Churches can help fight COVID

THE ESSENCE OF

RELATIONSHIPS

AND CREDIBILITY

IS TRUST. — JIVANI

Churches are not like restaurants or shopping malls. Nor are they just another event venue with four walls and a roof. People turn to their church for faith, community, counselling, jobs, food, education, health care and spiritual development. Yes, public health restrictions on churches have been necessary during the pandemic, and will continue to be. Nonetheless, churches shouldn't be lumped in with businesses and non-profits. They're unique, and our constitutional right to freedom of religion underscores that reality.

All of the above could also be said for other places of worship.

As we celebrate Christmas — or, otherwise enjoy time with family this week — we ought to reconsider the role of churches and other places of worship in fighting this pandemic. These days, you typically hear public health officials talk about churches when it comes to lockdowns.

And reporters only ask about churches if there's drama to cover, such as a lawsuit or an instance of civil disobedience.

But churches can actually help us fight this pandemic. And our political leaders and public health officials should accept the help, since they need all the help that they can get.

In certain Canadian cities and suburbs, COVID transmission rates are persisting, despite lockdown efforts, revealing that there are hot spots across Canada where the pandemic is having an acutely harsh impact. Many of these hot spots overlap with working and middle-class neighbourhoods, home to front-line workers from a diversity of cultural and ethnic minority communities. As the data indicate, our governments, including public health agencies, don't have the relationships and credibility needed to quickly make a difference in these hot spots. And this is going to be an even bigger problem when it comes to national and provincial vaccination strategies.

The essence of relationships and credibility is trust. Public health officials hoping to distribute vaccines can't expect to be easily trusted in neighbourhoods where governments have historically failed to provide adequate services, including health care. If you send your child to a failing public school, and see no economic opportunity for him or her, why would you easily assume that the tax collector now has your best interests in mind when it shows up with a vaccine?

Governments can't buy trust in these neighbourhoods by simply pouring more money into public health agencies. At least, not right now, when time is of the essence. Federal and provincial leaders need to broaden their partnerships to include leaders who are already trusted by families living in hot spots. Politicians and bureaucrats should work closer with organizations that have the requisite relationships and credibility to have an impact on the ground.

That's where churches and other places of worship come in.

Churches are community hubs, where people of different walks of life similarly turn to for a network of support, information and encouragement. Many churches are ingrained into their neighbourhoods, supporting the very front line workers and families who public health agencies are struggling to communicate with.

University of Texas at Austin Prof. Michael Lind articulates the importance of churches in his most recent book, The New Class War. Lind argues that churches have been where the working class exercises their voice. In addition to unions and other membership-based organizations, according to Lind's historical analysis, churches are where relationships and credibility among working families have converged into political, cultural and economic power.

If governments want to better engage frontline workers and families, they ought to partner with churches to help with communications and messaging concerning the pandemic, as well as the planning and execution of a vaccination strategy.

Standing in the way of such partnerships is the need for governments to reconsider their attitudes toward churches and other places of worship. Currently, our federal and provincial officials don't have an explicit public strategy to engage churches, nor do they include faith communities in their vaccine task forces or similar initiatives. Indeed, most if not all of our jurisdictions lack a ministry or department specifically tasked with co-ordinating church-government partnerships. Right now, if you're a faith leader looking to speak to your federal or provincial government, it's not even clear where to start.

Christmas 2020 will be unlike any we've seen before. But the importance of humility, a key lesson to be learned from the birth of God's son in a stable, is timeless. We'd all benefit from thinking about how we could be more humble next year. But, given the spread of the coronavirus, our political leaders and public health officials would especially benefit from humbly recognizing their own limitations, and reconsidering how churches can help us fight this pandemic.

WHERE PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT WALKS OF LIFE SIMILARLY TURN TO FOR A NETWORK OF SUPPORT.