Key points you should know:
- Religious institutions, such as Christian churches, are failing to meet the challenges of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and Long COVID crisis. In a Sick Times survey, the majority of respondents reported their churches are failing to acknowledge Long COVID.
- Churches’ denialist or apathetic attitudes have made Christian individuals who have Long COVID and/or actively take COVID-19 precautions feel abandoned by their faith communities.
- Despite institutional failures, Christian respondents are motivated to improve their faith communities, recognizing that COVID-19 safety mitigations are in alignment with faith commitments.
- In response to institutional failures to support COVID-aware Christians and Christians with Long COVID, respondents have forged supportive communities across online networks and social media platforms.
When Rose caught COVID-19 in spring 2024, her church congregants united to support her. Rose, who asked that we not use her real name for this story, recounted the many home-cooked meals, flowers, herbal medicines, check-ins, and miscellaneous deliveries that arrived at her door.
Rose, an Episcopal priest who developed Long COVID after her first infection with COVID-19 in 2022, suspected she caught her second infection from her church community. This hunch complicated her relationship with her congregants, who no longer observe COVID mitigations during weekly services.
“In my role as a priest,” she explained, “I’ve taken a vow to protect, love, and walk alongside to serve my congregation. I’m trying to do that with mitigations, but it’s not being received — and that’s devastating to me.”
Emily shared those frustrations. She requested we use her first name for this article due to future employment concerns. A nondenominational Christian navigating Long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), she lamented that her former church’s focus on social justice failed to include sustained COVID-19 advocacy or support for parishioners with Long COVID. “Churches are failing long-haulers,” she said.
At the start of the pandemic, her church took mitigation measures, opting for online-only services to protect community members.
But that changed with federal rollbacks on masks and other prevention strategies. Her church followed the government’s recommendations and removed mitigation requirements for services and projects for vulnerable community members, like food distributions and food assistance sign-up events. As Emily explained, this oversight renders vulnerable community members even more so.
“With every church service [without mitigations], they are creating more people who are sick and vulnerable,” she said.
Rose and Emily are part of a scattered yet growing community of COVID-concerned Christians and Christians with Long COVID. This community feels abandoned by their religious institutions, alongside other institutions — a blow they believe contradicts the clear connections between Christian values and COVID-19 precautions.
Amid these challenges, community members have taken formal and informal measures to grow with their faith and build new connections.
With every church service [without mitigations], they are creating more people who are sick and vulnerable.
Emily, christian with Long COVID & ME
Christians with Long COVID feel isolated
In a Sick Times survey, Christian respondents from varying denominational backgrounds shared their experience with Long COVID, commitment to COVID-19 precautions, and their relationship to their religious institutions since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some respondents tried to raise concerns with their church leaders. Several respondents shared their concerns and received no response. Others received dismissive responses, with one respondent noting that church leaders “humor me, as though I have psychological issues.”
Of the 58 Christian respondents to the survey, the vast majority said their church’s attitude toward the pandemic influences their religious participation. Of these respondents, 55% (32) disclosed Long COVID diagnoses. Having Long COVID complicates their church participation, with many unable to attend in person for safety or accessibility reasons.
When asked if their church had adequately supported them throughout their Long COVID diagnosis, 66% (21) answered “no.” Some respondents cited knowledge gaps in their congregation, with one observing that “a lot of people don’t even realize that COVID can cause so many long-term [health] issues.”
Others reported feeling “abandoned,” “forgotten,” “betrayed,” and “entirely alone.”
One respondent who worked at their church said: “After I got sick, two people stayed in contact with me for about a year. After that, nothing. […] I was basically abandoned by my church community. I was crushed.”
Reflecting on her own experience with Long COVID, Emily explained, “When you get Long COVID, people will leave, regardless of what they say they will do.”
While long-term support for congregants with Long COVID is sparse, some respondents cited short-term support from their churches — signaling the potential for churches to better assist people.
Fifteen (47%) respondents with Long COVID received help from their churches through prayer, finances, house visits, and meal preparation. Greta, who also requested we use just her first name, is a Christian with Long COVID and ME. She shared that her Evangelical Lutheran Church of America parish supported her through health relapses or “crashes.”
“When I became bedridden for several months, the assistant pastor organized people from the church to bring meals to me,” she explained. “The head pastor came and brought me communion once a month for the three months I was homebound.” These efforts, she said, made her feel included in her congregation.
Of these respondents, only two noted their churches integrating COVID-specific mitigations, such as improved ventilation and masked sections, in response to their access needs. Due to lacking protections, several respondents stopped going to services in person.
Rose continues to take precautions, ministering to her community in an N95 mask, and provides respirators to her congregants — though fewer and fewer wear them.
Reflecting on these discrepancies, Rose said, “In my less integrated moments, I think, ‘I don’t want your soup; I want you to wear a respirator.’”
In my less integrated moments, I think, ‘I don’t want your soup; I want you to wear a respirator.’
Rose, priest with Long COVID
Gap between Christian faith and institutional actions
The economic impact of Long COVID is staggering. Citing the work of health economist David Cutler, economist Matt Mazewski noted it approaches the same order of magnitude as the Great Recession.
Yet since 2020, religious institutions have been slow to consider these findings — a choice that is reminiscent of early pandemic resistance among fringe churches to resist mask mandates, use religious exemptions to circumvent vaccine requirements, and flout public health measures to gather and worship sans mitigations.
These early hostilities towards pandemic mitigation widened the perceived gap between public health, science, and religion in the public eye. And with more and more secular institutions abandoning mitigation measures and referring to COVID-19 in the past tense, resistant churches have felt vindicated.
Yet for COVID-informed Christians, faith justifies ongoing commitments to COVID-19 precautions, mitigation measures, and education on public health findings.
Mazewski, who is Roman Catholic, expressed hope that the Catholic Church will again embrace mitigations and make parishes safe for the medically vulnerable to congregate.
He maps Catholic commitments to human dignity and prioritizing vulnerable communities onto COVID-19 concern and Long COVID. “What we’ve learned about airborne transmission of COVID and other diseases suggests that we can think about a right to clean air, in the same way that Catholic social thought has developed the idea of a right to clean water.”
“As Christians, we’re called to protect others,” Emily explained. For her, clean air technologies, masking, testing, and other measures honor Jesus’s call to care for the vulnerable, or “fight for the least of these,” as outlined in Christian scripture.
Rose agreed: “One of our primary mandates as Christians is to care for the most vulnerable.” To honor this mandate, she supplies respirator masks before services and worked with institutional leaders to install high-quality portable HEPA filters in her church.
Yet without institutional buy-in, individual actions can only go so far.
For example, in 2024, the Episcopal Church held its General Convention to pass legislation related to church life. Unlike the prior convention in 2022, the 2024 event did not have testing or masking requirements.
The 2024 convention turned out to be a COVID-19 superspreader event. There was no official channel to inform leadership about positive tests or disease spread, so convention participants circulated an informal survey instead, Rev. Kate Harmon Siberine, an Episcopal priest with Long COVID, shared with The Sick Times. Per that survey, 100 out of nearly 900 attendees tested positive for COVID-19, according to reporting by The Living Church.
In response, Rev. Siberine wrote a letter to leadership expressing her frustrations about the lack of mitigation measures. “This is an issue of accessibility, inclusion, and safety,” she explained. Recognizing an awareness gap in religious institutions of COVID-19’s debilitating impacts, Rev. Siberine — who became disabled after her first infection — feels driven to tell her story.
Finding strength through faith
Despite the failures of their institutional churches in meeting their needs, survey respondents overwhelmingly cited their faith as a source of strength and comfort amid social isolation and physical suffering. Christians with Long COVID and COVID-concerned Christians are finding ways to build community in the face of adversity — but they still also want to see their churches, former and current, do better.
“The suffering [of Long COVID] was so intense, with no end in sight,” Greta said. “The only thing that got me through was faith.”
She continued, “People with Long COVID have a hard time making others understand how much they’re suffering. They just don’t believe the extent of it, because we live in a culture that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of this level of suffering.”
For Greta, religion acknowledged this suffering. She found solace in theological resources on suffering and endurance. Her Christian faith created space to process her experience with Long COVID, and she sees religion as a powerful resource for those with Long COVID, though institutional awareness is lagging.
Some Christians have taken to alternative channels to build community and systems of support. Some gather in-person at COVID-aware churches like Seattle’s Christ Episcopal Church, which requires attendees to mask. Others turn to online services. Emily attends the City of Refuge Zoom Church Fellowship, an online nondenominational worship gathering of the COVID-concerned, which she said makes her “feel a lot more grounded.”
Others have taken to social media platforms to build community and raise awareness. On Facebook, COVID-concerned Christians congregate in groups like “Still Coviding, Still Trusting & Believing in Jesus, in unbelievable times” and “Long Covid Faith, Prayer & Support Group,” which combined comprise nearly 3,000 members.
Rev. Siberine speaks almost daily to her 32,000 TikTok followers about topics ranging from Long COVID and disability justice to other sociopolitical trends. She also runs a live TikTok gathering, a morning prayer community called the Disabled Body of Christ that offers prayer and reflection spaces for people from a variety of religious backgrounds.
Its purpose, she said, is to “center the experiences and perspectives of disabled and chronically ill people as witnesses to a unique and important aspect of what is to be the church in the world.”
When asked about what actions they hope to see churches take at the institutional level, survey respondents cited collective responsibility through masking, air purifiers, advocacy efforts, mutual aid, testing before visiting high-risk church members, and acknowledgment — of COVID-19’s ongoing harms and of the ailing congregants harmed.
Overall, respondents expected more from their religious institutions. Greta hoped that churches would expand their commitments to accessibility in word and deed and become more disability-informed.
Rev. Siberine identified a similar learning curve in her denomination. Her former church had accessible pew cutouts for wheelchairs and ramps throughout, but as an ambulatory wheelchair user, she could not access the altar and pulpit to lead the service. “Even when a church thinks proactively about accessibility and inclusion, it may not think about a disabled person being in leadership,” she explained.
She, along with Greta, identified accessibility commitments as essential to honoring Christians with Long COVID, and sustaining the life of churches overall.
“Churches are really anxious about declining membership,” Greta observed. “If you want to get more people in the pews, then thinking about the barriers to access seems like a very obvious place to start.”
Churches are really anxious about declining membership … If you want to get more people in the pews, then thinking about the barriers to access seems like a very obvious place to start.
Greta, Christian with Long COVID & ME
Céire Kealty is a freelance writer and educator dedicated to covering stories on faith and social justice.
All articles by The Sick Times are available for other outlets to republish free of charge. We request that you credit us and link back to our website.
