ABSTRACT
Churches in the United States closed their doors to in-person gatherings during the covid-19 lockdown in March of 2020. As conditions improved, churches began re-opening to indoor worship services, instituting safety measures to comply with cdc guidelines. Churches used social media to promote their re-opening to their congregations. With the goal of evaluating the video messages of churches promoting their re-opening, the study analyzes the content of Facebook videos from non-denominational megachurches between June and October 2020. This qualitative thematic analysis explores how the videos address the threat of covid-19, the risk of attending in-person services, and the efficacy of health and safety measures. The inductive analysis was sensitized by the extended parallel processing model, ritual communication theory, and the concept of security theater. The themes identified have potential implications for future religious and health communication research, especially concerning contentious safety protocols, managing fear and anxiety, liability concerns, livestreaming technology, and more digitally transient congregations. © 2023 Authors. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The global COvID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 required significant ritual adjustment in churches worldwide, particularly the larger ones. It has also provoked theological reflection on the origins on the virus, as well as on what God's Word had to say in response. This article investigates the adjustments and reflections at one Indian megachurch, Bangalore's Full Gospel Assembly of God (FGAG), with special reference to its utilization of a victory-oriented and defiant gospel of divine care, protection, and health. The question that animates this investigation is: Can a gospel of victory and health survive a global pandemic? The answer, somewhat counterintuitively (but in another sense - for those familiar with prosperity theology - not at all) is that it not only survives, but thrives. The article attempts to account for this thriving with reference to two distinctive characteristics of the soft version of the prosperity gospel that are manifest in FGAG's victory gospel, both of which are inculcated through ritual repetition and performance: 1) Its paradoxically simultaneous insistence that the faithful are, by God, already victorious, and that miraculous reversals await those who aren't, and 2) its boldly defiant response to evidence that all is not well..