Is it just me or did the pandemic break the Church? Actually, I don't think it just broke the Church. I think on a broader level, it broke community, at least in-person society.
First, credit where credit is due, the pandemic is one area that I see the Church as handling relatively well. At the time it occurred, our stake president (who was a medical professional) immediately put health first. In person meetings were cancelled. Full building disinfection was done. Masks, gloves and hand-sanitizer were provided when meetings resumed on a limited basis, and Zoom meetings are still an option in that stake so that immunocompromised and elderly ward members and anyone who is just sick that week does not feel obligated to attend in person and either infect themselves or others. I realize that this wasn't the case in all stakes and wards, but it was what I saw. (I've also seen gluten free sacrament options provided in my last four wards, for over a decade now).
Pres. Nelson's public endorsement of the vaccine was another strength, especially when compared with the oddball Evangelical sects that were licking toilet seats at Church to show their defiance. The example all of our church leaders set in wearing masks and social distancing, and in general, taking the pandemic seriously was a positive. After all, most of them are in the target age group for Covid mortality. I realize that there were vaccine hesitant or even anti-vax members at Church, including some who utterly refused to wear masks even when asked, but that's not what broke us, at least not in my opinion. Every ward has a few brash self-centered people. We've endured worse.
What broke us is the community-busting act of going through a pandemic. Suddenly, we had to avoid human contact. Rather than going into restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes, churches, schools, and the workplace, we hunkered down. Online communities became a much bigger source of human contact. We couldn't read facial expressions as well as we used to. We were able to avoid social contacts that were obligations before.
When the announcement was made that church was cancelled, at first it reminded me of how it felt when I was a kid and church was cancelled due to snow. A snow day from Church was as good as a snow day from school! The routine was interrupted. We all shared the experience of ... not sharing the experience. It was like normal life was being skipped, and we could do something else, like read a book or do a puzzle or play family games or bake something or garden. That's how it felt the first few weeks.
As time went on, though, I was surprised at the sense of calm and relief I felt. It was like setting down a heavy suitcase and realizing how much it had been hurting my shoulder to carry it. I wasn't eager to pick it back up. My life moved on. My time was spent on other things. I didn't have to help put on activities or teach lessons. I didn't have to wake up my kids for school, or worse, seminary. I didn't have to sit on hard, cold folding chairs for two hours. I didn't have to listen to mind-numbingly boring content that mostly consisted of mundane quotes from mediocre talks. I didn't have to listen to people pretend that these threadbare quotes were amazing. I didn't have to talk to people who had no interest in me or my life beyond the church. I didn't have to pretend to care about people who also didn't have to pretend to care about me.
This "break" occurred across all facets of life: work (everyone immediately was working from home, isolated), school (our high school senior was told "Everyone will just graduate with whatever you've done so far; the rest of the school year didn't really matter"), and any other social obligations (no eating out, reduced shopping, no movies, not using much gas even). There were some of those things I missed more than others, but on the whole I was glad that there were fewer social obligations.
After a month or so, I started to feel starved for social contact. I started to go out of my way to visit some of my friends and neighbors, albeit with social distancing and outside. But these weren't necessarily church friends, and I was still content to keep all contacts to a minimum. This probably just means I'm an introvert, but I really did enjoy many of the friendships with people at Church over the years. I just didn't miss them as much as I would have expected, given how important they seemed at the time.
Valerie Hamaker, in her Latter-day Struggles podcast, talks about the concept of superficial relationships at Church. Too often, especially in a high demand environment, the relationships are not really about the people involved. They are about the high demands. This concept is familiar if you ever had a seminary teacher tell you that a "true" marriage is one between two people and God, in which as they draw nearer to God, they naturally draw closer to one another. In essence, this is describing two separate relationships (with God? with oneself?), not a relationship between two people, and guess what happens if one of the two people leaves the Church? No relationship remains. It's a recipe for feeling like a commodity rather than a person in a relationship, interchangeable with any more devout stranger if you step out of line or your beliefs change, which Pres. Kimball put so well when he said that any "worthy" young man could marry any "worthy" young woman successfully if they were both faithful. You aren't really a person so much as an idea to your partner. While this is terrifying in one's most intimate relationship, where we want to be seen and valued for who we are, it is often equally true in one's larger social circle.
So when ward members suddenly couldn't be around each other anymore, the superficial nature of some of our relationships made it clear that we really didn't have much reason to think about one another absent the construct of church attendance. Those social bonds were revealed to be weak. On top of that, the rituals and activities that used to create those bonds, that now couldn't happen were easily discarded and downplayed. For example, we were told that for single women (60% of the Relief Society sisters are single), it didn't really matter that they couldn't take the sacrament because they didn't have a priesthood holder in their home. After a lifetime of being told that it was the most important reason to be at church weekly, it was simply shrugged off. Apparently it was a placebo, for women at least. The Church was for men, and married women sort of. The rest were expendible, which exposed the myth-making.
As we continued in our little tiny silos, we filled our need for social contact either within the home or online, places where it was safe. That isolation led to further polarization as well as conspiracy-mindedness, and an erosion in empathy toward those who are less familiar or whose values differ from our own. And here we are.
- Was this similar to your experience during the pandemic and coming out of it? How did your experience differ?
- Has your attitude toward social settings changed as a result of the pandemic? In what way?
- Do you feel that relationships at Church are often superficial? Are there some that are time-tested for you? Which ones and why are they more lasting than others?
- Do you wish we could go back to our pre-pandemic way?
Discuss.
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