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Religion in 2021

Religion in 2021

Last updated on: December 28, 2021 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Religion in 2021 2021-12-27T15:12:38-05:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Year of Our Lord 2021 was a telling time for religion.

The Bible was used by both sides of the COVID wars. According to the online Bible study resource BibleGateway, the verse that saw the biggest jump in users looking it up was Leviticus 13:45-46:

Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as they have the disease they remain unclean. They must live alone; they must live outside the camp. (NIV)

From the Levitical laws about leprosy, people concluded, “See! Wearing masks to prevent infection is Biblical! So is social distancing! So is quarantining!” (See the other translations.)

Then again, the search term that saw the biggest jump of 2021 was “sorcery.” This is because the Greek word for that forbidden practice in Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 18:23 is pharmakeia, which is also the source of our words for “pharmacy,” “pharmaceuticals,” and thus “Big Pharma.” Sorcerers used potions, which included drugs and herbal medicine, so the word got transferred to modern medicines. In 2021, some Christians used the prohibition against pharmakeia, as in sorcery, as a prohibition against pharmaceuticals, as in vaccines.

Both of these COVID readings would seem to reflect the attempt to use the Bible to justify one’s own positions. That is, trying to find Bible verses that can prove that I am right. As opposed to the proper use of the Bible, to show just how wrong I am, convicting me of my sinful and lost condition, and then bringing me to the good news of God’s grace and forgiveness in Christ. We are all sinful and unclean from the leprosy of sin, but Christ heals lepers like us by having mercy on us and bringing us to faith (See Luke 17:11-19).

And we are unable to avoid the “works of the flesh”–“sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these” (Gal 19-21)–just by refusing to get a vaccine. The flesh must be crucified with Christ: “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (5:24).

But such conflation of the sacred with the secular characterized much of the way religion was perceived in 2021, both by its critics and its practitioners.

The Religion News Association, comprised of the nation’s reporters who cover religion, named President Joe Biden as “the religion newsmaker of the year,” both for his overt Catholicism and his rejection of Catholic teaching about abortion. The top story was that “Religion features prominently during the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump insurrectionists. Some voice Christian prayers, while others display Christian or pagan symbols and slogans inside and outside the Capitol.”

But was there really a substantive connection between religion and the January 6 Capitol riots? Notice how even in a story slamming Christians with guilt by association, there is the obligatory interfaith ecumenism: Christians prayers and symbols are complemented with “pagan symbols and slogans.” I haven’t seen any articles on how pagans were complicit in electing Donald Trump and in staging an insurrection to keep him in office, but that story begs to be written. That both pagans and Christians were on the same side suggests that the riots were not a religious exercise, much less an evangelical venture, since Christianity and paganism don’t mix. (See the entry before “sorcery” in the list of “works of the flesh,” above.)

See the rest of the top 10 religion stories of the year, which mostly focuses on politics, COVID controversies, and scandals. Another retrospective, presenting more of a viewpoint from inside the church, comes from Collen Hansen of the Gospel Coalition, My Top 10 Theology Stories of 2021. The list has some of the same entries as the Religious News Association list. For example, Hansen too rates the Capitol riots as the number one story, but as an example of the curious theological development of Christian nationalism. He also has things to say about the scandals and other divisions splitting Baptists and other evangelicals. I appreciated his observation that debates within these circles have led to a rediscovery of the church fathers in evangelicalism (a healthy development, in my opinion) and to his thoughts about how some “trend-setting pastors” are embracing the metaverse as a way to do church (an unhealthy development, in my opinion).

The big religious developments of 2021, though, are not what makes the news or defines institutional trends. Rather, they have to do with what is unseen–faith wrought by the Holy Spirit in an infant who is baptized; receiving Christ’s body and blood; loving and serving one’s neighbor in vocation; and other mighty realities that evade quantification. “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Photo: D.C. Capitol Storming by TapTheForwardAssist, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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