The Case Against Wet Markets They are culturally meaningful—and not at all worth the health risks they pose.by MARTHA CHENG

A few weeks ago, before the coronavirus pandemic upended our daily lives, my Facebook feed surfaced a photo from 2018, in which I was cooking a chicken that had been slaughtered in front of me at a wet market in Essaouira, Morocco. Anthony Fauci may call wet markets an “unusual human-animal interaction,” but it wasn’t that long ago in America that chilled, mass-produced, and nationally distributed meats were regarded as unusual and inferior to backyard chickens.
Wherever I am in the world, I make it a point to visit links to the past. I’ve been to a rural slaughterhouse, killed a pig and chickens on a farm, and shopped and cooked food from wet markets, from Morocco to China. I can’t help but romanticize the markets, as an old way of life preserved against modernization, as a showcase of regional diversity and culture, and as a model of access to nonprocessed foods for various income levels. I’m not alone: These markets are often popular tourist destinations. And for the residents, these markets are essential, not despite China’s efforts at modernization, but perhaps because of them. In a report on wet markets in urban China, a shopper says, “Everything comes alive in the market. Sitting in the office, I have no sense of season. The seasonal, colorful, fresh food in wet markets tell me the season.”

But as the weeks on lockdown go by, and deaths mount from the coronavirus pandemic, we must ask ourselves: wet markets at what cost? It’s widely believed, but not proved, that the new coronavirus originated in a live-animal market in Wuhan, China; SARS is suspected to have originated in wildlife trade in Guangdong province. The exact origins of these diseases are hard to pinpoint, but wildlife and live-animal markets, with their mix of species in proximity to densely populated areas, are a risk that I’m beginning to question. Several lawmakers and public health officials are calling for widespread banning of wet markets. “It boggles my mind when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface that we don’t just shut it down,” Fauci said in a recent television interview. “I don’t know what else has to happen to get us to appreciate that.”

First, though, a distinction that too many journalists and politicians miss, and which is important to get right as people debate the possible closure of these markets. Wet market is a Singapore and Hong Kong English term that is now being applied to a wide variety of food markets around the developing world, even though many of the markets look like the fresh produce and meat markets in Italy and France. In fact, wet markets tend to fall into three categories: those that carry wildlife, dead or alive; those that carry more common live animals, such as poultry and/or seafood; and those that carry no live animals at all. So calling for a ban on all wet markets based on the Wuhan wet market, which purportedly sold live wildlife, is like banning all pet ownership based on what goes down in Tiger King.

Wet markets overall should not be banned any more than farmers’ markets in America. They are more than fresh produce and meat: They are ways for consumers and producers to connect; they are forms of decentralization against governments and large corporations that people grow ever more wary of, whether in China or America. Live wildlife, however, is too risky to remain at wet markets. “The lowest-hanging fruit to lessen the likelihood of future pandemics is to close those markets where we have large congregations of wild species for commercial purposes,” Steven Osofsky, a professor of wildlife health and health policy at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, said in an interview for the podcast Excelsior. “When we harvest wild animals from all over the world and bring them into markets, let them all mix together, what we’re doing is creating the perfect storm. If you’re a virus whose goal is to spread, you couldn’t really design a better system to aid and abet a pandemic than these wildlife markets, particularly in urban centers in Asia. You have species that never under natural conditions would run into each other, all packed together, bodily fluids mixing, and then people come into the equation. Pathogens are meeting species that they’ve never met before. That’s when we have these opportunities for viral jumps, including the ones that lead to humans and create the situation we’re in now.”

But what is wildlife? In the past decades, China has encouraged wildlife breeding and farming operations for medicine, fur, and eating. China’s wildlife-farming industry for consumption, which includes species as varied as wild boar, ducks, snakes, and bamboo rats, was valued at $18 billion and employed more than 6 million people in 2016. Many of the animals sold in China’s wildlife markets are likely farmed (though wildlife farms are also notorious for laundering poached animals).

In America, as the coronavirus pandemic was beginning to unfold and health authorities cautioned against eating wild animals, it was easy to scoff at this—I wasn’t planning on eating bats or civet cats—until my mom asked me whether I consider bison wild (yes?) and then pointed to the bison burger I was about to bite into.

There’s a trend toward more culinary diversity—more than ever, people are seeking cuisines from different ethnicities, heirloom varieties of vegetables and livestock, and, yes, even game meats, the consumption of which is on the rise in the U.S. The urge seems to be spurred by discoveries in a more global world, coupled with resistance to rapid modernization—not unlike the appeal of wet markets. But it’s clear now that the public-health risk posed by wildlife markets is too great.

China has already instituted a ban on wildlife trade for consumption (but not for medicine) following the new coronavirus outbreak (it did the same after SARS, and then let the restrictions lapse). Removing live wildlife from wet markets is not likely to end the eating of wild animals, nor does it remove the possibility of another pandemic—livestock operations also harbor viruses such as swine flu, the cause of the pandemic in 2009, which originated in pigs in Mexico—but at least it would give disastrous viruses one fewer fertile breeding ground.

Many people argue that the markets where animals are slaughtered represent an important way of life that isn’t easily replaced. That may be true. But it’s also true that this pandemic is destroying other aspects of how we live, eat, move through the world, and interact with one another. The old way of doing things is already gone. Not all of it will come back. Not all of it should.

Think 168,000 Ventilators Is Too Few? Try Three. The coronavirus has been slow to spread across Africa. But a wave may soon hit, and health-care workers are bracing for disaster. by Graeme Wood

In late March an anonymous doctor in a New York hospital told CNN that he was working in “Third World” conditions, with patients coming in so fast, and so gravely incapacited, that he and his colleagues would soon be overwhelmed. “Third World” is strong language, with an antique ring to it—a memory of the 1980s, when late-night TV ads regularly featured pleas for charity accompanied by images of skeletal, fly-bitten African children barefoot in the dirt outside their huts. It was a generation’s cliché of misery. That’s us now—or it will be soon, the New York doctor’s comparison implied, if we don’t control the spread of this disease.
But the comparison invites a question. If America is now Africa, what is Africa? Africa is much better off than it was 30 years ago, but even today, most of the world’s extremely poor live on that continent, and its health-care systems are (with a few exceptions) a wreck. COVID-19 has been slow to arrive in Africa, or at least has been slow to be detected there. But the wave is coming. “Our health systems cannot absorb additional shocks,” Simon Antara, of the African Field Epidemiology Network, told me from his office in Kampala, Uganda. “We are preparing for disaster.”

Right now the numbers may appear manageable. The African countries with the most confirmed COVID-19 cases are South Africa (1,934), Algeria (1,666), Egypt (1,560), and Morocco (1,374). No sub-Saharan country other than South Africa has more than 1,000 cases. The countries hardest hit are those most connected with international travel, especially to France. (Kenya, at 184 cases; Ethiopia, at 56; and Nigeria, at 276, have numbers that remain suspiciously low.) Burkina Faso—not an especially connected country, or one with a huge population—has 414 cases. Every country in Africa has testing kits, many of them due to the largesse of China’s Jack Ma. In some countries, such as Rwanda (110), quarantines and the careful tracing of contacts have kept the numbers down.

We should not be too relieved that these numbers are not as high as, say, those of the United States (457,000). Every country’s numbers started small—and every country with endemic COVID-19 had a period when outbreaks looked contained, until a thousand fires ignited at once, and the caseload started doubling every few days. So far, Africa seems unlikely to be exempted from these iron laws of exponential contagious spread. If the spread seems slow to develop, that may be because no African country has the same volume of international travel as the countries elsewhere that are already suffering.

Most worrisome is the lack of any possibility of an effective response. Consider the Central African Republic (CAR), at the geographic center of Africa. It has a population of almost 5 million, about the same as Alabama. CAR still has only 10 cases, but the virus is spreading in the community, which means that those numbers will eventually rise very quickly, as they have elsewhere.

Alabama expects to need 340 ventilators at the peak of its outbreak (currently prophesied for April 20). The United States has roughly 172,000 ventilators—and that isn’t enough. Sierra Leone (about the population of Washington State) has 13 ventilators. CAR has three ventilators. Liberia (Louisiana) also has only three; South Sudan (Ohio) has four.

Or take ICU beds. Some African countries have many; South Africa has 3,000. (The United States has 64,000.) But Somalia has 15 ICU beds for the whole country. The largest city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has perhaps two dozen ICU beds to serve a province with a population about the same size as Louisiana’s, with endemic malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and other diseases that make COVID-19 especially dangerous. (One comorbidity relatively absent in Africa is obesity.)

The COVID-19 strategy in most of the developed world has been to “flatten the curve”—spread out the infections across the year, so that at any given time, enough ventilators and ICU beds are available to accommodate everyone who is sick. If you flatten the curve enough, the tail end might even get vaccinated and avoid infection altogether.

In much of Africa, this strategy is absurd, because no amount of home quarantine will flatten the curve enough to let everyone have a turn at one of three ventilators. “It’s pointless to try,” says Tom Peyre-Costa of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “Flattening the curve implies having a minimum of health-care capacity.” With few exceptions, African nations’ domestic surge capacity is nonexistent. In the past, when patients in very poor African countries needed intensive care, they effectively had two options: a hospital overseas (an option available to the rich), or the graveyard. Now that other countries (including the wealthier African countries) have closed their borders and maxed out their own hospitals’ resources, the first of these options is gone. The surge capacity for some countries was, in effect, France—which is itself flooded with COVID-19 and unable to help.

At least a few small mercies might make endemic COVID-19 more bearable. Having relatively few international connections has given Africa a window of time to prepare, Antara said, and preparations—subject to the extreme limitations—have been intense. Being in the last continent without widespread outbreaks has given African countries the opportunity to witness how bad those outbreaks can get, and to plan accordingly. Rwanda shut its borders when it still had only a handful of cases. It would not have done so if it hadn’t seen Italy and Iran suffering first. (Peyre-Costa notes that the lack of international connections has serious drawbacks, too. In some countries, the health sector is largely foreign-led and humanitarian, and as long as supply chains and human movement are disrupted, foreign health-care workers will have trouble getting in.)

When community transmission begins, it may move more slowly than it has elsewhere.  Most Africans live in cities, but the traffic between those cities is less than in other parts of the world. CAR, for example, has no domestic airline or railway, or even a domestic bus network. People move around much less, almost as if they were practicing social isolation avant la lettre.

Most of all, Africa will enjoy the advantage of youth. COVID-19 kills mostly the old, and Africans are relatively young, with a median age of 18.9. (The median age in the United States and China is 38.) That means, in effect, that about half of Africans who get COVID-19 will have a low risk of death. In an aged population such as Japan’s, 2 percent of those infected might be expected to die. In Africa (following the figures here), only 0.3 percent would die, or about 3.8 million people, if everyone were to be eventually infected.

A further possibility—however remote—is that Africa will be an exception. Already the case numbers are showing some anomalies. In Rwanda, for example, the confirmed COVID-19 cases are all mild. Not one of the 110 patients has required a ventilator. Indeed, none has even been admitted to an ICU. (Here is a video of a Rwandan COVID-19 patient dancing.) The median age of COVID-19 patients there is 36, so age alone does not explain the good luck. The low numbers in Kenya and Ethiopia—both of which have major international airlines that kept flying well into the pandemic—are also puzzles. One possibility, says Jeffrey Griffiths, a physician at Tufts University who works in Africa, is that some level of endemic immunity already exists in Africa, because of similar viruses whose effects are too mild to have warranted notice. (Griffiths thinks the catastrophe is still coming, but holds out immunity as an option that any remaining optimists can cling to.) And COVID-19 may transmit less readily in warm weather, like the common flu. These would all be incredibly lucky breaks. Perhaps the “Third World,” once a net recipient of pity, will begin to export it to Europe and America.

We cannot count on catching a break. Any situation whose most likely bright side is the death of 3.8 million people is a dire situation indeed. The United States will, for the next month at least, be preoccupied with its own miseries. But we should prepare for a second and potentially worse wave of catastrophe in Africa.

India Is No Longer India Exile in the time of Modi. by AATISH TASEER

You realize,” a friend wrote to me from Kolkata earlier this year, “that, without the exalted secular ‘idea’ of India … the whole place falls apart.”

India had been on the boil for weeks. On December 11, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government had passed its Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which gave immigrants from three neighboring countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) a path to citizenship on one condition: that they were not Muslim. For the first time in India’s long history of secularism, a religious test had been enacted. If some commentators described the CAA as “India’s first Nuremberg Law,” it was because the law did not stand alone. It worked in tandem, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah menacingly implied—in remarks he has recently tried to walk back—with a slew of other new laws that cast the citizenship of many of India’s own people into doubt. Shah, who has referred to Muslim immigrants as “termites,” spoke of a process by which the government would survey India’s large agrarian population, a significant portion of which is undocumented, and designate the status of millions as “doubtful.” The CAA would then kick into action, providing non-Muslims with relief and leaving Indian Muslims in a position where they could face disenfranchisement, statelessness, or internment. India’s Muslim population of almost 200 million, which had been provoked by Modi’s government for six years, finally erupted in protest. They were joined by many non-Muslims, who were appalled by so brazen an attack on the Indian ethos. The constitutional expert Madhav Khosla recently described the effect of the new laws as a swift movement toward “an arrangement where citizenship is centered on the idea of blood and soil, rather than on the idea of birth.” In short, an arrangement in which being Indian meant accepting Hindu dominance and actively eschewing Indian Muslims.

India was seething, but I could not go back to the country where I had grown up. I was deep in my own citizenship drama. On November 7, the Indian government had stripped me of my Overseas Citizenship of India and blacklisted me from the country where my mother and grandmother live. The pretext the government used was that I had concealed the Pakistani origins of my father, from whom I had been estranged for most of my life, and whom I had not met until the age of 21. It was an odd accusation. I had written a book, Stranger to History, and published many articles about my absent father. The story of our relationship was well known because my father, Salmaan Taseer, had been the governor of Punjab, in Pakistan, and had been assassinated by his bodyguard in 2011 for daring to defend a Christian woman accused of blasphemy.

None of this had affected my status in India, where I had lived for 30 of my 40 years. I became “Pakistani” in the eyes of Modi’s government—and, more important, “Muslim,” because religious identity in India is mostly patrilineal and more a matter of blood than faith—only after I wrote a story for Time titled “India’s Divider in Chief.” The article enraged the prime minister. “Time magazine is foreign,” he responded. “The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.” From that moment on, my days as an Indian citizen were numbered.

In August, I received a letter from the Home Ministry threatening me with the cancellation of my citizenship status. Then, in November, an Indian news site leaked what the government was planning to do. Within hours, the Home Ministry’s spokesperson was on Twitter, canceling my citizenship before I had been officially informed. In one stroke, Modi’s government cut me off from the country I had written and thought about my whole life, and where all the people I had grown up with still lived.

To lose one’s country is to know a feeling akin to shame, almost as if one has been disowned by a parent, or turned out of one’s home. Your country is so intimately bound up with your sense of self that you do not realize what a ballast it has been until it is gone. The relationship is fundamental. It is one of the few things we are allowed to take for granted, and it is the basis of our curiosity about other places. Without a country we are adrift, like people whose inability to love another is linked to an inability to love themselves.

For me, the loss was literal—I could not go back to India—but also abstract: the loss of an idea, that “exalted” idea of a secular India. India, as its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, vowed, was not meant to be a “Hindu Pakistan.” Rather, it was to be a place that cherished the array of religions, languages, ethnicities, and cultures that had taken root over 50 centuries.

Nehru’s idea of India as a palimpsest, where “layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer has completely hidden or erased what has been written previously,” served as the foundation for the modern republic, born of British colonial rule in 1947. The new country gave secularism a distinctly Indian meaning. As the parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor told me recently, “Secular in India merely meant the existence of a profusion of religions, all of which were allowed and encouraged by the state to flourish.” The idea of India was a historical recognition that over time—and not always peacefully—a great diversity had collected on the Indian subcontinent. The modern republic, as a reflection of that history, would belong not to any one group, but to all groups in equal measure.

But beneath the topsoil of this modern country, a mere seven decades old, lies an older reality, embodied in the word Bharat, which can evoke the idea of India as the holy land, specifically of the Hindus. India and Bharat—these two words for the same place represent a central tension within the nation, the most dangerous and urgent one of our time. Bharat is Sanskrit, and the name by which India knows herself in her own languages, free of the gaze of outsiders. India is Latin, and its etymology alone—the Sanskrit sindhu for “river,” turning into hind in Persian, and then into indos in Greek, meaning the Indus—reveals a long history of being under Western eyes. India is a land; Bharat is a people—the Hindus. India is historical; Bharat is mythical. India is an overarching and inclusionary idea; Bharat is atavistic, emotional, exclusionary.

It was this tension between two distinct ways of looking at the same place—modern country or holy land—that the founder of Hindu nationalism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, took aim at in the early 20th century. As he wrote in his 1923 book, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, “To be a Hindu means a person who sees this land, from the Indus River to the sea, as his country but also as his Holy Land.” This Hindu person was, in Savarkar’s view, the paramount Indian citizen. Everyone else was at best a guest, and at worst the bastard child of foreign invasion. Savarkar was, as Octavio Paz writes in In Light of India, “intellectually responsible for the assassination of Gandhi,” in 1948, at the hands of Nathuram Godse, now a hero of the Hindu right. Modern Hindu nationalism is represented by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the cultural organization in which Narendra Modi was reared, and of which his party—the Bharatiya Janata Party—is the political face.

As much as people in India bridle against the binary distinction of India and Bharat, it recurs again and again in the country’s discourse—Bharat as a pure, timeless country, unassailable and authentic; India as the embodiment of modernity and all its ills and dislocations. When a medical student was raped and murdered in Delhi in 2012, the head of the RSS had this to say: “Such crimes hardly take place in Bharat, but they occur frequently in India … Where ‘Bharat’ becomes ‘India,’ with the influence of Western culture, these types of incidents happen.”

Growing up in 1980s India, in a Westernized enclave where, to quote Edward Said, the “main tenet” of my world “was that everything of consequence either had happened or would happen in the West,” I had no idea of this other wholeness called Bharat. That ignorance of Hindu ways and beliefs was not mine alone, but symptomatic of the English-speaking elite, which, in imitation of the British colonial classes, lived in isolation from the country around them. Mohandas Gandhi, at the 1916 opening of Banaras Hindu University, a project that was designed to bridge the distance between Hindu tradition and Western-style modernity, worried that India’s “educated men” were becoming “foreigners in their own land,” unable to speak to the “heart of the nation.” Working closely with Nehru, Gandhi had been a great explainer, continually translating what came from outside into Indian idiom and tradition.

By the time I was an adult, the urban elites and the “heart of the nation” had lost the means to communicate. The elites lived in a state of gated comfort, oblivious to the hard realities of Indian life—poverty and unemployment, of course, but also urban ruin and environmental degradation. The schools their children went to set them at a great remove from India, on the levels of language, religion, and culture. Every feature of their life was designed, to quote Robert Byron on the English in India, to blunt their “natural interest in the country and sympathy with its people.” Their life was, culturally speaking, an adjunct to Western Europe and America; their values were a hybrid, in which India was served nominally while the West was reduced to a source of permissiveness and materialism. They thought they lived in a world where the “idea of India” reigned supreme—but all the while, the constituency for this idea was being steadily eroded. It was Bharat that was ascendant. India’s leaders today speak with contempt of the principles on which this young nation was founded. They look back instead to the timeless glories of the Hindu past. They scorn the “Khan Market gang”—a reference to a fashionable market near where I grew up that has become a metonym for the Indian elite. Hindu nationalists trace a direct line between the foreign occupiers who destroyed the Hindu past—first Muslims, then the British—and India’s Westernized elite (and India’s Muslims), whom they see as heirs to foreign occupation, still enjoying the privileges of plunder.

Almost 30 years ago, in the preface to his book Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie, fearful of the “religious militancy” threatening “the foundations of the secular state,” had expressed alarm that “there is no commonly used Hindustani word for ‘secularism’; the importance of the secular ideal in India has simply been assumed, in a rather unexamined way.” As it happens, the exalted idea of India has no commonly used translation either. Rushdie was saying that this is not merely a failure of language, but an expression of the isolation of an elite that thought its power was inviolable. “And yet,” Rushdie wrote, “if the secularist principle were abandoned, India could simply explode.”

India is now exploding. Even the visit of an American president in February was not enough to contain the rage. As Modi and Donald Trump bear-hugged each other, Hindu-nationalist mobs roamed the streets of New Delhi a few miles away, murdering Muslims and attacking their businesses and places of worship. The two leaders did not acknowledge these events, in which Hindus and Muslims alike were killed. India is approaching an especially dangerous point: the right quantity of unemployed young men, the right kind of populist strongman, and the right level of ignorance and heightened expectations, emanating from an imaginary past. Who knows what elements of modern nation-building and democracy might conveniently be sacrificed on the altar of a vengeful and revivalist politics?

I was not Muslim, and not Pakistani, but, as the writer Saadat Hasan Manto once noted, I was Muslim enough to risk getting killed. It was game over for my sort of person in India. We had been so blithe, so unknowing, so insulated from a wider Indian reality that it was as if we had prepared the conditions for our own destruction. If I became attuned to the danger, it was because I had seen what had happened to my father in Pakistan, where the shape of society is identical to that of India. He had died like a dog in the street for his high Western ideals. They mourned him in the drawing rooms of Lahore, and in the universities, think tanks, and newsrooms of the West. But in Pakistan, his killer was showered with rose petals; his killer’s funeral drew more than 100,000 mourners into the streets.

All over the old non-West, as well as in Western Europe and America, the symbols of belonging—race, religion, language—are being repurposed for a confrontation between what David Goodhart has referred to as the “somewheres” and the “anywheres,” the rooted and the rootless. I, with no tribe or caste, no religion or country, have had nowhere to go but to the cities of the West, where I hoped to wait out the storm. But, as my break with India acquired a cold new finality, exile turning into asylum, I could not help but ask whether any harbor would survive the destructive wrath of what may be coming for us all.

The Easter of Empty Churches Through plagues and wars, even through upheaval and revolution, there has never been an Easter like this one. by Mark Edington Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Europe

In April of 2019—exactly a year ago next week—flames shot through the roof of Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral. Before long, the dread became the reality—there would be no Easter at Notre-Dame.

We could hardly have imagined there would be no Easter anywhere in Europe a year later.

The cathedral I serve, the American Cathedral in Paris, has been closed for three weeks now. It will likely be closed until the end of the month. But when we were forced to shut the gates by order of the government, we were hardly alone. This is the Easter of empty churches.

All churches, not just our churches, have been closed throughout Western Europe—the place where Christianity made its Faustian bargain, evolving from a small gathering of socially marginal believers to a dominant civilizational force.

The late Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote that, during the past 2,000 years, nothing had more forcefully brought forward the fundamental assumptions of each epoch in Western history than “the attempt to come to terms with the meaning of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.” This, in a simple phrase, is the essence of Easter; on it hangs not hollow claims of privilege or longing for past grandeur, but the central idea of Christianity. But when the doors of the churches are barred, does any compulsion to make sense of Jesus’s story remain?

Today, for the first time since the first Easter, the meaning of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth is being observed, preached, and celebrated—but not in any of Europe’s countless churches. And for those of us who find it possible to remain people of faith, contemplating what this might portend is a matter of no small unease.

It is too early to predict what the impact of this shattering break with tradition will mean for the future of the Church—or for the idea of churches. It is not too early, however, to assert that the impact will be significant.

One way of constructing this future might be to see the Church going the way of the music and publishing industries—two other immensely influential values-mediating institutions brought low by shifts in social patterns of communication.

In these weeks of isolation and self-quarantine, faith communities have rushed to the screens to keep their people connected, doing the basic work of sharing concerns and joys in community that has been their purpose since Paul first planted churches along the edges of the ancient Mediterranean. But what musicians and writers learned about their industries’ Faustian bargain is that it trades the potential of impact for the loss of sustainability.

Digital natives expect their content—even their faith content—to come at no cost. And, brothers and sisters, that won’t keep the church doors open.

Another, more optimistic view of the Church’s future, popular among many of my colleagues, is that this moment of separation from both the companionship of the faith community and the place in which it gathers will reawaken in people a hunger for congregating and connecting. Once the doors are reopened, goes this line of thinking, it will be just like it was after our last great trauma—filled pews, expectant faces, hopeful hearts.

Maybe. My tradition teaches a simple idea expressed in the Latin aphorism Lex orandi, lex credendi—“Praying shapes believing.” Right now, people are praying at home, in their own surroundings, separated from community. And I believe that this may be the practice that shapes the belief of the post-COVID-19 era.

Through plagues and wars, even through upheaval and revolution, there has never been an Easter like this one. The day marks the single most radical claim of Christian belief—that there is more to life than physical existence, more to existence than ourselves. But on this disorienting Easter, the moral claim of loving our neighbors by slowing the spread of an eager and evil disease takes precedence over the imperative to gather and celebrate. Will we ever be the same on the other side of an Easter when the churches stood empty, wondering where we’d gone?

At least this much is true: At the very center of the meaning of this day is the story of another empty structure—an empty tomb. From that emptiness emerged a set of ideas of incalculable influence on human life, culture, and thought.

Who knows? Today’s empty churches may hold something similar in store.

What Easter Can Teach Us About Suffering The most important holiday on the Christian calendar feels foreign and unfamiliar this year. by EMMA GREEN

Jimmy Dorrell is the kind of Texas pastor who slips into preaching mode within the first five minutes of conversation, who has to tell two stories before finishing the first. His jokes can skip right past you if you’re not paying attention. On Palm Sunday, the fast-talking 70-year-old stood in the middle of Waco’s Webster Avenue, near Baylor University, wearing a light-blue face mask and a black hoodie, surrounded at six-foot intervals by homeless men and women waving palm fronds. Beside the street’s double yellow lines, a tattooed Jesus washed the feet of one of the men, while volunteers in masks and gloves waited on the sidewalk to put food from a slow cooker onto Styrofoam trays.
This is what church looks like during a pandemic: distanced, clouded by the threat of disease, but stubbornly persistent. Dorrell, whose congregation started meeting under a bridge close to I-35 nearly 30 years ago, is sad that his people can’t meet the way they used to on Sundays, that the crews who cook for the homeless are limited to 10 to 15 people at a time. As weird as this time is, though, remaining faithful through a period of fear and illness is exactly what faith is about, he says. “Protestants, we don’t do very well when it comes to dealing with the suffering of Christ,” he told me. Despite the many parts of the Bible that depict intense pain, “we middle-class Christians don’t like those passages, because we don’t want to suffer. We just want the good stuff.”

Easter weekend is usually a celebratory and social time of year, with pastel outfits and egg hunts and elaborate family brunches. The story it marks is one of joy for Christians: Jesus’s resurrection, offering the fulfillment of a promise and the hope of human salvation. This year, most people will spend the holiday alone, maybe tuning in to an online worship service or communicating with family members over Zoom. Many Christians will carry sorrow and worry, wondering about the health of their elderly neighbors or friends in big cities. But perhaps there’s theological insight to be gleaned from a painful Easter. “Most of us have taken the shallow way—we want to have Jesus as savior and get to heaven. They’re missing the Gospel,” Dorrell said. “It’s entering the pain, getting off of my place of safety and security, moving in among the poor, working among the broken, suffering with people.” In a time when many Americans are mourning their usual life, this may be a season of clarity about what it means to be a person of faith.

At the end of March, as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths was sharply rising, President Donald Trump declared that he wanted “the country opened up” by Easter. When a reporter asked why he had selected that date, he replied, “I just thought it was a beautiful time.” Public-health officials were quick to caution that lifting restrictions so soon would be dangerous, and the president soon backed off his statements. But his comments illustrate how unthinkable this moment is: Most of the country will be shut down through one of the biggest Christian holidays of the year. It’s hard for anyone not to yearn for a different reality.

While Dorrell would never wish a pandemic on the world, in a certain sense he seems to relish the normal ways of religious life getting turned upside down. “I grew up in that religious culture where we all had to have new clothes, and we all had to sit in the family row together” on Easter, he said. This is “the superficiality of most of the Christian Church in America: It’s pretty. We have a big building and a gorgeous place with choir robes and stuff.” Dorrell, who refers to himself as “a recovering Baptist,” describes his congregation, the Church Under the Bridge, as nondenominational in every sense of the word: middle-class and poor; black, white, and brown; ex-offenders and the homeless. “I’ve got Lutherans and Episcopalians,” he said, “and I’ve got wild-eyed charismatics.”

In recent months, the group has been meeting in Waco’s Silos—the headquarters of the home-decor empire run by Chip and Joanna Gaines—while the I-35 bridge is under construction. The pandemic has derailed its typical 300-person worship services, however. Now each week consists of cooking burgers for the homeless, calling and visiting congregants who live alone or don’t have internet access, and trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy during this unusual Lent. A traditional Palm Sunday celebration for the Church Under the Bridge involves Jesus riding in on a motorcycle—it’s a long story involving an intransigent donkey—and it kept that up this year, with a guy on a hog riding around a block away from its socially distanced gathering.

Dorrell delights in this kind of weirdness, which underscores how different his community is from the typical American church. Just as Dorrell is critical of the version of Christianity that hawks salvation at no cost, he’s skeptical of pastors who have refused to cancel church services during the pandemic. “I think a lot of times, it’s egocentric leadership that has this pulpit that says, ‘God will conquer everything. We’ll just get together, and we’ll show them that we’re not going to get sick,’” he said. “They really don’t love their people as much as they act like they do on the pulpit.”

The overwhelming majority of churches in America have shut down in accordance with government guidelines, with many putting their services online and guiding people on rites, such as taking Communion, at home. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, for example, will live-stream its 10 a.m. Easter Sunday Mass. Lakewood Church in Houston will feature remote performances and comments from Mariah Carey, Kanye West, and Tyler Perry. These styles are very different from Dorrell’s, but each is a way of working around the quarantine to keep church going. “How can we break from the single-mindedness of ‘We all can’t get together in one big room’?” he said. “We can figure out ways to follow the guidelines and not be stupid.”

Even still, he’s disappointed that his congregation won’t be able to celebrate Easter the way it normally does. In other years, his members all drive out to a camp about 40 minutes from Waco, where they worship outside. They perform baptisms in a river, just as the Bible describes Jesus’s baptism in the River Jordan. They eat together and pray together. It’s this joy in gathering, similarly cherished by Jews at Passover and Muslims during Ramadan, that will be missing for so many Americans this spring.

And there will be other losses. Dorrell said his congregants are already starting to feel the effects of the pandemic and the resulting economic shutdown: a job that wasn’t great to begin with disappearing, bills piling up, families unsure of whether they can stay in their home. It’s one thing to read the Bible with a theoretical understanding of tremendous loss. It’s another to do so while living through it. “The theology of suffering is: God, if you’ve got to make me walk through those tough times for me to be closer to you and more faithful in my walk, I’m willing to let you do that,” Dorrell said. This may be an Easter of solitude. But Easter by the river will return again. “We’ll go back out,” Dorrell said, “and have baptism there when this thing cleans out.”

The Books Briefing: The Leaders Who Weathered Historical Storms Power players and unsung heroes: by ROSA INOCENCIO SMITH

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Emergency Banking Act in March 1933

In a crisis, leaders step up—and not always in the expected ways. As the U.S. scrambles to contain the novel coronavirus, President Donald Trump has been heavily criticized for his lack of preparation and misleading messaging, while the immunologist Anthony Fauci has become an unlikely celebrity. Meanwhile, volunteers around the world have mobilized to keep their neighbors safe, fed, and healthy. In this tumultuous time, reading about historical feats of leadership can be a source of perspective and comfort, as well as inspiration.

The author Fergus M. Bordewich’s new history of the Civil War focuses on the radical Republican legislators who guided ambitious policies through Congress while the nation was in turmoil. The historian Eric Rauchway homes in on the transition between the Hoover and Roosevelt presidencies, showing how Roosevelt responded to the uncertainties of the Great Depression.

Vanessa Siddle Walker’s study of school desegregation reveals the work of black educators who had to keep their activism secret to protect their jobs. Anne Firor Scott examines the women’s organizations that supported the everyday functions of communities and protected their most vulnerable members throughout the 19th century. And Sherwin B. Nuland’s “biography of medicine” chronicles the accomplishments of pioneering physicians—such as the development of the personal protective equipment that’s so essential today.