A RELIGIÃO NO CONTEXTO DA PANDEMIA DE CORONAVÍRUS EM MOÇAMBIQUE: desafios e oportunidades

Abstract

The present paper analyses the role of religion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic situation in Mozambique by mapping the challenges and opportunities it creates in the society. Through the review of literature and observations made by key-informants, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic, on the one side, created important limitations on the religious activities due to the closing of the places of worships. By doing this (closing the sites of collective cults) it created to the religious institution financial problems due to the interruption of collecting the tithe. On the other side, the pandemic situation opened opportunities for the involvement of the religious institutions in campaigns of solidarity that aim to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 in the Mozambican society. We conclude that, on the one side, the great challenges that religion can impose on the society during this pandemic era are situated on the primacy of material prosperity that is based on “false prophecies” preached by some Pentecostal churches; and, on the possibility of generating attitudes and behaviours of religious fanatism as the consequence of the religious discourses that attach the causes of coronavirus on the idea of sin. And on the other hand, the challenges may be situated on the fact that most of the rituals performed in the places of worship in Mozambique and in many other countries of the world (such as trance, sermon, chanting, wafer, and holy communion, the loud recitations), as well as the environmental conditions of the places of worship situate the religious institutions in the top list of the super-spreaders of COVID-19.