Weaponization of Faith

Abstract

Over the past six months, COVID-19 has had a disparate impact on the populations of Durham, North Carolina, and the United States in general. Economically, North Carolina is teetering on the edge of collapse, and many businesses have closed down. Families are suffering from illness, food insecurity, violence, lack of resources, inaccessible education and healthcare, and other disparities contributing to their overall loss of quality of life. The long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have yet to be seen. The weaponization of the church universal and partisan politicization of COVID-19 through white Christian nationalism in the United States increased pressure along economic, geographic, and racial divides, leaving communities devastated. The defunding and discrediting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the historical disenfranchisement of indigenous and Black communities, racialized incarceration, and detention of children and families seeking political asylum, led to mass outbreaks with little to no state or spiritual resources. This chapter explores the theoethical and social implications of the role of the church during this pandemic as well as how decolonizing faith and relying on past traditions, womanism, and liberation theologies can help the church re-embrace a necessary ethic of care. This chapter will posit that a well-developed theology of care at the grassroots level is both a tradition of the church universal and a spiritual formation of endurance and resistance in times of crisis and suffering, reflecting the theodicy of a loving, inclusive, healing God who suffers alongside God’s people.