‘We Are Children of God’: An Ethnography of a Catholic Community in Rural China in the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Academic studies of the relationship between religion and pandemics have been emerging since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of these studies have been conducted in Euro-American contexts, with little attention paid to non-Western cases. This article provides a local case study from China, the earliest epicenter of the pandemic. The study focused on a Catholic community in rural China, Little Rome, through the lens of lived religion, exploring the relationship between religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants in our ethnographic study indicated that the Church plays an essential role in responding to the pandemic. In contrast to conventional studies of lived religion, in this ethnographic study on Catholicism in China, we contend that while the study of the lived experience of individuals is central to the lived-religion approach, more attention needs to be paid to the role of religious institutions such as the church, which mediate relations between individuals, society, and other social institutions. This article also argues that investigating different places and cultures can provide rich data for understanding the dynamic and diverse relationship between religion and the pandemic.