on the “Corona Cult”

In my May 2020 essay, I approached the question — of whether “Corona” was classifiable as a religion — academically and not polemically. I found that the social-phenomenon that was “Corona,” involving fear of the flu-virus and the major disruptions to life associated with it and major social mobilization and intense emotions and more, it all qualified under anthropology as a religion.
 
The “Corona as Religion” idea had first come to me in early April 2020. I wrote the “Is Corona a Religious Cult?” essay-investigation in mid-May 2020, the fullest-form and most-seriously-approached investigation I had seen anywhere on the topic then-to-date. Few others at the time were talking in those terms, but in the subsequent sixteen months, many more have. It feels to me like autumn 2020 was a turning-point towards many more people calling Covid a “religion” or some variant.

Tucker(‘s writing team) now uses some of the same phrasing and imagery used here in May 2020, including some exact-same phrasing, including “the Corona Cult,” undoubtedly independently coined many times, but among the first-ever appearances was on the pages of Hail To You.

Google Trends thinks the first appearance of the phrase “Corona Cult” was on or about Feb. 13, 2020, at which time the Anti-Panic side was still very much in control, overlooking events from a position of confidence and strength, but also in retrospect entirely too confident and sluggish. A virus-centered apocalypse cult had made major strides in the past five or so weeks by mid-February 2020. It had started on the extreme conspiracy fringes and by mid-February began threatening to broach into the mainstream, which it did in March 2020, the blackest month in Western history in living memory.

Google Trends then suggests steady appearances of the phrase “Corona Cult” up until March 17, 2020, after which it faded to undetectable levels, aligned with the full retreat of Anti-Panic forces at the time. “Corona Cult” mostly stayed at zero (undetectable levels) until May 18/19, coincidentally the two-days on which “Is Corona a Religious Cult” appeared here at Hail To You. From this I take it that my essay on Corona treated as an anthropological-cultural phenomenon worth study as a New Religion, was among the first in the post-CoronaPanic-breakthrough era to push the idea. That it is now common among the Anti-Panic side is refreshing vindication. A variant phrase, “the Covidian Cult,” enters Google Trends in a strong way after C. J. Hopkins published an influential essay with that title (Oct. 2020; two follow-ups, most recently with The Covidian Cult, Part III, Sept. 2021.)

In the three-way split on the Corona-Panic issue, namely between the Pro-Panic side, the Neutrals, and the Anti-Panic side, the Pro-Panic side formed the core of the religion. They held sway over the Neutrals, who acquiesced to the new religion (and some degree of “trusting their betters” was in effect). As for us of the Anti-Panic side, we were shoved into the role of heretics, blasphemers, or pagans. How dare you question the Panic? You must be wicked, bamboozled, or deranged, or all three.

This all might seem to straddle the line between metaphor and literal, especially as interpreted by a reader not reading closely. To be clear, I do think “Covid” ended up a literal (non-metaphorical) religion, so-classifiable according to established practice on such things within the fields of anthropology of archaeology, as explained in the “Is Corona a Religious Cult?” essay. (read more)