FRACTURE IN FAITH
The pandemic widened fissures that caused Christians like Trey Medley to leave their church.
Dennis Whitworth did not take lightly his departure from the church he called home for two decades.
His disillusionment predated the pandemic. In the years before COVID-19 shuttered churches across the nation, the 64-year-old often disagreed with some of the politics he encountered at Second Baptist Church of Houston, one of the nation’s largest congregations.
Nonetheless, he opted to continue with the Bible study classes he’d taught for five years, believing political differences shouldn’t trump saving souls.
Then came COVID-19 and, soon after, church policies that Whitworth said made him feel unsafe.
And so, after a quartercentury at Second, he left.
“My association with the church was a huge part of what I did, and so it’s painful,” he said. “But I’m not the only one.”
The 2020 presidential election had already exposed serious fissures in many parts of American Christianity, fractures that were further deepened as COVID-19 ravaged communities and shuttered many congregations, thousands of them permanently.
Meanwhile, vaccine hesitancy or skepticism remain high among Christians, particularly white Protes
tants in more rural and conservative parts of the country that experts fear will remain unprotected and vulnerable to new and more contagious strains of the virus.
That’s not a surprising trend, said Kira Ganga Kieffer, who researches vaccines and religious movements at Boston University. White evangelicals have for decades been skeptical of vaccines, namely when they’re accompanied by fears of government involvement.
That resistance has usually been rooted in moral concerns, she said, noting the HPV vaccine that some Christians thought would make teens more likely to have sex.
Pushback against COVID has been particularly fierce, she said, because of the proliferation of conspiracy theories, online disinformation and “culture war” rhetoric, particularly in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election.
“Tribal lines have been drawn,” she said.
Recent survey data bolster that claim. From January to May, the share of unvaccinated evangelicals who said they were “very unlikely” to get the vaccine doubled to 43 percent, according to a recent analysis of Data for Progress polling by Eastern Illinois University political science professor Ryan Burge.
About 36 percent of Catholics said the same, a 14 percentage point increase since January.
And polling by the Pew Research Center found Republican-leaning Christians were “far more comfortable than Democrats” with resuming normal church life “sooner rather than later.”
Essential?
That much was clear in Texas last spring, in the wake of an executive order by Gov. Greg Abbott that closed most businesses and houses of worship.
The order sparked outcry from conservatives, as well as a lawsuit filed by groups that had also challenged the constitutionality of Harris County Judge
Lina Hidalgo’s stay-at-home orders and business closures.
Abbott soon changed course, deeming churches as “essential” but limiting services to 25 percent capacity.
Within a few weeks, the Archdiocese of GalvestonHouston had resumed Masses on a limited capacity; Second Baptist reopened limited services, with social distancing and recommendations that people wear masks, on
May 10, Mother’s Day Weekend
Many other large congregations remained closed, including Joel Osteen’s massive Lakewood Church. An interdenominational group of more than 80 Christian churches from around the Houston area also signed a statement they would not hold inperson services in May.
It was around that time Whitworth began to question whether he should stay at Second, where he said he often encountered “anti-mask” sentiment. He also took issue with the church’s decision to reopen, which he said drew in many elderly people at high-risk for COVID-19.
“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
Second Baptist declined comment, but a spokesperson provided the Chronicle with various COVID protocols from May and June of 2020 that called for social distancing and limited worship services, but no mask mandates.
Whitworth now attends weekly services at a Methodist church.
It does not yet feel like home. “I’ve just had to kind of start over,” he said.
‘Do no harm’
Most churches have gradually moved back to in-person worship and, with that, welcomed those in search of a new church home.
That includes those such as Trey Medley. He recently left Houston Northwest Church in search of a more egalitarian church that allows for the ordination of women. The church’s response to COVID was a factor as well, he said.
His wife has asthma and so they were particularly cautious during the pandemic. Houston Northwest’s protocols, Medley said, were “just a little bit ahead” of the couple’s comfort level. He added that he left the church on good terms.
Medley and his family now worship at South Main Baptist Church, in downtown Houston.
One selling point? The church’s COVID protocols, which included vows to “follow the advice of the medical community” and a reminder that “churches are not like businesses.”
“We must strive to do no harm,” the church’s website still reads.
In early May, South Main also released a survey of congregants over the age of 16, of which 89 percent said they were fully vaccinated.
That vaccination rate would put South Main congregants far above the averages for both Harris County and Texas, both of which had vaccinated half of all residents older than 12 as of this week.
‘Prophetic voice’
Dr. Timothy Sloan said he felt slightly traumatized as he read reports of a COVID-19 outbreak at a Houston-area church’s camp in late June.
Seventeen months after the beginning of the pandemic, his congregation, The Luke Church in Humble, has yet to resume full services. The church camp outbreak reinforced the need for precautions, he said.
“It kind of triggered the trauma and caused us to be mindful,” Sloan said of the Clear Creek outbreak.
The Luke’s members are mostly Black, and many were initially skeptical of vaccines in part because of the historic abuse of Black Americans under the guise of federal health initiatives, such as the Tuskegee Experiments, he said.
In January, Sloan hosted a video call with Dr. Anthony Fauci as a way to persuade his and other congregations to trust vaccines. Since then, Sloan said, many in his pews have shed their suspicions and gotten inoculated.
He’s proud of his role in helping keep people safe. And he sympathizes with the many church leaders who, in the last two years, have been thrust into the middle of congregational disagreements on COVID, former President Donald Trump or systemic racism, among other contentious issues.
Sloan said he often finds himself battling misinformation that his congregants read on social media, and sometimes feels caught in a “tug of war” between the wants, needs and safety of his congregation, particularly at a time of the “double grief ” of COVID and racial upheaval felt by many minority Christians.
“My role is to be a prophetic voice,” he said. “It is to speak truth to power.”
Pastors, he said, need to confront those disagreements within their pews — particularly in a time of great misinformation.
“Because so many of us are coming back not just with excitement to worship, but with the grief of a past season,” he said. “And that can’t be denied.”