Unmute! Listening for Religion in the Age of COVID-19

As the most important religious holiday in the Christian liturgical calendar, Easter, and the forty days of Lent that led up to it, was particularly poignant and difficult for Christians during the pandemic. Lent is a somber period of reflection and abstinence from pleasure, characterized in churches by hushed sounds and muted colors. In many traditions, Lent begins with believers wearing ashes shaped as a cross on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday to remember the inevitability of death and importance of repentance for sins. As streets quieted and fear took hold in March 2020, Christians noticed an eerie parallel to the sights and sounds usually associated with Lent when celebrated in churches.

Easter Sunday, which for many Christians in the U.S is one of the only times that they attend church, is a noisy, colorful, and joyful celebration. As the end of March 2020 moved into the beginning of April, and the first national shutdown began in an effort to stem the tide of a growing medical crisis, anxious Christians wondered how they would celebrate Easter. Could they go to church? Was it safe to sit indoors and worship? Would they be able to celebrate with family and friends? A religious holiday celebrated by family gatherings, worship, and festivities, the COVID-19 pandemic made that all but impossible as believers struggled to recreate annual Easter traditions.

In all of the Christian traditions, church-goers can expect to hear an Easter Sunday message that celebrates the triumph of life over death. In this audio essay we hear religious leaders seeking to strike a balance between despair and hope in a frightening context of increasing deaths. As a result, Easter 2020 became decidedly more somber as clergy, congregants, and virtual listeners acknowledged the horror of illness and death evident all around during the pandemic. While leaders reminded the faithful that hope, faith, and prayer remained, you can hear the strain and weariness in their voices and messages.

Listen as a moment of quiet reverence becomes intertwined with the clangs of church bells and the celebration of Easter joy as different church leaders from across the Internet reflected on life and death, Hear how communities recreate the sounds of Easter by clanging pots and pans on their doorsteps, honking their horns to shout “Hallelujah” in parking lots, and greeting one another via Facebook Live sunrise services. This audio essay features various sounds of Easter during the pandemic, taking you into the solemn prayers of the hopeful, past the halls of empty churches, and into the lives of various virtual and physically-distanced congregations desperate for hope in the time of great peril.

– Amy DeRogatis