ESSAY:

Religious Tourism during COVID

COVID-19 and its associated quarantine measures not only changed how people practiced religion; it also changed where they practiced and with whom. In the materials people submitted to our project, it wasn’t uncommon for people to celebrate with communities where they didn’t typically participate. This map shows a snapshot of only a few of these examples: people from multiple locations participating in worship at Central Synagogue in New York, a woman in Vermont listening to the Easter service live stream from the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, a woman in Spokane, WA listening to a calligraphy lesson in the UK. [Explore the points on the map to see/hear other examples. On smaller screens you may need to scroll left or right to see all the points.]

Show Singh Memorial
Wall mounted television over fireplace, showing Chris Matthews and Joel Osteen on Fox News
Chris Wallace interviews Joel Osteen on Fox News. Photo by Skylar Berlin.
All of these materials raised a question: where were these virtually-connected events actually happening? Were they happening where the individual listener was? Were they happening where the person speaking was? Or were they somehow simultaneously happening in both places and neither, in a religio-sonic form of quantum entanglement? Our main archive includes a map of the various religious sounds we have collected over the years, but that visualization is predicated on the recordist and the other people celebrating being co-located. Examples like these, where that is not the case, throw a wrench into that portion of our research model. So what might a map of these sorts of interactions look like?

We made the specific choice to center the listener on this map. True, the Washington National Cathedral and Central Synagogue and other religious organizations are broadcasting out, but at the same time they have no idea who – if anyone – is going to tune in. They are simply putting these sounds out into the universe, and it is up to the listener to go out and find it. Therefore on our map, on the lines connecting the listener to the thing-listened-to, the arrows indicate the direction of the listening. An arrow out from the site of a broadcast would imply that, for instance, was being done for the specific benefit of a person in Issaqah, WA, rather than that person in Washington reaching out to find the recording from NYU. In cases like , there was reciprocal listening between Osteen in Houston and host Chris Wallace, but one-directional listening from recordist Skylar Berlin (in Rockford, MI) to the two men.

One particularly interesting recording (which we are highlighting in a separate exhibit) was a Sikh memorial service held on Zoom. That service, for Raminder Singh Bajaj, was nominally conducted by Col. Harjit Singh Bhagat from Delhi. Participants, however, came from many different locations, including five other Indian cities, Dubai, Singapore, San Francisco, New York, Houston, Lansing MI, and two sites in the UK. All participants spoke, giving eulogies and sharing stories. Rather than a few discrete nodes, this memorial was more of a mesh – a network of people listening and talking. [Use the toggle switch on the map to display this network.] As an aside, one thing we decided not to depict was the vast network of invisible nodes that connected recordists to the sounds they recorded. Many of these events were streamed live via Facebook, Skype, Zoom, YouTube, or other services. As a result, the paths between listener and religious community were not straight lines, but rather winding ones, with connection points at any of the dozens of server farms scattered around the world.

Despite their invisibility, however, those intervening nodes are audible, often through interruption or interference. The distortion in the recordings of the and the were introduced as those sounds were compressed, moved between online nodes, and played through tinny laptop speakers. Even when all participants were in relatively close physical proximity, as in the Winding Road Coven cone of power Lauren Pond discusses in her essay, the lag introduced by virtual “hops” around the country transformed the practice from unified to disjointed.

By complicating the question of where these religious practices were taking place, these recordings also troubled the very idea of American religious sounds. We chose the most inclusive approach, wherein if any portion of the network existed within North America, the sound could be considered “American.” Thus, for our purposes, the recording of the (recorded from Russia) was considered an American religious sound, but so too was the recording of a at Cambridge Muslim College in the UK, because of the listener’s position in the US.

Finally, the COVID initiative called attention to the silences produced when religion moves online. There were many elements of religious practice – even solitary practice but especially in groups – that could not be heard in these recordings. In many of the recordings, other worshippers were inaudible. Backchannel discussions had moved into text chat, where their sonic presence was reduced to the . The ambient sounds of celebration were often silenced as well: empty pews do not creak, and if a child fussed during an online service, the mute feature would prevent other participants from hearing. Perhaps more important: some whole communities were rendered silent to our recordists: groups without the financial means or technical know-how to stream a service; groups who chose to ignore COVID risks and meet in person; groups whose celebrations were held in private online meetings; and groups who were unable to meet at all.

Beyond its implications for our particular project, COVID should make us reconsider how we think about sound and religion in general, as well as how we practice religion post-pandemic. How much practice will remain online? Will religious groups expand how they think about “community,” to incorporate virtual as well as physical space in a way that mimics other online communities? Will they grow beyond geographic borders, or become more Balkanized, drawing in only those who specifically seek them out, or both? Which religious practices will have their sounds amplified online, which will become distorted through the change of medium, and which will be silenced altogether?

– Alison Furlong
Open laptop, showing video from Washington National Cathedral on the left and a chat dialog on the right
Video window and chat for Easter services at Washington National Cathedral. Photo by J. Caroline Toy.
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