I take it as an enormous blessing we inhabit a world as prosperous and as peaceful as we do. You may not think so from the headlines, but humanity is actually doing a lot better than it has than at virtually any other point. Cyclical famines of the kind that used to end civilizations have become rare, both mother and child can survive the birthing process quite predictably, and one of the deadliest infectious diseases on the planet, smallpox, has been reduced to a curiosity in a lab. We can move people, money, and goods in times orders of magnitude faster than our ancestors could. And ever since COVID-19 came on the scene, so much of this has ground to a near halt. Above all, the virus has reacquainted us with death in ways that none of us predicted.
In some ways, COVID-19 is just another infectious illness. It has identifiable symptoms, and it disproportionately claims the elderly as its victims. But the complications that have appeared as far as how to contain it and how to treat it are something else indeed. Many people die of the flu every year, and yet we don’t go into nearly the kind of panic that the coronavirus has, and why is that? Because the flu is a known quantity, we know how to vaccinate against it, and we know how to treat it. Influenza has been controllable and somewhat predictable for a while now. COVID-19 is not, and may not be for a long time. Part of what scares people about this is that when younger, healthier people do contract it, the best way to manage it is not yet entirely known, and if there is one thing we hate, it is unknowns.
Among other things, the virus has thrown back into focus just how unpredictable life is, and how capricious it can be with respect to our deaths. COVID may not kill with the speed or ferocity of maladies like smallpox or the plague, but it has quite effectively dented the developed world’s seeming indifference to the ever-presence of death. What was once known is now unknown, what was constant is now variable. The contradictory and constantly changing advice from authorities at least theoretically knowledgeable on such things has not helped matters. People who we thought knew what they were doing, it is now readily apparent, are no less error-prone than the rest of us. Time was we could safely presume our deaths were at some point in the distant future, but that luxury many can no longer afford.
For most of us, death is no longer an immanent aspect of our lives, and this has profoundly affected how we approach it. From our current standpoint, we no longer appreciate that our forebears lived in world saturated by death. Women died in childbirth, children died extremely young, bad weather could ruin the harvest and cause a famine. Physical injuries now easily treatable were then life-threatening. It should not surprise us, then, that much of religion, and Christianity specifically, focused on how to prepare oneself for death. Because it is easy to think of death as something we can put off, preparing ourselves for it can extend little further than estate planning, but if you lived at a time when you could die at almost any moment, the disposition of your soul in the here and now became highly significant. It is hard to read the history of the Black Death without getting the impression people were constantly stalked by the ever-presence of death because they in fact were in an almost literal sense.
In a very real way, this affects the church too. Churches once required very strict penance to maintain right standing. This had something to do with aspects of atonement theology and the role of the church in the lives of parishioners, but this also had to do with the church’s need to reinforce that not only is sin wicked, but that it has real consequences for real people in a real world. Systems of penance reinforced the reality of sin, and in theory at least, helped people correct their sinful behavior. If you can die at any moment, you need to correct course now. By the later medieval period this had become abused to the point that it was arguably counter-productive – the Reformation did not come out of nowhere – but the point still stands that a shepherd who guards a flock in immediate peril of going over a cliff leads them in a fashion altogether different from one whose flock grazes in pastures guarded by wolf-seeking missile launchers. It is no coincidence that much of American Christianity has become a self-help gospel. The Prosperity Gospel did not appear out of nowhere either; it appeals to those more concerned about money than death because that is who the American Christian is right now.
The self-evident vices of medieval Christianity should caution us against returning to it, but I do think that the COVID crisis should function as a wake-up call for the church. What are our priorities, and are those the priorities of the scriptures? Are we teaching what we teach to help people lead a comfortable life now, or so that they can attain the next? Is our gospel one for those who already count themselves righteous, or for those who need to know that they are not? For all of their differences with each other, one thing our ancestors have in common is that they are dead. That will one day be true of all of us, and the church ought to act like it.