Restricted religion. Compliance, vicariousness, and authority during the Corona pandemic in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

The wide-reaching government restrictions in the fight against COVID-19 are compelling religious communities in Switzerland to modify their ritual practice in order to comply with the state's stipulations. With a focus on religious authority following Bourdieu, this paper researches the ritual modifications in the Roman Catholic Church and an Islamic organisation via the three categories of change, shift, and cancellation. Modifications were implemented to avoid the cancellation of public rituals which highlights their importance. As it finally became inevitable, the decision-makers within the two communities were confronted with the need to justify their compliance to state rules within the community and towards the secular outside world. This paper shows that the constitution of religious authority in response to ritual restrictions is dependent on the degree of establishment within the societal context and the division of religious labour in the community.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology of religion
• religious field
• ritual theory
• authority

Acknowledgement

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. We further thank Ben Greet and Alexandra Probst.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Bourdieu understands habitus as an incorporated mode of behaviour that varies according to position in the social world and thus reflects its structured nature (cf. 1990: 66–79).

2 This stands for Vereinigung der Islamischen Organisationen in Zürich (Association of Islamic Organisations in Zurich), which is the largest Islamic umbrella organisation in Switzerland and represents adherents of various Islamic groups, of which the majority are Sunni. Because of the migration context, the various communities are linguistically differentiated, but the boundaries between them are becoming increasingly fluid (cf. Baumann et al. 2019: 24f., 78, 82).

3 The data material originally investigated was significantly larger, whereby documents with no direct relation to modifications were not given any further attention.

4 Focussing on Durkheim's emphasis on the importance of interaction for the formation of solidarity, Collins highlights the significance of bodily presence for religious rituals and is sceptical about the possibility of other ritual forms (cf. Walthert 2020: 196f.). In this understanding, online rituals could never be a full-fledged alternative. However, newly emerging forms of community through online media led to a revival of this discussion (cf. Krüger, Rota 2019: 2–5). Works on religion and the internet use different theoretical and methodological approaches in which the efficacy of online rituals is often viewed differently from Collins’ perspective and the reciprocal influence of online and offline religion is emphasized (cf. Campbell, Evolvi 2019: 7–11).

5 According to Bourdieu, every social field has its own logic (cf. 1992: 104).

6 It can be expected that noncompliance of the laity could be identified in the sample since it would have provoked a reaction by the respective religious authorities as the case of Marian Eleganti demonstrated.

7 Exemplarily, 300 people met in front of a Berlin mosque for Friday prayer in early April which violated state restrictions on assemblies. The imam of the mosque then cooperated with the police to convince the laity to dissolve the gathering and encouraged them to stay at home (cf. Debionne: 4.4.2020). In addtion, as Wildman et al. (2020) show, there are also examples where the laity and the religious authorities jointly opposed state measures. In such cases, religious authorities explicitly supported the maintenance of ritual practice by referring to religious arguments as used by Marian Eleganti.

8 According to the list provided by the national Catholic media centre (and our exploratory research), none of the Catholic parishes in the city of Zurich provided regular online services (cf. Kath-CH: no date). This stands in contrast with findings in Ireland, where a majority of Catholic parishes were offering online services during the pandemic (cf. Ganiel 2020: 17).

9 Most Catholic monasteries had already built an online presence before the pandemic (cf. Jonveaux 2019: 75).

10 A compilation of links to Catholic online services provided by the church through its media centre (cf. Kath-CH: no date) lists the monasteries prominently at the top. They are then followed by comparatively few parishes offering online services and doing so less frequently than the monasteries. The list shows that many parishes were not offering any streaming services at all. Thus, it is to be assumed that if one's own parish did not offer a broadcast, the chances were high that one would turn to a service provided by a monastery, as monasteries figure more prominently in the religious landscape of Switzerland than parishes. Exemplarily, a monk of the Einsiedeln Abbey, which is part of to the Diocese of Chur, stated in an interview that significantly more people tuned into their broadcasts than were otherwise participating in church services (cf. Walther: 15.4.20). When looking at the streaming numbers of the Einsiedeln Abbey on its Youtube-Channel, the number of people watching rose continuously up to a monthly average of 4123 views in April. Numbers peak on Sundays and Holidays whereby the most significant peak is around Easter. On Good Friday, 20’000 views have been registered. The numbers also indicate a decrease in viewings since the end of May, which can be linked to the lifting of the ban on religious services. The monk responsible for the livestreams at Einsiedeln Abbey shared in a personal conversation that some viewers seem to watch the sermons delayed and not in full length. He added that they receive positive feedback and will continue their streaming activity parallel to sermons based on physical copresence. Further research on the behavioural patterns of online participation would be necessary to understand the various ways in which the broadcasts are consumed.

11 Drive-in sermons in the USA (cf. Chow 2020: 28.3.20) or Jewish prayer within a minyan on balconies maintaining eye contact (cf. Frei-Landau 2020: 258f.) show exemplarily compliance through modification of ritual practice.

12 Exemplarily, the Islamic scholar Schulze discusses the consequences of the cancellation of the Hadj by Saudi Arabia for religious authorities (cf. Hulliger 2020: 28.7.20).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Loïc Bawidamann

Loïc Bawidamann and Laura Peter are studying religious studies at the University of Zurich.

Rafael Walthert

Rafael Walthert is professor for religious studies at the University of Zurich.