This text is part of the special section Religions and funerary rites
Researchers from Northern Ireland, Canada, Germany and Poland are teaming up to carry out a research project that will study and compare the changing role of religions in our societies after two years of the pandemic. At the Université de Montréal, Professor Solange Lefebvre, of the Institute of Religious Studies, will focus on the analysis of four religions, two majority and two minority, in the country.
“The subject is resilience and religion, and our questions are these: how have religions adapted to the pandemic? Did they suffer? What were the relationships between religion, science, vaccination and health? said Solange Lefebvre.
The research project “The Changing Role of Religion in Societies Emerging from the COVID-19 Pandemic” is led by Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. The team will analyze several factors, particularly regarding the ways in which several issues, such as health, disease and science, have been approached. “Particularly, it is about examining how the relationship between religion and the state has been transformed”, specifies the professor.
Because religious practice has also had to adapt to the era of COVID. Places of worship had to close and believers found themselves online, for the most part. But it also served as a reminder that, although they are less visible in certain societies, there are still practitioners. “In Quebec, we discovered that there were still practitioners, after decades when the dialogue had been quite negative, saying that the churches were empty. In reality, it’s more nuanced,” explains Solange Lefebvre.
Different phases of research
To gather the necessary data that will be studied in this research, the team will use a variety of methods, including surveys, interviews, and analysis of media materials and content produced by religious organizations themselves.
Two online surveys will thus be conducted with worshipers and religious and community leaders in the four countries, as well as 320 in-depth interviews, or 80 in each country. “Interviews will be conducted with members of religions of all social classes, to take into account those living in areas further from major centers. The objective is to find out whether certain vulnerable people have felt abandoned, because left to themselves without resources,” explains the researcher.
The team will also analyze the media content produced by religious groups, allowing them to see, using keywords, how the pandemic has been experienced, scientific news and the relationship to illness and death, in particular . “Religious mourning rituals have been undermined during the pandemic in Canada, with the closures of places of worship and the impossibility of meeting,” recalls Ms.me Lefebvre.
The place of religion in the public sphere
Researchers can then study what has been done in mainstream mainstream media about places of worship and religion. The researcher points out that she was struck by an article published in The Globe and Mail speaking positively of a priest and spirituality in the midst of a pandemic. “It contrasted with the times when we spoke of religious groups as being sources of contamination,” she says.
This will also allow them to study how religion was expressed in the public sphere, how it was perceived and how places of worship were managed. In Quebec, the communication channels between organizations, religious representatives and the provincial government no longer existed and they had to be rebuilt, explains the holder of the Chair in Cultural and Religious Diversity Management at UdeM. “We put [les lieux de culte] at the beginning under the heading of bar closings,” she says.
Some religious representatives have come up with innovative ideas for reaching out to certain communities during the pandemic, such as a walk-in vaccination clinic opened at the Assuna Annabawiyah mosque in May 2021.
Several religions studied
Among the religions studied in the four countries, there are “several Christian denominations, Catholicism, Protestantism, but we will also include the Evangelical Church, and take into account Muslims and Jews”, indicates Solange Lefebvre.
In Poland, the Catholic Church is the majority, but the study will take into account a minority, that of Jehovah’s Witnesses. “In Germany, they will take into account the Steiner philosophy”, underlines Mme Lefebvre.
As Canada has many religious groups, the researcher chose to focus on Catholicism and Protestantism as the majority religions, and on two minority groups, Jews and Muslims.
The jump to virtual mode
One thing is certain, even before starting the research, Solange Lefebvre already knows that the transition to virtual mode for the majority of religions played a big role during the pandemic. However, there are nuances to be made, which only an analysis will be able to provide to researchers. “It may have had positive effects in terms of audience, because more people were reached by this online passage, but it did not reach everyone”, she underlines.
As for the formats used, she notes that this varies from place to place. “In a lot of cases we went back to the traditional format, it was very statistical, but in other cases it was a bit like snipers. People have done so well that now we have kept the hybrid formula, the virtual and the face-to-face,” she says.
All these investigations will last three years, and the results will be observed as the research progresses. It is the researcher who will be in charge of setting up this conference, in 2025. For this research, Solange Lefebvre received a grant from the Transatlantic Platform.
She has also received two other grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to study Quebec municipalities, religions and secularism. This project will last until 2027 and will focus more on the challenges and issues that arise between municipal management and religious diversity in Quebec. Finally, “it is a question of taking religion out of its invisibility. These religious groups exist, believers and practitioners also,” recalls the researcher.
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