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Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyze how religion played a role in the perspectivation of the Covid threat in Portugal, focusing on some minority religious groups and how they reacted to the threat.

Paper long abstract:

Like other crisis, the Covid19 pandemic seems to have been an accelerator of the "re-spiritualization" of secular society, independently of the religious field. How did the various religions interpret the pandemic times, and what memories do individuals keep of two years of lockdowns and prohibitions to attend funerals and religious rituals? What was the real impact of the pandemic in their religiosities and the dynamics of religious communities? This paper will address the situation in Portugal, where most people abide to the State regulations, and vaccination was highly successful. Still, as in many other countries, individuals turned to religion for psychological relief. This paper will analyze how religion played a role in the perspectivation of the Covid threat in Portugal, focusing on some minority religious groups and how they reacted to the threat.

It is based on field work undertaken in the Lisbon area with a diversity of religious groups --Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims, other minority new religious groups (Spiritism, New Age, neo-Pagans, Afro-Brazilian religions), and non-religious, representative of present day Portuguese religious scape. We focus on the Lisbon Metropolitan AREA for two reasons: 1) we have the basis of a previous study on religious diversity, undertaken by team members (TEI2019); 2) it is the region of Portugal with the larger religious diversity. We combined qualitative research, based on ethnographic methods and netnography, with a study of media and social networks, as well as a quantitative survey.