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A very useful meditation on COVID and secularization by @C_Stroop. It makes me wonder how much the right-wing theatrics of defiance, the framing of lockdown orders as assaults on religious liberty, are themselves counter-secularization tactics. https://religiondispatches.org/will-the-pandemic-hasten-the-decline-of-christianity-or-is-it-americas-best-hope-for-a-religious-revival/
There's a sense in which the ostentatious heightening of tension with government gins up a kind of crude spiritual frisson -- as if the specter of persecution is really the final bulwark of religious commitment.
And that staging religion's putative immunity from common sense public health measures reproduces the tension with liberal democratic modern life that looms so large in conservative religious identity.
(What is interesting is that anti-lockdown protests which treat not being apple to go to church and not being able to go to Applebees as equivalent tyrannies actually undermine this logic, which needs to insist that religious liberty is "the first freedom")
