Dear Readers,
Why are churches disproportionately in the news as superspreaders? Is it because there’s something that makes a church risky to your health? It’s clickbait for the principalities and powers (Google, Facebook, Twitter), but one good explanation is that we sing in churches and singing aerosolizes. We get that. Here’s another reason: data sets. A customer buying Cowgirl Creamery Triple Cream cheese (worth every penny) at Woodlands Market or another picking up a bottle of 2012 Freemark Abbey cabernet sauvignon at the exclusive club that my wife and I belong to are epidemiologically speaking anonymous and therefore impossible to contact trace. Unlike Woodlands or Costco, churches are thick communities.
This is the unconsidered reason churches are overrepresented in Covid news. People who otherwise might have none of the usual affinities — academic (church is not the Yale Club), economic, professional, racial, recreational — gather together in peace to love God and love their neighbor, and because they do they know each other by name and look after one other. That makes churches manifestly weird in a consumerist culture. And it makes them low-hanging fruit for contact tracing.
So, readers. You can look at worship-associated virus outbreaks and regard churches as creepy places to be avoided and condescended to, or you can do something kinda rare on social media. You can think. Here’s a thought: were American society at large as thick a community as churches are then the contact tracing necessary to bring this virus under control would have been done a long time ago.
Just putting a good word in for the institution that invented hospitals when the world wasn’t interested and thought caring for the sick a waste of time.
Faithfully,
The Management