayer works" because I can't follow a God who decides whether to heal you based on whether you prayed "correctly.")
And in 2020 I wrote An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God, where I said that, if it's really true that some Christians can have a "personal relationship with God" so strong that they become good at "discernment" and listening to God, then we should see extremely devout Christians getting infected with covid at lower rates than the general population, because God will warn them to avoid places where covid outbreaks are taking place, invisible to everyone except God. I very much doubt that this is the case, but I would love to see some statistics on it, and I thought perhaps this study in the Christianity Today article would be those very statistics.
And also, I have linked to this paper before: Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials (2009). The "Discussion" section at the end is EXTREMELY GOOD. It asks a lot of questions that people definitely should be asking if it's really true that "prayer works."
All this is to say, oh man, I am SUPER INTERESTED in the idea that perhaps God protected Their most devoted followers from getting covid, to an extent that's statistically significant. I don't believe it, but on some level, I still want to find statistical evidence of it. When I was evangelical I always wanted that, and bizarrely, no one else seemed to care. If they really believe it, then they should care, and that's why I'm still looking.
So let's take a look at Christianity Today's article. It's paywalled, but actually all the information is in the "article preview" and the only thing behind the paywall is one infographic, so don't worry if you don't have a CT subscription. And anyway, the study itself, which the article links to, is what we're really interested in.
CT titled their article "The Curious Case of Coronavirus Contagion in Church", and the subhead is "Pandemic impact was not as predictable as expected, sociological study finds." My first thought, upon reading this title and subhead, was that perhaps a study had found that, even though people who went to church in person during the pandemic were more likely to get covid than people who didn't go anywhere, they were less likely to get covid than people who went to non-churchy places in person. For example, imagine 2 hypothetical indoor gatherings of 50 people who are mostly wearing masks- one gathering is a church service, one gathering is something else- perhaps by some miracle, the people at the church service were less likely to get covid there than the people at the non-religious event.
That was my first thought, on reading the title. Could it be that God intervened at church services to make it less likely for covid to spread there, compared to other in-person events with similar levels of social distancing, mask-wearing, etc? I am SUPER-INTERESTED to hear about any data on that.
(This probably says something about my own brain and where my thinking is, in terms of being evangelical vs ex-evangelical...)
Okay, so, no, that's not what the study said. Here's Christianity Today's summary:
People who went to church during the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns were generally more likely to catch COVID-19. This is fairly straightforward. Yet look a little closer, and the facts get a bit more perplexing.
The “association between attending in-person worship during lockdown and later testing positive for COVID-19 was limited primarily to those who were not previously frequent worship attendees,” according to a study published in the American Sociological Association journal Socius.
[The study specifically looked at May to August 2020. In the US.]
Oooh, fascinating! So if you were already regularly attending church, and you continued to regularly attend church throughout the "lockdowns" (I put "lockdowns" in scare-quotes because I lived through the Shanghai lockdown) (some of you have never set your alarm for 6:55 so you can button-mash on a grocery app at exactly 7:00 am for the slim chance to buy vegetables, and it shows), the church attendance didn't really increase your chance of getting covid. But if you didn't attend church much before, and then you just started attending during the "lockdowns", then there is an increased chance of you getting covid.
Wow! I am so interested in this data! On reading CT's article, my mind comes up with all kinds of explanations for this. Maybe people who just started attending church are not as strong Christians as those who were already regular attenders, and so God miraculously protected the strong Christians better than the weak Christians. Maybe for those Christians who defied government orders and kept having church, standing up against "persecution" [note: those of us who live in reality recognize that it was a public health emergency, not "persecution"], God supernaturally protected them from covid, just like Daniel in the lions' den. Maybe long-time church members have the experience and familiarity with how their church runs and are already connected to the church's social groups and communication channels, and therefore it's easier for them to adapt to whatever new policies get put in place to stop covid from spreading, but new people don't know what's going on at all so they can't follow the new anti-covid rules well. Maybe there's something about the sort of people who would suddenly start attending in-person church in a pandemic... who would do that?
(To be clear: All of that is my own speculation. CT's article doesn't say anything about that. I don't want to misrepresent what the CT article said. It simply said "here are the results of the study; how interesting that the increased chance of getting covid was only for the new attenders" but didn't give any speculation about the reasons why.)
And honestly, I really wanted it to be "God miraculously protected the strong Christians better than the new Christians." I went and read the whole paper (full text is here). The researchers who wrote the paper give this as a possible explanation:
However, interactions indicate that this increase was limited primarily to those who were not regular attenders previously. The results suggest that worship attendance during lockdown substantially increased COVID-19 infections for the minority who attended possibly as a form of protest.
And:
How do we interpret this latter finding? Contrary to what we might expect from the 2021 BRS or 2020 CES data showing an association between general worship attendance and COVID-19 infection, it does not seem to be the case that deeply devout Americans disregarded stay-at-home orders, attended worship gatherings frequently during lockdown, and then got infected and tested positive for COVID-19. Rather, our data suggest that some Americans who were relatively disconnected from faith communities (they rarely or never attended) reported attending in-person worship gatherings more frequently during late April or early May 2020, and it was these Americans who later tested positive for COVID-19. This suggests that their reported in-person worship attendance at the height of lockdown restrictions did not reflect their stronger commitment to religious community but that their very attendance may have been an act of defiance or protest against the restrictions. Persons who would have otherwise stayed at home (as they usually did in 2019) suddenly felt compelled to attend in-person worship when they were advised or demanded not to and then were more likely to test positive for coronavirus. Another possibility is that in-person worship would have been among the limited opportunities for even irreligious Americans to actually interact socially at the height of lockdown, though the strength of this explanation is mitigated somewhat by controlling for other kinds of gathering frequency.
Oooh! I had not thought of this explanation: that people who suddenly started attending church during "lockdown" did so as a political statement against the idea of government policies to stop covid, and in particular, restrictions on religious gatherings. I guess if that's their motivation, they're not going to be like "let's try to keep having church but with reasonable precautions to stop covid" like existing members would probably say. Instead, it's more of a "look at us, not following the rules! You can't stop us!"
And, continuing along those lines: Initially I was imagining that in any given church, you have some long-time members and some new people, and the new people are more likely to get covid than the long-time members, perhaps because God miraculously protects the long-time members because they are very good faithful Christians. [No, I don't actually believe that- I am just considering it as a statistical model.] But wait, what if it's not about specific individuals in a church, but about the overall congregation? What sorts of churches would have the most new members during "lockdowns"? Probably churches that were making big public statements about how they're not going to follow the anti-covid rules. Whereas, on the other side, I've heard of churches that required people to sign up beforehand if they wanted to attend the in-person services. Churches that had online services for a long time, and were very very careful about starting up in-person services again. That kind of caution and hoops to jump through will deter newcomers from casually dropping by to check out your church. Those reasonable and careful churches probably had very very few new people.
So- and this is just me hypothesizing; the actual data says nothing about this- maybe the question to ask is "what kind of church is most likely to have a covid outbreak?" And a church that takes the pandemic seriously and sets up a bunch of new policies- and is therefore more difficult for new people to attend- will be much less likely to have a covid outbreak than a church that proudly breaks the rules and attracts new people who attend just to make a political statement.
To be clear: the researchers' explanation (that new church attenders were more likely to get covid because they were just attending church to make a political statement) is just their attempt to explain their findings; it's not something that's supported by the data itself. It seems intuitively true to me, but do remember that it's just an idea and not something we have the actual stats to support. Same thing with my idea about churches that openly break the rules (and therefore have covid outbreaks) being more attractive to people who suddenly want to start going to church in a pandemic. It seems to make sense, but we don't have data on it, so don't believe it just yet.
But anyway, so, yeah, turns out this study doesn't show that God miraculously protects devout Christians from getting covid. The explanation offered by the researchers makes much more sense. At least I'm glad to see that long-time church members who continued to go to in-person church did not have an increased risk of getting covid (probably because most of them took it seriously and set up precautions to stop the spread, rather than treating it like an us-vs-them political issue). That's good news. But if we want statistical evidence that "God answers prayer" and/or supernaturally protects Their most devoted followers, we'll have to keep looking.
---
Related:
Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk
No comments:
Post a Comment