How will Covid Change the Church?

 

Nicole Archambeau, Associate Professor of History, Colorado State University, has written an interesting essay entitled " Penance and plague: How the Black Death changed one of Christianity's most important rituals."   https://news.yahoo.com/penance-plague-black-death-changed-120952584.html   and  https://theconversation.com/penance-and-plague-how-the-black-death-changed-one-of-christianitys-most-important-rituals-177193


It has caused me to wonder how, in years to come, we will see all the ways Covid has changed the Church.

Philosophically, the Black Plague caused a shift in perspectives on reality. Instead of seeing persons as imaging God--unique particulars participating in a community, and seeking the common good--Europeans started to see human beings as individuals--autonomous "billiard balls on the pool table of life." That individualism has been snowballing to this very day: from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to Spencer's "survival of the fittest" to Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, postmodernism.

It remains to be seen where Covid will take us, philosophically and theologically, but I think that it has already paradoxically increased hyper-individualism while simultaneously increasing tribalism. When there is no longer such a thing as persons who seek to image the divine community, human beings will still yearn for it, and seek a substitute, by collecting themselves tribally around political or social figures and topics. In the past, that was called idolatry.