On Friday, March 13, 2020, while working out in the university fitness center, I received two successive notifications on my phone. The first was that the U.S. president had declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency. The second was that the NCAA had canceled “March Madness” for the first time since its inception in 1939.
Two days before, Baylor University, where I was employed, had announced it would extend spring break by a week due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While I already had some idea it was serious, these notifications elevated my awareness of how historic the global phenomenon would be.
Four weeks later, I was preaching at the funeral of a family member who had died after contracting the virus. His was the first recorded death from COVID-19 in Smith County, Texas.
In that first month, Smith County, the largest East Texas county north of the Houston area, only reported two COVID-related fatalities. McLennan County, Texas, where I live, had similarly low death counts during that time.
However, America’s large metropolitan areas, particularly in the North, were being ravaged with hundreds of daily deaths and thousands of critically ill patients fighting for their lives in hospitals. Even considering factors like scale and lagging tracking data in rural areas, cities like New York and Washington D.C. disproportionately suffered in those early days.
Because of this, residents of the Sun Belt had already grown weary of pandemic-related restrictions within weeks of their introduction. Parties quickly resumed.
“It’s just the flu” flooded Facebook comments. I began to see photos of friend groups gathering with captions like, “I love our bubble,” before scrolling down and seeing some of the same people in different “bubbles.”
Without proper formation, it is challenging to take anything seriously when it doesn’t affect you. One of the greatest failures of the public health community at that time was assuming that the public had been exposed to and formed by the scientific method’s trial-and-error nature.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, we were told to cover our coughs and sneezes in the crook of our elbows and use hand sanitizer often. (Confession: When Baylor indefinitely closed down the building I worked in during the early hoarding days, I “borrowed” several industrial-sized bottles of hand sanitizer from the school to store in my home.) By mid-April, we were told to maintain social distance and wear a mask–any mask. By summer, the specifications for masks that slowed the spread of the virus had narrowed.
With each new directive came new doubts. Many wondered, “Do these people even know what they are talking about?”
This was a failure of formation. Without the constant reminder that scientific information is conditional and that new information requires new guidance, large segments of the population were left unmoored.
Nefarious actors and systems took advantage of this. Chief among them was a capitalist machine that requires human sacrifice to survive.
In this instance, the burden for this sacrifice fell on the most vulnerable among us. To avert our attention and assuage our guilt, we renamed these people “essential workers” and thanked them for their service. Their deaths were also a failure of formation.
With more accumulated wealth than any nation in history has ever known, we could have figured out a way to adapt our systems to allow for the flourishing of all people. But we haven’t been formed to believe that is a possibility. Our formation assumes bodies must be sacrificed on the altar of the economy.
By October 2021, we had a safe and effective vaccine and knew how to slow the spread of the virus, even in its newer mutated forms. Still, at one point during that wave, an average of 6 people died daily of COVID-19 in Smith County, Texas. Similar numbers occurred in regions across the United States with lower vaccination rates.
In the year and a half from the beginning of the pandemic until the fall of 2021, more formation had occurred. Although some marginalized communities had historical reasons to be leery of vaccines, others had formed a mistrust due to misinformation.
Formation happens all around us. In our context, the most consequential formation occurs in religious communities.
During the fall of 2021 rise in COVID-19 deaths that occurred disproportionately in red states, I watched the online worship service of a church I had once briefly been a part of. Since the beginning of the pandemic, this small congregation had buried at least 8 of its members as a result of the virus, including an elderly couple and one of the church’s ministers.
A friend of mine with family members in the congregation told me that many in the church had refused the vaccine and had never taken any precautions against the spread of the virus. Attempting to make sense of the most recent death, the pastor asked everyone in the congregation to pray.
He said, “If you are comfortable,” before inviting them to the front of the sanctuary. Everyone went up.
In a county with extremely low vaccination rates, none wore a mask. This played itself out in numerous congregations across the nation.
So much formation led to that moment: a distrust of public health experts, nurtured by an inability of those experts to adapt to this distrust; constant drumbeats of a “faith over fear” mantra that equated caution with unfaithfulness; the belief that if a pastor asks you to do something, it must be the right thing to do; an inability to be alone.
Within the next month, at least one more funeral would take place at that church, and several more would be hospitalized.
Five years later, we have yet to wrap our minds around the scale of destruction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We pretend we knew then what we know now and act as if nothing happened. Our churches, families and public institutions have been irrevocably altered.
The destruction didn’t begin on Friday, March 13th, 2020. It had been nurtured for generations before and will require generations of formation to reverse.
But if destruction can be the result of formation, so can resurrection.