COVID and Congregations: An Analysis of Religious Messages on Facebook during the Coronavirus Crisis

Abstract

Religious organizations are critical in post-crisis renewal. Less is known about how effective these organizations are during other stages of a crisis. Furthermore, religious organizations’ crisis messages, especially those sent out via social media channels, are understudied in the larger crisis communication literature. This study adopts holism as a theoretical framework when analyzing religious-based crisis messages sent out over Facebook. Holism advocates for sources to appeal to the mind, body, soul, and spirit of their audience. We conducted a first-level, inductive qualitative content analysis to determine underlying themes in the content of the messages. Our analysis has revealed five major themes driven by the content of the messages: (1) sensemaking, (2) informative, (3) encouragement, (4) spiritual disciplines, and (5) “the Christian response.” We, similarly, determined the occurrence of holistic elements present in the messages based on initial coding. The majority of the messages did not contain any holism categories, but the ones which did primarily focused on the spirit. We conclude the article by discussing the limitations of our study and future research directions.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• crisis communication
• holism
• religious communication