The one million marker on official U.S. COVID-19 deaths sparked much commentary, including on the effects on religiosity. The Toronto Star commented on changing attitudes towards death and faith: “The pandemic has made us all conscious of the fragility of life. This might have a positive effect in the long term — hopefully, it will help us humanize death by rethinking it as part of the human life cycle.” Meanwhile, globally the pandemic waxes and wanes as do the visible signs of response, such as masks. In Indonesia, for example, requirements for mask wearing indoors were lifted, two weeks after millions of Indonesians celebrated the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by traveling to see their families, ending two years of pandemic restrictions and travel curbs. COVID-19 cases have continued to decline, prompting the government to relax its mask policy. In Africa the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be affecting widows in new ways, disrupting traditional ways of assuring care after a husband’s death. Data is limited, but men are dying at higher rates than women.

The effects of the pandemic and associated lockdowns and disruptions of practice will become clearer in the months and years ahead but one report is telling: Willow Creek Community Church, a Chicago megachurch, one of the largest and most highly regarded congregations in the nation, will lay off 30% of its staff due to post-COVID-19 declines in attendance and giving. “Willow is about half of the size we were before COVID, which is right in line with churches across the country,” Dave Dummitt, Willow Creek Community Church senior pastor, told his congregation in a video announcing the cuts. “But as you can see, and as you can imagine, that has fiscal impactions.”

A Brookings Institution report highlights the vital roles of Black churches during the pandemic and lessons to draw from it: “In general, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been numerous examples of formal public health organizations partnering with Black churches. Prominent examples include the Mayo Clinic partnership with FAITH! in Minnesota, the collaboration between Liberty Grace Church of God in Baltimore, the International Vaccine Access Center (IVAC) at Johns Hopkins University, the DC Vaccine Exchange Program, and the New York State Vaccine Equity Task Force’s statewide partnership with Black churches.” The report concludes that achieving equity requires public policy that prioritizes collaborations with cultural institutions that are salient to people of color, specifically highlighting how churches are central to public health efforts and calling on stakeholders (public health officials, racial equity advocacy organizations, congresspersons, real estate developers, etc.) to pay attention when there are discernible trends in the disappearance of churches in communities of color.

COVID vaccination and religious responsibilities have been a significant issue in recent weeks, linked to President Biden's COVID-19 summit. An op-ed by the Faiths4Vaccines leadership focused on an inclusive, multifaith movement comprised of U.S. religious leaders and medical professionals working to resolve gaps in vaccine mobilization. It highlights the moral imperative for the United States, as the richest nation in the world, to share their vast technological and science capability to help aid poorer countries dealing with COVID-19. Of the more than 11 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccines administered globally, only 14.5% of people in low-income countries have received a single dose, and a lack of urgency to help the world’s most vulnerable puts us all at risk. As the article aptly summarizes, “No one is safe until we are all safe.”

Pastor Tony Spell from Oneness Pentecostal Church in Louisiana is the first pastor to publicly defy COVID-19 lockdown orders by winning his legal battle against the state of Louisiana two years later. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that the governor did not have good reason to block Spell’s church from meeting for worship while other venues received exemptions. The Louisiana court found that it was a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion to offer legal exemptions to secular groups and not religious ones.

Pre-COVID-19, members of the Shadhili Sufi order in Singapore would meet in their lodge weekly to participate in the sound and movement ritual called the hadra. In March 2020 Singapore’s lockdown measures brought these ritual movements to a halt, and the group started participating in online gatherings which sacrificed the “affective dimensions of their ritual.” A recent article captures this transformation and focuses on the sensorial challenges these Sufis faced due to the inability of technology to translate the atmospheric elements of the practice. It details how listening became the key focus of this ritual engagement online and argues that the Sufis demonstrated that the spiritual dispositions of religious practitioners can go past technological dysfunction and make “the external elements of worship internally effective.”