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I knew COVID-19 mitigation was a religion because I knew what religion looks like:
Lockdowns and Mandates as Religious Conversion
It was evident to me from the early days of the lockdown that something very cult-like was occurring. When quite literally nothing happened during those first 15 days to justify the lockdowns, the mantra of “just wait two weeks” was on the lips of the believers of the Branch Covidians, much like how a doomsday cult leader is allowed to pick new dates when the aliens don’t show when they are supposed to.
Creators of mathematical models (which only tell you what they were told to tell you) were exulted as if they were prophets who could tell the future, and like the false prophets of the Old Testament they weren’t punished and ignored when the first round of predictions failed to come true. The Amish, the state of South Dakota, and the country of Sweden may very well have never existed because it was impossible to speak of them.
Suddenly, argument from authority (which is the weakest form of argument in every science except Theology) became the primary means of demonstrating scientific truth; people were citing CDC web pages the way I might cite Scripture or the Church Fathers. It was as if, in the manner of God, the CDC can “neither deceive nor be deceived.”
Suddenly, complete novelties such as 6-feet distancing, lockdowns, forced masking, and experimental mRNA shots were declared as “safe and effective” not because of any real evidence but out of some misplaced “faith” and unjustified “hope” so that the absolute cruelty of destroying peoples’ jobs, making them be muzzled to return to work, and then threatening to fire them if they didn’t receive the sacrament of the covenant with Pfizer might mockingly be called “charity.”
Indeed, some people who received the earlier rounds of vaccinations were describing the experience in terms that were just as religious as descriptions of full immersion Baptism in the early Church.
The strongest evidence that something akin to a religious conversion was occurring in people was precisely what I witnessed among some of my fellow clergy. “Do not be afraid” became “Fear is a virtue.” “Those who wish to save their life will lose it” became “We must wish to save lives at any cost.”
While seeing the face of God is to experience salvation, seeing the faces of those made in his image no longer held any value at all. Those who once described themselves as defenders of the rights of laborers ignored my own call to action and I was forced to admit embarrassment at the fact that a socialist publication could more easily observe the damage being done to the poor and working class than my own confreres.
What I was witnessing was a “religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth” which is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes the “mystery of iniquity” which accompanies the Church’s final trial (CCC 675).
I recognize that many readers here may not be of a particularly religious background, so I will add that this experience of conversion also occurred in people regarding supposedly deeply held ideological and moral beliefs.
Committed libertarians became radical authoritarians. Those who would proclaim that health care should be free to everyone now insisted it should be denied to those who don’t comply. Those who once claimed government was too large now eagerly caused it to grow.
Those who once asserted rights to privacy and bodily autonomy renounced the right to be taken seriously ever again by declaring that medical decisions should be public and forced. The entire field of public health basically apostatized from the entire moral and policy framework that they had created before 2020. Medical doctors completely abandoned everything they were trained to do with respect to treatment and ethics, even to the point of refusing to see patients in person and jettisoning the concept of informed consent completely.