Bishop J. Delano Ellis. Photo courtesy of Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops
Bishop J. Delano Ellis II, a Black church official who started Pentecostal organizations and emphasized ecumenism, died over the weekend.
He was 75 and died after a recent hospitalization.
“While you share your love, concern and prayers with us, God and Bishop Ellis had another plan,” the Rev. Sabrina J. Ellis, who co-pastored Pentecostal Church of Christ in Cleveland with her husband, said in a Facebook post on Saturday (Sept. 19). “My husband made his transition this morning. Please continue to pray for us in this season.”
Over the course of his career, the Philadelphia native was a teacher, pastor and a chief of chaplains in the U.S. Air Force Civil Air Patrol.
But J. Delano Ellis was also among a group of “High-Church Pentecostal” clerics who in the 1990s became known for adorning their necks with Roman collars, wearing priestly garments with links to their African heritage and reciting the Nicene Creed. They were part of a trend that reshaped a portion of American Black religion.
“Traditionally … the Pentecostal church maintained its ardor but was never really known for its order,” the bishop, then president of the United Pentecostal Churches of Christ, told Religion News Service in 1995. “What we’re discovering … is that order is not blasphemous. Order best represents God.”
At that time, Ellis’ denomination had joined with two other groups, Pilgrim Assemblies International and Full Gospel Baptist Fellowship, for the first Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops. They supported women ministers, which was a departure from some traditions. At their conference’s closing ceremony, Ellis and other bishops wore fuchsia zucchettos, or skullcaps, and episcopal rings, religious wear reminiscent of Roman Catholic bishops.
Bishop J. Delano Ellis visits with Pope John Paul II in 1991. Photo courtesy of Bishop J. Delano Ellis
Ellis’ ecumenical work included several visits to the Vatican during St. John Paul II’s papacy, including one in 2000 where he led 160 delegates on a pilgrimage in hopes of building closer ties with the Catholic Church.
He retired in 2014 from the role of national chief of chaplains for the Civil Air Patrol, according to a bio on his ministry’s website.
Ellis was recalled as a key leader by members of the Church of God in Christ, a denomination he served for more than 35 years, and other faith leaders.
“Bishop Ellis was the consummate churchman. He was a wise counselor, dedicated servant, and a wealth of information that was helpful to generations of preachers, pastors and bishops,” said Bishop Talbert W. Swan II, leader of COGIC’s Nova Scotia jurisdiction. “He was a mentor, a friend, and a church father. He will be sorely missed.”
African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Vashti McKenzie, a Texas-based leader, responded to Sabrina Ellis’ announcement of her husband’s death.
“Time will not dull his legacy,” McKenzie commented on Facebook, “you and his sons and daughters in the faith will flesh out the rest.”
In 2004, Ellis had to step down from his leadership of the United Pentecostal Churches of Christ for health reasons.
But a couple of years later, he and more than a dozen other bishops started the Pentecostal Churches of Christ after he recovered from leukemia.
At the time, Ellis marveled at the convocation that came three years after he was preparing for his death.
“It was not a lack of faith in God’s ability to heal. It wasn’t that,” Ellis said. “It was more of a belief that maybe God was finished with me.”
About two weeks before his death, his last public appearance was in Cleveland, at a dedication ceremony naming a portion of an avenue in his honor. His family said he was hospitalized less than 24 hours later, a local Fox news station reported.
“I’ve got one thing to say,” he told the crowd at the Sept. 6 ceremony, “to God be the glory.”
This article originally appeared on ProPublica.com, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
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Vote by Mail News
Although the cost of postage for mail-in ballots varies by state, a USPS spokeswoman said any ballots with insufficient or unpaid postage will still be delivered, with the cost charged to local elections boards. (USA Today)
A study of 2018 mail ballots in three California counties found that the rejection rate for voters age 18-24 was three times higher than the counties’ overall rejection rates. (KQED)
California Sunday went behind the scenes at companies in the mail voting supply chain. (California Sunday)
Maryland’s ballot vendor reportedly quit after printing had already begun, but the state has found another vendor to fill the gap. (The Baltimore Sun)
NPR mapped how mail ballot rules vary across the country. (NPR)
Some overseas voters are panicking about voting from abroad by mail this year. (USA Today)
Some voters reported errors with Detroit’s third-party absentee ballot tracker during the primary. (Detour Detroit)
North Carolina voter hotlines are getting a lot of questions about how to vote by mail. (Voting Booth)
California and Oregon voters who have been displaced from their homes by fires must take steps in order to vote by mail from a new or temporary address. (San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian)
Third-party registration forms and ballot application mailers are causing confusion among some Florida and Montana voters. (Miami Herald, NBC Montana)
During Pennsylvania’s primary, around 20,000 mail-in ballots weren’t counted, either because they were returned after the deadline or because they didn’t have a voter signature. (NBC Philadelphia)
Because of changes made to absentee ballot envelopes and other policy changes, a lower rate of Georgia mail ballots were rejected during the primary than during the 2018 general election. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Mail-In Voting Policies
Pennsylvania’s Department of State told counties that they cannot throw out absentee ballots over signature match problems. (Morning Call)
Pennsylvania couldn’t start sending out absentee ballots Monday due to legal disputes. (CNN)
Ohio’s Controlling Board voted against funding prepaid postage on absentee ballots. (Columbus Dispatch)
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are among battleground states where local election officials aren’t allowed to start processing mail ballots until Election Day. (Politico)
The Michigan Senate approved a bill to allow clerks to begin processing absentee ballots the day before the election. The legislature is considering other policy changes that would affect this year’s election. (Detroit Free Press, MLive)
Only some Michigan counties are paying for pre-paid postage on absentee ballots. (Lansing State Journal)
Thanks to a court decision, first-time Tennessee voters will be able to vote by mail. (News Channel 9)
South Carolina’s governor signed a bill to allow no-excuse absentee voting during the upcoming election. (AP)
New York state says it doesn’t have the necessary funding to provide pre-paid postage for absentee ballots. (North Country Public Radio)
USPS Absentee Voting Mailers
Several state election officials said a nationwide mailer from the US Postal Service offering generic voting guidance would confuse voters in their states. The mailer urged voters to request a mail-in ballot “at least 15 days before Election Day.” (Reuters)
A judge in Colorado temporarily blocked distribution of the mailer. (Denver Post)
Missouri’s secretary of state is encouraging people to vote in person, contradicting the state’s health department recommendations to avoid crowds on Election Day. (The Beacon)
One Missouri county, which is not requiring election workers to wear face masks, sent an email to poll workers telling them they must keep a mask at hand or on one ear and “may act surprised” and “apologize as you put the mask on” if questioned by a voter. (KMOV)
More than 8,000 volunteers have applied for just 1,100 spots to serve as election judges in Denver, Colorado, but the local election commission says they’re still short of Republican applicants. (Colorado Politics)
States are hoping to learn from this year’s primary election mistakes to avoid long lines, confusion and delays over mail-in ballots and minimize rejected ballots in November. (PBS Newshour)
About 14% of California eligible voters said they were worried about contracting COVID while voting, with African Americans and voters with disabilities among the most concerned, according to a new study of California voter messaging amid the pandemic. (USC Center for Inclusive Democracy)
Enfranchisement News
College campuses are normally an important venue for mobilizing young voters, but advocates and voting groups say they’re still struggling to figure out how to reach students scattered across the country by the pandemic. (McDowell News, The Guardian)
Former NFL quarterback Michael Vick said it wasn’t until he got involved with Lebron James’ voting rights project that he was able to reinstate his own right to vote after serving a prison sentence. “I didn’t understand or know that I could vote…it took until this campaign [to find out] that I did have rights to vote,” Vick said. (Sports Illustrated)
A new Arizona policy will allow prospective voters with nontraditional addresses, particularly Native people in rural tribal communities, to register to vote online with digital location codes. (Cronkite News)
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said the state’s elections board won’t stop the enforcement of a court ruling that would allow more convicted felons to vote this fall. (Associated Press)
North Carolina elections officials are trying to identify and contact nearly 5,000 people with felony convictions whose right to vote could be restored by a court ruling. (Carolina Public Press)
Advocates working to register prison inmates to vote are worried USPS cuts could threaten ballot access for hundreds of thousands of eligible inmates, whose right to vote hinges on reliable mail. (The Guardian)
Some advocates are concerned there hasn’t been enough outreach to Kentucky felons after their voting rights were restored. (Spectrum News)
Two Texas congressional representatives are questioning why 20 Houston-area Post Offices reportedly threw out or refused to distribute voter registration cards to patrons. (KHOU)
While homeless people often face major barriers to voting, advocates in Washington, D.C. are registering homeless individuals and helping them participate in November’s election. (Washington Post)
More than 400,000 people have registered to vote through a new Snapchat feature. (The Verge)
Disinformation on Voting
Attorney General William Barr attacked mail-in ballots again, claiming without evidence that they’re more vulnerable to coercion than in-person voting. In an interview, Barr suggested fraudulent ballots favorable to Democrats would be “discovered” on Election Day. (The Hill, Chicago Tribune)
Twitter and Facebook flagged President Donald Trump’s posts telling North Carolina voters to vote by mail early and subsequently visit the polls on Election Day. The head of the state’s election board said the president’s comments could cause unnecessarily long lines during the pandemic. (GPB)
Twitter is expanding the types of voting-related content it will label or remove to include “false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence.” (Forbes)
Trump told a crowd in Nevada he will “negotiate” a third term and claimed without proof that Democrats will “rig the election.” (Slate)
Connecticut’s Secretary of State has hired an expert to thwart online disinformation campaigns targeting the election. (CT Mirror)
The Chicago Tribune debunks election season misinformation for Illinois voters, including false claims that voting is available by text message and that voter information is being sold online. (Chicago Tribune)
Creative Approaches to Getting Out the Vote
Live Nation announced an initiative to try to convert concert venues into voting centers around the country. (Rolling Stone)
Fashion designers launched a new voter registration campaign, which will also debut at New York Fashion Week. (Harper’s Bazaar)
Kentucky is offering lawyers continuing education credits if they serve as poll workers. (WTVQ)
An El Paso church is registering people to vote at food distribution sites. (KTSM)
Dancers and choreographers in St. Louis are encouraging people to vote through a series of commissioned dance videos. (St. Louis Public Radio)
TikTok creators are launching a “Tok the Vote” voter registration campaign. (CNN)
Facebook kicked off a poll worker recruitment drive that will appear on users’ news feeds. (Techcrunch)
Shamony Makeba Gibson was in her hospital room, recovering after giving birth, when she said something that worried her mother.
Gibson had just delivered her second child, Khari, a healthy baby boy, via C-section at Brooklyn’s Woodhull Hospital on Sept. 23, 2019.
But in the delivery room while prepping for her surgery, Gibson told her mother, doctors had briefly struggled to insert an IV in her hand — likely because of a blood clot, she said they informed her.
Courtesy of Gibson Family Omari Maynard holds his infant son, Khari.
Shawnee Benton-Gibson’s concern for her daughter was based on her years of reproductive justice activism in New York City, working with mothers and families dealing with issues like postpartum depression and stillbirths.
Back at home after leaving the hospital, Gibson felt fatigued and short of breath, her mother recalled in a phone interview with THE CITY.
“I talked to her about pulmonary embolisms, but she said they checked her in the hospital for it,” Benton-Gibson said.
Besides, her daughter argued, she was taking anticoagulants — commonly prescribed after surgeries, including C-sections — and was wearing compression undergarments the hospital gave her to improve circulation. But her fatigue and shortness of breath persisted.
‘My Best Friend’
One evening in early October, watching TV in the Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment she shared with her partner and their children, Gibson collapsed. EMS workers resuscitated her and rushed her to Interfaith Medical Center, the nearest hospital.
There, doctors found blood clots had spread to her lungs and legs.
Gibson — an artist who was “very funny” and “loved to sing,” according to her mother — died 14 hours later on Oct. 6, two weeks after her son was born.
The cause of death was the condition her mother had suspected: a pulmonary embolism. She was 30 years old.
Her children live with Omari Maynard, their father and Gibson’s partner of seven years.
“She was very fiery like me,” said Benton-Gibson, 51. “She was my best friend.”
Stark Disparities Persist
On Thursday, Benton-Gibson joined other women like her — grandmothers left to help raise their grandchildren after the sudden deaths of their own daughters — for #HearUs, a virtual pre-Grandparents Day event to raise awareness about Black maternal mortality.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 700 women die in the United States each year from pregnancy-related complications. By the CDC’s estimates, two-thirds of those deaths occur in the days and weeks postpartum — and about two-thirds of deaths overall were determined to be preventable.
A 2017 study by the medical journal The Lancet found that the United States has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the developed world — a trend that’s steadily increased over the last two decades.
Brooklyn, where Gibson lived, is home to three neighborhoods that rank highest in the city for non-fatal but serious pregnancy-related illness, or severe maternal morbidity, according to a 2016 study by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
In Brownsville, which has the city’s highest rate of such incidents at 497.4 per 10,000 deliveries, 79% of all deliveries were to Black non-Latina women.
The borough is also home to the neighborhood with the city’s lowest rate of severe maternal morbidity — largely white Borough Park, with a rate of 113.3 per 10,000 deliveries, according to that same DOHMH study.
Gibson’s death was particularly wrenching for Davis, who worked at the city’s health department for more than a decade.
She knew Gibson and her mother well from their reproductive justice work in Brooklyn. Benton-Gibson was the first person to offer Davis a public speaking opportunity on maternal well-being, she noted.
“I can tell you that she has saved lives,” Davis said of Benton-Gibson’s activism. “I can tell you that Shamony [also] has saved lives. And all that knowledge was not enough to save her own life.”
The Thursday evening event — equal parts memorial, group therapy session and rally — brought together women from New York, California, Alabama and Georgia who’d lost their daughters, and in one case, a grandchild as well, to complications stemming from childbirth.
‘All that knowledge was not enough to save her own life.’
Most of those women have embraced a life of activism after the sudden loss of their loved ones.
Among them were Maddy Oden, of Oakland, Calif., who became a doula after the 2001 deaths of her daughter, Tatia Oden French, and her grandchild Zorah, during delivery.
Also attending was Wanda Irving, mother of Shalon Irving, a 36-year-old CDC epidemiologist in Atlanta who died in 2017 from complications of high blood pressure weeks after delivering her daughter.
“Women know their bodies best and know when something doesn’t feel right,” Shanna Cox, associate director for science for CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health, told THE CITY. “The campaign is encouraging women to speak up — during and after pregnancy — if they have health concerns.”
Calls for Justice
Benton-Gibson, a longtime community organizer and licensed social worker, founded The A.R.I.A.H. — Association for Reproductive Innovation through Artistry & Healing — Foundation, which “works to stop the devastation of Black maternal mortality,” in the aftermath of her daughter’s death.
“I’m conflicted: Do I cry? Yes. Am I upset about this? Yes. Do I sometimes wake up and feel like ‘What the…?’” Benton-Gibson said at the event.
“But my bigger stand is that that girl lived all the days that she lived, and I don’t want those days that she lived to be in vain so that the day she passed took over,” she added. “But how she passed — that’s what every breath in my body will be about, because I’m making sure that this never happens again.”
It’s a similar position to the one Bruce McIntyre found himself in nearly six months ago when his partner, Amber Rose Isaac, died during delivery at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx in April during the coronavirus crisis.
Courtesy of Bruce McIntyre Amber Rose Isaac died shortly after giving birth at the Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx during the coronavirus outbreak.
On Aug. 1, McIntyre hosted a “Mothers March,” a rally for Isaac and others who died from pregnancy-related causes. Dozens, including Benton-Gibson, attended the event and donned purple in Isaac’s memory.
Also at the march was the family of Sha-asia Washington, who died during delivery on July 3 at Woodhull Hospital, where Gibson gave birth last year.
“I’m staying up all night holding the baby that she should be here holding,” Desiree Williams, Washington’s mother-in-law, said at a separate rally in July in front of that hospital. “It’s not fair, it’s not right. My son is broken down, it’s not right.”
‘She Was Really Happy’
Gibson, an artist who specialized in dance, was “very savvy in graphic design,” and “loved to travel,” her mother said. The Medgar Evers College graduate had visited 10 countries.
She wanted a big family, Benton-Gibson said: five children, which she tried talking her out of, without much success.
“She loved the idea of having children,” she said.
Courtesy of Shawnee Benton-Gibson Shamony Makeba Gibson and her partner, Omari Maynard
When Benton-Gibson became pregnant for the second time in 2019, she knew exactly the kind of birth she wanted.
She had delivered her first child two years prior, a baby girl named Anari, via C-section. When she found out she was expecting Khari, she pored over information about natural births, and at one point even considered a home birth.
She researched doulas and midwives in her area and eventually hired one of each, including a Black doula who lived a short walk from her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment.
“She was really happy, had a baby shower and everything,” Benton-Gibson said.
But after she checked into the hospital, doctors told her she needed another C-section.
Before that news, she had told her mother, “This birthing experience is going to be different.”
THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.
A dozen doughnut holes. Growing up, that was a typical breakfast for Tassiana Willis, a 24-year-old African-American poet. In her family, moments of joy centered around sweets. Her grandfather, a man of few words, showed affection through weekend trips to McDonald’s.
learned to find i love you in white paper bags
instead of his lips
see, I loved food out of ritual
Willis, who grew up in San Francisco, has harnessed the power of poetry to raise awareness about Type 2 diabetes, a preventable disease caused largely by poor dietary habits and lack of exercise. It once affected mostly adults but now is spreading at alarming rates among young people, especially minorities and youth from low-income households.
“Raise your voice and change the conversation,” urges the tagline on four new videos produced for an arts and public health campaign called The Bigger Picture. The videos, including one by Willis called “The Longest Mile,” show young poets telling deeply personal stories about the life circumstances that promote diabetes.
The videos challenge viewers to look at “the bigger picture” behind the startling rise of diabetes. Instead of highlighting poor individual choices, they expose the social and economic factors — everything from food pricing and marketing to unequal access to parks and playgrounds — that conspire to push young people of color into an unhealthy lifestyle.
“The way these stories are told … really calls for social change,” said Natasha Huey, who managed the campaign for Youth Speaks, one of four youth development organizations across California that partnered with the University of California-San Francisco’s Center for Vulnerable Populations to produce the poetry videos.
The Bigger Picture, which launched in 2011, has produced more than two dozen videos about diabetes, which together have been viewed more than 1.5 million times on YouTube. They have also been presented at school assemblies for thousands of Bay Area students.
The rise in Type 2 diabetes among youth goes hand in hand with rising obesity rates.
Willis said she is obese now because of the way her financially strapped family ate when she was young. “There are powerful emotions behind why we eat what we eat,” she said in an interview.
In “The Longest Mile,” Willis recalls the humiliation of being unable to run a mile during PE class in middle school. “I wasn’t slow / I was just fat.” Obesity is fueling the spread of Type 2 diabetes, and Willis knows she’s at high risk for the disease.
by luck I escaped type 1
i feel like I’m always
1 soda away from type 2
that’s like dodging a bullet
and committing suicide with a gun
in my kitchen
Unlike Type 2 diabetes, which is related to lifestyle choices and obesity, Type 1 diabetes typically develops in early childhood and is believed to be the result of genetic factors and environmental triggers, including viruses.
Over the past decade, rates of Type 2 diabetes have tripled among Native Americans, doubled among African-Americans and increased by as much as 50 percent in the Asian, Pacific Islander and Hispanic populations, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We’re at the tipping point in this disease,” said Dr. Dean Schillinger, a professor of medicine at UCSF and director of health communications at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, who co-created the Bigger Picture campaign. “The trajectory is very scary and the rate of increase, particularly in youth of color, is exponential.”
In a recent JAMA paper featuring the new videos, he stressed the importance of shifting the way diabetes is characterized in public health education.
“The overarching objective is to change the conversation about diabetes away from it being an individual ‘shame and blame’ message to approaching it as a societal problem,” Schillinger said.
In another video, “Empty Plate,” Anthony “Joker” Orosco, a 20-year old Chicano poet, depicts his farmworker relatives who can’t afford to buy the produce they pick.
Backs breaking bones aching Harvesting healthy fruits and veggies Acre by acre, The bounty of California’s breadbasket That almost never blessed the tables of farmero families,
Orosco, who grew up in Stockton, a city in California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley, said he was inspired to honor the hard work of immigrants who sacrificed for his generation.
Low-income people often struggle to buy fresh vegetables, whole grains and other nutritious foods, because those choices are more expensive than the sugary, fat-laden processed foods widely available in many poor neighborhoods. In a 2013 study, researchers at Harvard and Brown universities found that a healthful diet costs about $550 a year more per person than an unhealthy one.
Schillinger said that, based on his earlier experience with the AIDS epidemic and anti-tobacco campaigns, he believes there needs to be a “groundswell of grass-roots activism” if the course of Type 2 diabetes is to be reversed.
“A young person getting diabetes is an injustice, and so the campaign features young people who are targets of diabetes risk but are now becoming agents of change,” he said.
In “Monster,” Rose Bergmann, 17, and Liliana Perez, 16, talk about fathers who relied on sugar-packed energy drinks to work double shifts to support their families.
52 grams [of sugar] from the can keep his eyes open
Sugar creating their own hands around his throat
The industry that makes sweetened drinks has taken notice. “We do agree that people need to manage their sugar intake,” said Lauren Kane, senior director of communications for the American Beverage Association in Washington, D.C. She said beverage makers are “aggressively working to innovate to offer more products with less sugar … and to create interest in access to those beverages.”
McDonald’s has also recently announced new nutritional standards to reduce the number of calories in its Happy Meals, which are marketed to children.
Los Angeles poet Edgar Tumbokon, 19, said nutritious food did not play a big role in his childhood. “I grew up in a food desert surrounded by a culture and kids who loved to eat junk food,” he said. “Eating healthy was considered ‘a white thing.’”
Tumbokon, who weighed 13 pounds at birth, said his poem, “Big Boy,” was inspired by his immigrant Filipino mother, who developed gestational diabetes, which now afflicts 1 in 11 pregnant women. He grew up watching her test her blood sugar and inject herself with insulin.
Seemingly everyone has an opinion on masks: when to wear them, how to wear them, which ones are best and even whether we should be wearing them at all.
For those in this last camp, a popular argument is that the coverings aren’t the problem, but being forced by a government entity to wear one is. It’s the mandate, not the mask, some might say.
Some anti-maskers have claimed that being forced to wear a face covering violates their religious rights. Back in May, Ohio State Rep. Nino Vitale, a Republican, publicly rejected mask-wearing on the grounds that covering one’s face dishonors God. This view is echoed by some individual faith leaders, with churches flouting requirements that congregants wear masks. Meanwhile, media-savvy pastors have put anti-mask posts on Facebook that have been viewed millions of times.
And a recent study revealed that the rejection of masks is higher in populations that associate with conservative politics and the idea that the United States is a divinely chosen nation.
Is it that masks are a religious matter, or is religion being used to suit people’s political agendas? Socially speaking, both things can be true.
Using religion to support one’s political interests is generally viewed as a negative thing that represents the hijacking or twisting of religion. Such a view is echoed in the words of preacher and activist Rev. William Barber, who said Donald Trump’s alliance with evangelical Christians was a “misuse of religion.”
From a scholarly perspective, though, all forms of religion affect society in some way – even if those outcomes are deemed undesirable or unethical by certain groups. Examining how religion operates in society can help us understand why the conversation over masks has recently turned religious.
In his landmark analysis of the social impact of religion, scholar Bruce Lincoln argued that there is no realm of life that cannot somehow be made religious. This is not because there are topics that are specific or unique to religion, but because of what happens to the authority of a claim when religious language is used. In other words, when people use religious speech, their authority is often perceived to be heightened.
For example, if someone plans to marry a partner they don’t appear to like very much, their claim that “we’ve been together a long time” may not come across as a convincing argument for a wedding. But what if that same person says that “God has brought this other person into my life”? That reason may be more readily accepted if the public hearing these words is already open to religious ideas.
Taking this approach to religion doesn’t mean that all religious claims are factually true or ethical. It also doesn’t mean that the people who use religious language are insincere or even wrong. Rather, the function of religious speech is to amplify the authority of an idea through appeals to seemingly unquestionable authorities, like deities and “ultimate truths.” If a statement does this, Lincoln concludes, then it is religious.
Special authority
These are important considerations for the debate over masks. Using religious language to justify an anti-mask position is a move intended to amplify the voices of those who make this claim. And public health issues have long been a concern of American religious groups.
For example, when it comes to childhood vaccinations, arguing for exemption on philosophical or moral grounds will work in only 15 states. But arguing a religious objection will be accepted in at least 44 of 50 states. The difference is that, in the United States, religious claims are often granted a special type of authority.
Consider also that Americans generally accept the circumcision of infant boys on religious grounds. This is true despite the fact that some medical authorities and activists have questioned both the ethics and health impact of performing this specific surgery, which is otherwise elective and cosmetic, on a newborn.
This does not mean, however, that if religion is involved, then anything goes. As recently as 2014, a faith-healing couple was sentenced to jail time after the preventable deaths of two of their children. The couple claimed that seeking medical care was against their religion.
These examples provide some clarity on when religious rhetoric is successful and when it is not. Groups, beliefs or practices that are already popular or commonplace often appear to get a boost of authority when religious language is used to describe them. If the claim is unpopular or the group is not considered mainstream, then religious language may have little impact.
Barometer of public opinion
Masks are a religious issue because some people have described them that way. But this does not mean that such religious claims have successfully granted them authority. Despite an existing partisan divide on the matter, there is still no widespread sentiment among Americans that a government mask mandate is religiously problematic.
This means that those who rail against masks for religious reasons may not gain a lot of traction right now among the wider American public, when more than 6 million Americans have so far been infected with the virus. There is simply too much fear presently to make that a popular line of reasoning.
But if that number wanes, I believe it is entirely possible that religious rationales against masking could receive renewed, and even broader, support as the culture’s interests change.
This is a good reminder that whether religious ideas take hold is not so much a matter of “truth” or ethics. Rather, the issue at hand is often the barometer of public opinion.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that 6 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus to date.
