The Pandemic Response: Our New State Religion

For the better part of a year, an entire belief system has arisen around the world’s response to COVID-19. This new religion is unmistakably statist, but has taken forms far beyond the typical worship of democracy and the social contract and the offices of heads of state; it has established its own priesthood, its own doctrines and catechism, its own sacraments and rites, and its own take on “saints” and “sinners.” It even goes so far as to take the coronavirus, the actual enemy of humanity, and to transform it into an instrument of judgment for those who do not abide by the new creed.

This is the first in a series I will release in the coming days on the different ways that the pandemic response has become a widely accepted religious movement, and how we “heretics” who do not subscribe to all of the pervasive dogma can respond to the pressure to convert. In this first installment, I want to lay the groundwork by making the case that the “Cult of COVID” is indeed is not merely a religious movement, but specifically a statist religion. Whether we examine it from my perspective as a citizen of the United States or not, the foundation of this cult is that complete central planning is the only means by which we shall be saved. Any other solution is insufficient — or even detrimental — and the end result of any other approach would be a catastrophic loss of life.

Because government is seen as holding the only solution, it has become an article of faith that government cannot be held responsible for anything other than a failure to act quickly enough. While it can certainly be shown that government red tape and bureaucracy prevented private industry and other innovators to respond more quickly to the threat of COVID-19, what the Cult of COVID insists is that state-imposed lockdowns came too little, too late. In the eyes of the faithful, the lockdowns themselves, however, are in no way responsible for the economic and social calamity that we face today.

Back in late February and early March, when the confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States began to take off, many businesses took initiative to close their doors in order to protect their clientele and staff, and to determine how best to respond to the growing pandemic and continue to stay afloat. The state, at every level, soon meddled in its typical fashion by taking away the right to engage in commerce and putting over 30 million Americans out of work. The end result, as we have begun to see, is a calamity anyone with any basic understanding of sound economics predicted back in March: businesses closing for good, persistent unemployment and poverty and hunger, eviction and homelessness, increased death from non-COVID causes — along with all of the mental health issues that accompany these things.

One would think that the government officials responsible for creating those conditions would be held accountable. But, wait! That would collide with one of the principal tenets of the Cult of COVID:

"Government is society’s only savior. The ultimate sin that the state can commit is inaction.”

So, whom can we blame for the economic tragedy the world is now facing? Every response can be summed up as one of the following:

those in government who did not act quickly enough, or provide enough economic aid (for they must not acknowledge that it was the direct actions of state central planners that created the very problems they face);
the coronavirus itself (because they have ruled out non-governmental approaches to navigating the pandemic, even by those with actual “skin in the game” and much more expertise in managing their own lives and businesses); or
free-market capitalism (for, if subsistence were not connected to labor and individual effort and economic production, everything would not have gone off the rails when the economy was put into a coma by the government, right?).

Nowhere in the dogma of the followers of this religion is any room for blaming the government for lockdowns. It was only doing what was necessary to protect us all from the one thing that matters in this whole public issue: avoiding transmission of a contagion.

Therefore, the Cult of COVID would not exist without a blind, unquestioning adherence to the notion that responding to a pandemic requires the involvement of an active, intrusive, authoritarian government every step of the way. It is, in all respects, our new state religion.