Paper short abstract:

Religious discourse against pandemic rules may be either a way to care for the spiritual well-being of its followers or a strategy to consolidate authority capitalising on voices of pandemic skeptics.

Paper long abstract:

There are many voices raised against the restrictions imposed in connection to the prevention of COVID 19 aggressive spreading. The arguments brought forth build up as a way to contest medical hegemonies and, additionally, to offer alternative safeguarding methods to fight against the virus. Against an increasingly eroded public image the Romanian Orthodox Church holds, religious reasoning plays a rather vigorous role in capitalising the disbelief of the many opposing the rules or contesting the existence of any virus.

This paper will look at how some clergymen and, occasionally, the entire Church, deliberately defied the social distancing rules by summoning people to sermons, performing certain Christian rituals, even taking to court the authorities’ for banning the pilgrimage to the patron saint of the Romanians. However, such attitude was rather inconsistent reaching spikes of utter virulence followed by periods of calmed opposition.

This paper ponders whether the Orthodox Church discourse stems from an authentic care for the spiritual well-being of the faithful or from an intricate strategy to regain a strong foothold in the game of authority building. In doing so, it will investigate how the religious arguments unfold on social media and digital news agency in contrast with how such discourse is perceived among wider categories of publics and the types of arguments used in encouraging rule breaking.