Abstract
This is an introduction to a special issue on researching religions in societies emerging from COVID-19, namely the Global North contexts of Canada, Germany, Ireland/Northern Ireland, and Poland. It outlines the project’s research questions and core areas of investigation: (1) discourses around health, illness, and science; (2) relationships with governments and policymakers; and (3) digital innovations. It justifies the methods, including analysis of public documents and religious media articles, online questionnaires of leaders and members, and interviews. It summarizes the individual articles, including key findings from each context, as well as comparative findings.
This special issue explores how religious groups have lived, experienced, and understood the COVID-19 pandemic in five Western societies. Context-specific case studies lay the foundation for comparisons that illuminate the key dynamics of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, shedding light on relationships between religions, science, digital innovations, state, and society in a time of crisis.
The research focused on three European countries (Germany, Ireland, Poland) and a UK region (Northern Ireland), as well as Canada. The pandemic acted as a structural force forming a comparable context in all these locations, despite their differences. This introduction serves as a common methodological reference for all the articles in this issue, while also signposting key context-specific and comparative findings in each article. A detailed justification and description of our methods has also been published (Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026).
The project was concerned with whether or to what extent the global pandemic and its effects have impacted on continuities and changes in prepandemic trends. Prior to the pandemic, all the societies we investigated were experiencing secularization, both in terms of a diminution of religions’ public roles as well as in measurements like religious identification and practice (Inglehart 2020). Yet, in the early weeks and months of the pandemic, some claimed religion had taken on renewed significance in many societies, including those experiencing secularization. They reported that religious practices like prayer and interest in spirituality had increased globally as people turned to religion to cope with the crisis (Bentzen 2021; Ransome et al. 2024). Even Inglehart concluded: “for the immediate future, we would expect the insecurities linked with the pandemic to generate support for religion” (2020, 166–167). Moreover, faith leaders were identified as “key workers” in many countries, in recognition of their important roles in burying the dead, comforting the grieving, and ministering to the sick (WHO 2020a). In fact, the World Health Organization issued some practical recommendations for faith leaders and faith-based communities, recognizing their special role. But with the development of widespread vaccination and the resulting lifting of restrictions on movement, did almost all evidence of religious resurgence dissipate? In Poland a 2020 study by Boguszewski et al. found increases in religiosity during the first lockdown, while a 2022 study by some of the same researchers reported steep declines in religious practices during the second and third waves of the pandemic (Boguszewski et al. 2022). Indeed, some religious leaders blamed the pandemic for accelerating secularization—at least as measured in terms of people attending religious services—in the Global North. Research tends to confirm these observations, even in the United States (Pew Research Center 2023); although other research reports that the religious practices of some Americans who remained attached to churches intensified (Thumma 2025). But theories of secularization go beyond the quantitative dynamics of decline or increase by also examining the transformations of religion in the secular world (Taylor 2007), and this is really the focus of the research.
As such, the results raise questions about the impacts of the pandemic in terms of different dimensions of secularization, including changes in religions’ public roles and relationships between religions and the state, and religions and science; as well as changes in religious practice, such as declines/increases/transformations in religious engagement or the use of digital technologies. Our analysis focuses on two interrelated periods, during and after the crisis, based on retrospective interpretations of experiences and new developments. The WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020 (WHO 2020b), and it defined it as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO 2020c). On 5 May 2023 the WHO declared that it no longer fit the definition of a PHEIC, even if the pandemic continues and needs special attention (WHO 2023). The research considers this timeline as the pandemic period, and the months that followed the period characterized by the end of systematic restrictions for religions, a certain back-to-normal life.
This introduction summarizes the genesis of the project, the reasons for the choice of countries involved and the religious and nonreligious groups within each of them, the fundamental questions explored, the methods of data collection and analysis. It explains the plan for the special issue, including a first group of articles putting into perspective the context-specific results, followed by another group offering comparative approaches.
1 Selection of Contexts and Groups
The 2021 Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities (T-AP) call for proposals on Recovery, Renewal and Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World (RRR) required a minimum of three countries, out of twelve involved from Europe, the Americas, and South Africa. The objective of the platform is to “enhance the ability of funders, research organizations and researchers to engage in transnational dialogue and collaboration” (Trans-Atlantic Platform n.d.). We included four national (Canada, Germany, Poland, Republic of Ireland) and one regional (Northern Ireland, UK) contexts in our complex proposal. The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are in different political jurisdictions, so we consider them separate contexts, but we also consider them as one religious unit because the churches and many smaller religious groups are organized on an all-island basis. The choice of contexts was made on the basis of most different design (Otner 2010; Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026), which is the most suitable for our study. It helps explain possible variations within the sample, and to analyze connections between individual factors (the groups’ and their members’ different ways of dealing with the COVID-19 restrictions) and the wider milieu (religious, cultural, and political). Notably, it allowed us to compare the changing role of numerically larger and smaller religions in our selected Global North contexts.
Poland and the Republic of Ireland have more homogenized religious settings with 89 percent and 69 percent Roman Catholic populations, respectively (with a mixed Roman Catholic-Protestant population in Northern Ireland). Canada and Germany have more pluralism with a greater variety of religious and nonreligious worldviews, alongside a Christian majority and high proportions of nonreligious people (Statistics Poland 2023; CSO 2022; NISRA 2021; REMID et al. 2024; Statistics Canada 2022). Germany and Canada are the destinations of many immigrant groups who bring their cultural and religious or nonreligious traditions with them and adapt them to the new conditions, while Christian churches still play important roles. Table 1 includes religious diversity scores by context, published by the Pew Research Center (2014). While these figures are based on data more than ten years old, the contrast between contexts is still enlightening.
The contexts also dealt with the pandemic very differently and varied in their restrictions, lockdowns, and vaccination rates.1 Moreover, the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people differs: whereas Ireland/Northern Ireland and Germany have around 2 per million people, Canada has 1.4, and Poland has 3.1 (Mathieu et al. 2024).
Table 1
Religious diversity index scores by country, based on the global religious diversity survey
|
RDI |
Percent christian |
Percent muslim |
Percent unaffiliated |
Percent hindu |
Percent buddhist |
Percent folk religions |
Percent other religions |
Percent Jewish |
2010 country population |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Canada |
5.3 |
69.0 % |
2.1 % |
23.7 % |
1.4 % |
0.8 % |
1.2 % |
0.9 % |
1.0 % |
34,020,000 |
|
Germany |
5.3 |
68.7 % |
5.8 % |
24.7 % |
< 0.1 % |
0.3 % |
< 0.1 % |
0.1 % |
0.3 % |
82,300,000 |
|
Ireland |
1.7 |
92 % |
1.1 % |
6.2 % |
0.2 % |
0.2 % |
0.2 % |
< 0.1 % |
< 0.1 % |
4,470,000 |
|
Poland |
1.2 |
94.3 % |
< 0.1 % |
5.6 % |
< 0.1 % |
< 0.1 % |
< 0.1 % |
< 0.1 % |
< 0.1 % |
38,280,000 |
2 Building of Comparative Case Studies
Our research intentionally developed comparative case studies by selecting four exemplary groups per context, ensuring a mix of similar and different religious and nonreligious groups across various social, political, and media environments. Our selection always included two larger groups and two smaller groups. (Table 2).2 Our conceptual framework sometimes oscillates between designating groups as “small” or “large” (numerical importance) and “minority” or “majority” (power dynamics). This fluctuation reflects the reality observed during the research: While internal factors and simple numerical size influence group dynamics, the well-documented dimensions of the majority-minority dynamic—including power, cohesion, and strategy—are equally critical to understanding the cases (Howard and Tadros 2023).
Across all contexts we included mainline Christian denominations, specifically Roman Catholicism and a range of Protestant churches. This reflected their historical and numerical significance. The selection of the smaller groups was highly strategic, adhering to three criteria: (1) they were large enough to maintain relationships with public authorities; (2) they had published significant public documents online during the pandemic; and (3) the overall selection needed to incorporate a variety of cases, including nonreligious groups. For example, this included humanists in Ireland/Northern Ireland and anthroposophists in Germany. In Canada, Germany, and Ireland/Northern Ireland, Islam was selected because Muslims are a visible minority in those contexts. Canada further included Jews as a second minority group. Poland necessitated a unique selection due to its distinct demographics, as it lacks a second majority religion and Islam has a limited presence. Consequently, we selected the minority groups of Orthodox Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses in that country.
As such, our research was structured to investigate how environmental factors—both religious and nonreligious/social contexts—shaped the discourses and behaviors of religious and convictional groups during the pandemic. The methodology deliberately built this essential distinction (disparity) through the careful selection of similar and different groups, including: (1) numerically larger and smaller groups; (2) different national/regional contexts; and (3) social and religious/theological positions (including ideas about health, illness and acceptance/hesitancy/rejection of science, relationship to public authorities, and digital religion). This brings us to the research questions.
Table 2
Groups by context
|
Canada |
Germany |
Ireland/Northern Ireland |
Poland |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Religion I |
Catholic Church (29.9 %) |
Catholic Church (23.7 %) |
Catholic Church (69 %/42 %) |
Catholic Church (90 %) |
|
Religion II |
Protestant churches (13 %) |
Protestant church (21.5 %) |
Protestant churches (4 %/37 %) |
– |
|
Religion III |
Islam (4.9 %) |
Denominational Muslims (3.9 %) |
Islam (<2 %/<1 %) |
Orthodox (0.5 %) |
|
Religion IV/ Philosophy |
Judaism (0.9 %) |
Anthroposophical Society (no official numbers)3 |
Humanism (no official numbers) |
Jehovah‘s Witnesses (0.36 %) |
3 Research Questions and Core Areas
Following a review of existing literature about the pandemic and religion, the project sought to advance knowledge of the topic through two fundamental research questions: (1) Has the role of religion changed during the pandemic in our Global North case study contexts? If so, how? (2) What are the key similarities and differences across these contexts and what factors have contributed to change in particular directions in different settings? Potential changes considered included, but were not limited to, cooperation or conflict between scientific findings and belief systems, shifts in public visibility (increased, decreased, or transformed), modified interactions with the state and policymakers, changes in interreligious relationships, and variations in online/offline religious practice.
To address these questions, we identified and researched three core areas. The first concerned discourses around health, illness, and science. This area focused on analyzing how group leaders, experts, key people, and general members framed the critical issues of health, illness, and science. The analysis sought to identify differences and similarities both within and between the various contexts. This involved examining how these discourses varied based on the minority or majority status of the group and their distinct worldviews or beliefs.
The second area centered on the relationships between religious/convictional groups and political authorities. We analyzed how group leaders, experts, and key personnel engaged with governments and policymakers. This included documenting the various forms and content of their communications and meetings, as well as the types of issues raised.
Finally, the research identified the extent and specific forms through which different religious organizations and groups adapted their digital practices by moving their operations and practices online during the pandemic. The study investigated whether, and how, groups incorporated blended online and in-person approaches to religious practice during the pandemic and as lockdown restrictions were relaxed. Attention was also paid to the manifestation and impact of digital divides. Other studies were not as ambitious in their scope; indeed, as far as we are aware, ours is the only comparative, international study to feature systematic analysis of these three areas.
Our study is also internationally unique in the extent of its methodological triangulation, providing an in-depth, cross-contextual analysis of qualitative data sources, addressing a significant gap identified by Lene Kühle and Brian Conway (2025, 412). This approach allows us not only to offer the detailed insights of single qualitative case studies, but to compare our cases in a systematic way. In contrast, Kühle and Conway (2025) analyze a range of existing studies from different contexts, examining how these studies assess changes in individual religiosity, shifts in religion–state relations, and public controversies, including civil disobedience related to religion, conspiracy theories, and the scapegoating of religions as spreaders of the virus. But the studies compared by Kühle and Conway were conducted by researchers working in different contexts and without a structured framework like the three-fold model developed for our study, making the comparisons inevitably less systematic.
Among the large-scale comparative projects on religions during the pandemic, ours stands out for the breadth of its research areas. Several major comparative studies focused more narrowly on digital and ritual innovations. A seven-nation project on “Religious Communities in a Virtual Age,” is mainly concerned with religious communities’ use of digital tools during the pandemic and beyond, including how this has impacted on ritual practices (Recovira, n.d.). “Churches Online in Times of Corona” also compares digital practices, and includes a survey of pastoral workers, pastors, and priests in twenty-three countries in the Global North and South (CONTOC, n.d.). “Digital Islam Across Europe,” examines the digital practices of Muslims in five European countries in contexts of deep mediatization, and includes the impact of the pandemic (Chanse n.d.). Broadly, these studies confirm the rapid and widespread digitalization of religious practices during the pandemic, the development of new forms of (virtual) pastoral care, and the emergence of blended or “hybrid” models of in-person and online religiosity—which have been adopted with varying degrees of enthusiasm in different geographical and religious/denominational contexts (Schlag et al. 2023). They also explore how religious leaders struggle to adapt to digital expectations and discuss “digital divides” between generations, arguing that in some cases religious authority became more decentralized and individualized (Astor et al. 2024; Smolucha 2025). Our study produced similar findings in these areas, confirming and highlighting key differences between Catholic and Protestant churches across contexts, while also further exploring perceived relationships between digital religion and declining attendance at Christian services in the global north (Kołodziejska, this issue; Ní Dhónaill, this issue; Colin, this issue).
In the area of relationships between governments and policymakers, a Pew Research Center study compared the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on religious groups in 198 countries (Majumdar 2022). This study documents cases of cooperation between governments and religious groups, as well as cases when governments used force to prevent religious gatherings. However, much of the data is drawn from news reports and—unlike our study—does not necessarily capture the nuances of cooperation and conflict between governments and religious groups. Our more comprehensive approach to data sources—including documents produced by religious groups themselves and religious media—offered richer perspectives, albeit across a much smaller number of contexts. Finally, the “Religious Responses to Covid-19” project collated an online repository of more than 1,000 resources from around the world, detailing religious responses to the pandemic, including narratives around public health, changes in religious gatherings, changes in funeral practices, and the role of religion in fostering resilience through providing social safety nets (Marshall 2022). However, the researchers working on this project do not claim that the repository is comprehensive; nor does it enable systematic country-level comparisons.
Our research builds on and complements these studies, but our approach is novel in its three-fold framework and its methodological triangulation, which included analysis of more than 1,000 official documents produced by religious groups, 800 religious media articles, questionnaires from more than 2,000 leaders and members, and more than 300 interviews, enabling a remarkable depth of insight.
4 Data Collection and Evaluation
We collected our data using a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative text analysis of religious groups’ public documents (Colin et al. 2023; Grünenthal 2023a; Ní Dhónaill and Ganiel 2023; Rabiej-Sienicka and Kołodziejska 2023a) and religious media sources, online questionnaires (leaders and members), and in-depth interviews (for a detailed overview see Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026).4 This enabled us to triangulate the data, facilitating comparisons between and within contexts (Carter et al. 2014). We produced reports for the internal use of the research team for each set of documents, which allowed us to compare the material efficiently (Colin and Lefebvre 2023a, 2023b, 2024; Grünenthal 2023b, 2023c, 2024; Ní Dhónaill 2023a, 2023b, 2024; Rabiej-Sienicka and Kołodziejska 2023b, 2023c, 2024).5
Our rich and varied data yielded complementary insights on the “official” public positions and views of religious/nonreligious groups, as well as impressions and observations beyond the official discourses. While we collected documents from the period of the pandemic only (March 2020 to February 2023), the questionnaires and interviews delved into the retrospective understanding of issues, and how people perceived their situation in the aftermath of the public health emergency. Retrospective readings were especially important for understanding perceptions of how power and authority were exerted throughout the crisis (Lefebvre, this issue).
Figure 1 shows how the different phases of the research are related. We analyzed documents during Year 1, which provided us with material to inform the questions on our online questionnaires. The results of the questionnaires helped us identify gaps in knowledge and to determine the focus of our individual and group interviews.
We analyzed two types of documents: “official” publicly available documents produced by organizations such as denominations, dioceses, smaller umbrella groups, etc. These were available on their websites and social media and/or distributed as press releases. Documents were selected if they conveyed official statements or perspectives on COVID-19, government restrictions or guidance, or digital religion. We analyzed a total of 1,318 documents; the number of documents produced across countries varied, with a high of 583 in Germany, followed by Canada (333), Poland (217), and Ireland/Northern Ireland (185) (Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026, 8). These documents allowed us to discern the official positions of religious or nonreligious organizations from the perspective of the highest-level leadership.
Figure 1
Research design
Citation: Journal of Religion in Europe 19, 1-2 (2026) ; 10.1163/18748929-bja10155
We wanted to push beyond official, institutionalized perspectives, so we also analyzed articles published in religious media sources, namely newspapers, newsletters, and/or journalistic magazines. We began by identifying the major religious media sources available in each context. We then selected the most significant and most popular magazines and newsletters (measured by the circulation/number of copies issued/number of newsletter subscribers, number of website views, etc.) for each group. There were different types of sources in each context, including national or regional publications, traditional print media (monthlies, weeklies, etc.), websites, or email newsletters. We excluded sources that were purely informational, that is, church bulletins and bulletin boards, internal clergy brochures, media produced for special events, etc. We finally selected one or two media sources per large group, and one media source per smaller religious group. The larger groups’ media in some cases returned more than 1,000 articles during the timeframe; in contrast, most smaller groups did not even have such publications, so we analyzed opinion-style pieces published on their digital media outlets. Since larger groups produced much more content than the smaller, we agreed to analyze seventy articles per large group (selected randomly) and thirty articles per small group. This resulted in approximately 200 articles for each context. But not all small groups published thirty articles. When they did not, we included every article and divided the remaining articles among the larger groups in order to reach 200 in each case (Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026, 9).
All documents were subjected to qualitative deductive content analysis (Mayring 2014, 2022), the category system of which was developed around the three core research areas, and included theory-based subcategories (Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026, 9). This enabled a systematic qualitative analysis of large amounts of text while maintaining a relatively structured and comparable approach, even when documents were in different languages or represented different types of texts.
In the questionnaires and interviews, respondents were not always speaking about real-time experiences but were elaborating retrospective interpretations. Using these methods allowed us to produce complementary, reflective findings that could be compared to the “real-time” documents produced during the pandemic. The two questionnaires were carefully built around the preliminary results of the documentary analysis, and thought through with a view to ensuring their consistency and to protect against bias (Bryman 2016). We conducted pretests with people from all groups in each context to ensure we produced clear and user-friendly questions. This was particularly helpful for ensuring inclusive language for nonreligious groups (humanists, anthroposophists). The Survey Monkey platform facilitated multilingual online questionnaires, while using several types of filters. The questionnaires were partly based on the Likert Scale, as well as featuring multiple-choice answers and open, “write-in” text boxes for comments (Brill 2011; Croasmun and Ostrom 2011; Pescaroli et al. 2020). The Likert Scale utilizes a range of response categories indicating varying levels of agreement or disagreement, of importance or low importance, with a specific stimulus statement expressing an attitude or opinion. There were sixty-two questions on the questionnaire for leaders and key people, and forty-five on the members’ questionnaire (Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026, 9). Ultimately, 1,333 leaders and 1,417 members responded.
The questionnaire results were useful for identifying gaps in our knowledge and guiding the qualitative interviews, but they have some limitations. Because the number of respondents varies considerably across contexts and religious and nonreligious groups, it is important to recognize that these are primarily qualitative results. As such, the proportions or percentages of respondents sometimes mentioned in the articles in this issue only indicate potential trends; this is not representative survey data. At the same time, the questionnaires reveal more nuanced stories than official documents and religious media, providing us with more than 2,000 detailed responses to precise questions about individuals’ perceptions and opinions. The questionnaires also helped us to recruit for the interviews, as the last question invited participants to volunteer. While we did not have many, especially in Germany and Ireland/Northern Ireland, it provided another source of recruitment in addition to our partners and pre-existing networks.
In the interviews, we sought to understand how people documented, reconstructed, and interpreted the pandemic and their experience. We took a narrative-episodic approach, drawing on the respondents’ experiences and their semantic knowledge (Flick 1995). The narrative dimension is based on direct experience and consists of a memory bank of concrete events. Its main focus is representing sequences of situations, while the interviewee contributes generalizations, abstractions, and contextual framing. The episodic dimension means the interviewer allows the interviewee to tell their story (drawing on narrative knowledge) but also poses targeted questions guided by a structured framework (drawing on semantic knowledge).
We interviewed around eighty people in each context, in three different formats: group interviews with leaders and key people, individual interviews with leaders and members, and interviews around case studies (for example, a Roman Catholic online prayer group in Northern Ireland or members of the anthroposophical Christian community Christengemeinde). While there were some common questions, there were also country-specific questions. We used a country-specific COVID-19 timeline for the narrative part of the interviews to stimulate stories and reflections about their COVID-19-experiences (for elicitation methods, see Harper 2002). The combination of narration and questioning echoes the dynamics of everyday communication, producing rich and fluid interactions. For some of the group interviews with leaders, we presented the preliminary results of the previous analyses.
In this work package more attention was paid to context-specific experiences and attitudes. We have not drawn a systematic comparative analysis from the interview material, except to support very specific hypotheses and angles of analysis, as will appear in some articles. This more targeted approach enabled us to explore in greater depth issues and religious groups less covered by the questionnaires, such as anthroposophists in Germany and Muslims in the other contexts. We used qualitative deductive content analysis (see above) to analyze the transcripts, using the same category system (Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026, 28–40). This allowed us to compare findings with the results of the public documents and religious media.
In some cases, contextual factors affected recruitment for the questionnaires and interviews. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was current with the distribution of questionnaires, which made it more difficult to mobilize Muslims and Jews. Anti-immigration riots in Northern Ireland and Ireland during summer 2024 compromised the recruitment of Muslim interviewees. But overall, while the response of some groups was very low for the questionnaires, we were able to recruit some respondents from these groups for interviews. So, while Muslims did not respond to the questionnaires in large numbers, we conducted (relatively) more interviews with them.
To conclude, it is important to emphasize the interdependence of the various research findings, from questionnaires to documentary analysis to interviews, which are complementary and interrelated. The different methods produced very large and varied results. The structured analytical framework, which was organized around the project’s research questions and core areas, has allowed us to compare the findings.
5 Special Issue Structure
This special issue includes two parts, one presenting context-specific results, and the other offering comparative approaches. The articles in the first part summarize the context-specific results in each of our core research areas: (1) discourses around health, illness, and science; (2) relationships with governments and policymakers; and (3) digital innovations. Each article then develops an original argument around key research finding from that context.
For Germany, Sander reports similarities between the discourses of Protestants, Roman Catholics and Muslims, including support for government restrictions and vaccinations; as well as ambivalence around the use of digital media once restrictions were lifted. Sander further explains how the Anthroposophical Society, a philosophical group, differs in these regards, especially in its focus on the freedom of the individual. She observes that the secular media in Germany characterized anthroposophists as being against vaccination (antivaccination), but her analysis demonstrates that the position was more nuanced. Anthroposophical documents in fact advocated vaccination for the elderly and most vulnerable, while maintaining the emphasis on individual freedom. This raises important questions about how the misrepresentation of a minority group’s position in the popular media came to pass, and the implications for minority groups of such misrepresentation.
In the Polish context, the three religious groups—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Jehovah’s Witnesses—navigated the pandemic quite differently. Kołodziejska, Mandes, Ostrowska, and Rabiej-Sienicka explain this in terms of Poland’s religious structure, which is dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. While generally supportive of restrictions and vaccinations, the Roman Catholic Church was critical of the government for what it perceived as unnecessary curtailments of religious freedom. The Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church said little about restrictions and vaccinations but emphasized the power of God and the Eucharist to resist the virus. The Jehovah’s Witnesses supported restrictions and enthusiastically embraced online options for religious practice. These authors argue that the dynamics of religious pluralism in Poland favored the Roman Catholic Church, enabling it to receive exemptions from restrictions and overshadowing the concerns of religious minorities.
For the island of Ireland, Ní Dhónaill explores how religions responded to the pandemic across two political jurisdictions: the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Roman Catholic and Protestant churches are organized on an all-island basis, straddling the Irish border, while Muslim and Humanist groups are not. All groups supported government restrictions and vaccinations. Religious groups in Northern Ireland had greater access to and influence on regional policymakers than their counterparts in the Republic, reflecting religion’s greater salience in the region. While both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches increased their options for online religious practice, Ní Dhónaill found significantly more enthusiasm for digital religion among Protestants. She links this to Protestants’ emphasis on using online tools to build community, an approach that was relatively absent within Roman Catholicism.
In Canada, Colin’s work demonstrates that religions in Canada, like their European counterparts, were broadly supportive of government restrictions and vaccinations, although there was some dissent around vaccine mandates. In some provinces, religious groups struggled to gain audiences with policymakers or to see their perspectives reflected in the public sphere. Like Ní Dhónaill, Colin recounts how both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches embraced the digital during the pandemic. And like Ní Dhónaill, he notes greater enthusiasm for digital religion among Protestants. In Canada, the discourse of the “hybrid church” was important within Protestantism, with the hybrid church conceived as a worshipping community that blends in-person and online practices. But unlike on the island of Ireland, there seemed to be less intentional focus on using online tools to build community, with Colin arguing that digitalization could lead to greater religious individualization, accelerating the process of secularization.
The articles in the second part of this issue analyze religious responses to the pandemic in a comparative perspective, highlighting significant findings in four areas: (1) attitudes toward digital media use; (2) approaches to COVID-19 vaccination; (3) the relationships between different types of authority (religious, political, and scientific) and secularization; and (4) the communication and positioning of religious groups in secularizing public spheres.
Kołodziejska’s analysis of digital media use identifies a range of online approaches to religious practices during the pandemic, with Jehovah’s Witnesses in Poland the most enthusiastic, followed by Protestant denominations. Protestants advocated for hybrid models of church, as also explored by Ní Dhónaill (Ireland/Northern Ireland) and Colin (Canada) in this issue; with Roman Catholics and then the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church even more cautious. While identifying theological reasons for this variation in attitudes, Kołodziejska also observes that organizations that strongly opposed or negotiated pandemic restrictions typically showed decreased enthusiasm for digital media integration, while those accepting restrictions more readily embraced digital solutions for maintaining religious community and practice. This trend could be further explored in other contexts, raising questions about the role of digital tools in religious transformations.
Ganiel observes that in all contexts, “official” religious voices overwhelmingly supported vaccination, presenting public health as a “common good.” This consensus extended to the Roman Catholic Church, despite initial ethical debates about vaccines developed from fetal cells. Instances of dissent were relatively rare and appeared in the more ambiguous positions of the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church, the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, and in some responses to online questionnaires across various groups. Ganiel argues that Christian institutions deliberately combined secular and scientific reasoning with moral and theological arguments. This dual strategy allowed them to reaffirm their role as influential societal actors within increasingly secular public spheres, even as their numerical strength and institutional authority declined.
Lefebvre analyzes how religious groups’ relationships with political and scientific authorities were tested by the pandemic, identifying widespread compliance of religious and spiritual groups with directives and restrictions, juxtaposed with intense legal, personal, and media challenges and protests. Reflecting on the distinction between power and authority, she identifies multiple sources of authority evident in the data, including public governmental authorities, medical and religious experts within the (religious) groups, the law, doctrines and beliefs, ethical principles, civil leaders, and individual conscience. Lefebvre argues that the way authority was experienced is closely tied to different levels of secularization in each context, as well as different types of relationships between the state and religion. Interestingly, the data shows that society, religion, and science overlap and do not refer purely to autonomous spheres, even in secularizing contexts. Such insights are important for understanding the dynamics of secularization and religious persistence/transformation across contexts.
Finally, Radde-Antweiler examines religious groups’ public communications throughout the pandemic, asking if a religious or secularized communication can be observed. She finds variation across contexts, which does not map easily onto particular religious groups (that is, Muslims in Canada use very secularized discourses, while Muslims in Ireland primarily use theological language). Nor do communication strategies map easily onto levels of secularization; for example, Germany and Canada experience similar levels of secularization, but churches in Canada use far more religious language than those in Germany, whose discourses are highly secularized. Ultimately, depending on how the respected context is evaluated as secular (or not) the use of religious language is quite different. But also the power status of the religious group in the respective society seems to play a critical role.
Acknowledgments
We thank our partner organizations that assisted throughout the project: Canada—Quebec Interreligious Table, Canadian Center for Ecumenism, Canadian Council of Churches; Germany—Digital Religious Communication Competence Centre, at the Centre for Applied Pastoral Research, Digital Religion Consortium, Zurich; Ireland/Northern Ireland—Irish Council of Churches/Irish Inter-Church Meeting, Religion Media Centre, UK; Poland—Institute for Catholic Church Statistics.
We also thank our academic advisory board: Joshua Edelman (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK), Dorota Hall (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland), Anna Neumaier (University of Bochum, Germany), Ilona Nord (University of Würzburg, Germany), Thomas Schlag (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Frederic Volpi (University of Edinburgh, UK).
For the different courses of the pandemic in the selected countries see: Radde-Antweiler et al. 2026, 11–19; Sander, this issue; Colin, this issue; Mandes et al. this issue and Ní Dhónaill, this issue.
Table 2 uses the most recent data available (Statistics Poland 2023; CSO 2022; NISRA 2021; REMID et al. 2024; Statistics Canada 2022).
According to their website, “there are currently around 42,000 members worldwide, of which around 12,000 are in Germany” (Anthroposophische Gesellschaft in Deutschland, n.d.)
An additional analysis of organizations’ public documents and selected “secular” media sources from each context was conducted, using text mining. An independent contractor (Michal Palinski) analyzed the articles using co-occurrence analysis using Word2Vec similarity scores and topic modeling; and Slawomir Mandes conducted further interpretive analysis. Because text mining typically requires very large data sets, the analysis was compromised by the relatively low number of documents and articles on relevant topics. However, there was significant coverage of some issues, such as vaccination, for the analysis to be included selectively in this special issue (Ganiel, this issue).
Parts of these internal reports can be made available upon request.
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