In the US some conservative religious communities have ignored government regulations aimed at stemming the spread of Covid-19. Some Evangelical churches, educational institutions and places of business were determined to remain open. Some very observant Jewish communities in the United States were also slow to respond to social distancing orders. In one case a prominent religious leader of the Satmar community, who first instructed his followers to continue to study and pray together, was himself diagnosed with the virus. But things seem even stranger elsewhere. In Me’a She’arim, an observant Jewish neighborhood in Israel, the residents cursed and threw stones at police who came to enforce social distancing regulations.
Outsiders are outraged when religious communities flout government regulations that are supposed to protect the general public. But we know that people give meaning to their experiences in different ways. Some ways of knowing the world have been denigrated as “backward” or “irrational” by secular Western forms of knowledge. But secular ways of life may be considered decadent and immoral from a religious point of view, not to mention empirically harmful. “Modern” ways of life create wide differentials in wealth and dignity among people, destroy irreplaceable natural resources, and poison the earth in myriad ways that are fatal to the ecosystems of the Earth that supports us all. Our aggressive encroachment into new ecosystems is one of the reasons we face increasing threat from pandemic disease in the first place.
So it’s worth thinking about why we end up blaming minority populations for endangering our health. In Jewish communities, most prominent rabbis ultimately supported government health regulations even though some Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) communities had been defying the orders. Many were opposed to closing down their places of study and worship. As a result, the virus has been spreading in ultra-Orthodox communities in the United States and in Israel.
