Doing community in social distancing times: Faith,sociality and new embodied practices during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article looks at the role faith communities and faith-related practices played in older people’s lives during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 through the lenses of adapted techniques of the body. By drawing on interviews conducted with 75 older people across three different ethnic groups in Greater Manchester, the article explores the impact of the closure of religious spaces, dramatically altering faith-related activities that had until then been a key part of older people’s routines. This in turn brought about a number of adaptations whereby faith-based networks functioned as webs of solidarity through actual and virtual infrastructures. Throughout, this article puts forward the argument that Covid-19, with its unprecedented requirement of social distancing, engendered new techniques of the body altering the physical ways older people socialised with others from their faith communities, used religious spaces and carried out rituals. I conclude by arguing that during the Covid-19 pandemic new techniques of the body were forged to maintain faith-related connections at the personal, collective and societal levels which involved engaging differently with the materialities that enable the practice of one’s faith.

Introduction

This article looks at the role faith communities and faith-related practices played in older people’s lives during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 through the lenses of adapted ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss, 1934/1973). Sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss used the term in a classic essay where he observed everyday practices, such as swimming or walking, and less mundane ones, such as hunting and magical procedures.

His argument struck a chord when I first started listening to older people’s accounts of their everyday lives under lockdown. I was the main interviewer in a project in Greater Manchester, UK, that investigated how older adults of 50 years old and above were coping with the unprecedented global requirement of social distancing. ¹ This article builds on that research by focusing on new material and embodied configurations that enabled rituals to be carried out within people’s homes after the closure of faith spaces, which was experienced as a dramatic change from the way faith was enacted prior to the lockdown. This in turn brought about a number of adaptations to faith practices while intensifying faith rituals in the domestic space, which proved a key coping mechanism to structure people’s days. Adaptations translated into new ways of engaging with the social and material aspects of faith practices, while religious frameworks shaped interpretations of the virus itself and the latter’s effect on the body.

As I listened to over 100 older adults’ accounts of their everyday life, the significance of faith practices emerged in subtle yet striking ways. Because death became so much more present in everyday life, whether through news on television or the loss of loved ones, faith gained in importance for those in later life or/and struggling with an ageing body. The idea that religion offers a framework for understanding the tragedies in human existence has been a long-standing theme in anthropology (see Durkheim, 1912/1995; Geertz, 1966; Malinowski, 1954) and the centrality of the body in religious practices cannot be separated from the ephemerality of life. Health-related challenges, often experienced in the body, serve as turning points prompting people to interpret the fragility of life on earth in otherworldly terms. Thus, the body is central to systems of belief whether through embodied practices of one’s faith (Henkel, 2005; Landry, 2018), rituals performed to the deceased (Tsintjilonis, 2004), disposal of the body (Prendergast et al., 2006), puritan ethics (Weber, 1904/2001), spirit possession (Boddy, 1989; Lody, 1995) or the need to transcend the constraints of the flesh to achieve eternal life (Cannell, 2005).

At times of crisis and rupture, people may be prompted to reconsider their religious stance (Jenkins, 2021) even if for those living already precarious lives not much changed with the pandemic (Sanders, 2020). As an event that challenged certainties that so many took for granted, such as attending mass, visiting family or having a cup of tea with friends, Covid-19 gave new impetus for studies on the role of religion as a key coping mechanism. This article builds on research about long-term changes resulting from the pandemic (Lewis et al., 2023; Marston & Morgan, 2020; Simpson et al., 2021), and on the role of religion as a source of comfort and support to offset social isolation and loss (Carr et al., 2020; Evolvi, 2022; Simpson et al., 2021). Less explored are the effects of the pandemic on faith-related practices, a gap this article addresses by drawing on Mauss’s influential essay on techniques of the body to investigate the adaptations older people made to maintain the social aspect of their faith practices when facing the imperative of shielding ² and/or social distancing.

I start by introducing the reader to Marcel Mauss’s use of the term ‘techniques of the body’, and to the analytical framework of time, space and materiality, three dimensions of embodied practices that became salient in the context of the lockdown. I then outline the methodology deployed to answer the following questions: how older people participated in religious activities during the pandemic; and how religion helped them to maintain social connections. I then give an overview of the Greater Manchester context, before moving onto the data to show the impact of the closure of faith spaces on older people. Next, I explore adaptations that ensued once places of worship started to reopen, how people rehashed faith practices to maintain socially distanced connectivity, how some resisted the changes, and the virtual spaces that emerged as an alternative along with the new material configurations of remote interaction. Finally, I consider changes in funeral practices, with attention given to how the sensory body experienced the rites through digital means.

I conclude by arguing that during the Covid-19 pandemic new techniques of the body were forged to maintain faith-related connections at the personal, collective and societal levels. At the personal level, faith practices emerge as a central coping strategy, as a means to structure the day, and as a means to connect oneself to God, a relationship that gained importance and intensity when human contact was restricted. At the collective level, faith networks provided support to older people who were shielding, and new technologies enabled their expansion from within the boundaries of people’s living rooms. At a societal level, different religious doctrines provided frameworks through which people reflected on global changes to embodied practices. These three levels of faith-informed activities involved learning new techniques of the body, engaging differently with related materialities, and challenging perceived impositions on the body. The embodied learning that emerged at a time when all that seemed solid melted into air (Berman, 1988) shows how virtual and global connectivity irrevocably altered the affordances of the ageing body through new forms of engaging with time, space and materialities, a key sociological insight of this research.

Techniques of the body – Defining the concept

Mauss defines techniques of the body as ‘the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies’ (1934/1973, p. 70), based on an understanding of ‘technique’ as an action that is traditional and transmitted across generations. He refers to concrete examples of everyday practices, such as walking or swimming, to argue that humans learn to use their bodies according to cultural trends and social class, and that these techniques may vary across generations. Mauss also pays attention to the role of materialities such as shoes or feathers when walking or performing a ritual. But the primary instrument for humans, Mauss goes on to observe, is the body, a premise that informed a considerable number of studies in anthropology and beyond (see Bourdieu, 1984; Douglas, 1970; Elias, 1996; Foucault, 1977; Ingold & Vergunst, 2008; Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002).

Interpretations of Mauss’s essay have been wide-ranging, from the oppressive demands of etiquette (Elias, 1996) to deeply rooted styles of walking (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008), but they generally endorse Mauss’s lasting premise that the biological is shaped by the social and the psychological. The works by Michel Foucault and Merleau-Ponty on embodied practices are noteworthy but they differ from Mauss’s approach in fundamental ways. The Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, broadly understood as a means of rationalising problems presented to governments such as population health or sanitation (Foucault, 1977, p. 73), does speak to some matters of concern that Covid-19 made salient. However, by focusing on bodily adaptations to institutionalised forms of control, Foucault leaves little room for individual agency and resistance (Pylypa, 1998). While Foucault’s biopolitical lens provides a much needed critique of how bodies are disciplined in prisons, mental health institutions, and in the context of public behaviour when following the imperative of social distancing during Covid-19, behaviours within the household during the pandemic offered different insights. As people talked about their bodily practices at home during lockdown, what struck me was not how ‘docile’ (Foucault, 1977) their bodies became, but rather, how they were able to create personalised embodied practices within unprecedented disciplinary regulations. The imposed restrictions on movement were undoubtedly disciplinary, but interviewees’ adaptations to the new normal revealed a sense of autonomous resourcefulness rather than subjugation.

As for Merleau-Ponty’s conception of body-organism, it is so intertwined with the perceived surrounding world that it would be impossible to disentangle the two. His sensory gestaltic framing would demand a different methodology, namely one where participants were involved in actually capturing and registering their own embodied practices, an approach unattainable as interviews were conducted by telephone under strict social distancing rules. Besides, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reading that the person is the body, does not help me to unpack the process through which participants created reflexive strategies to maintain their networks.

Mauss’s approach, on the other hand, allowed me to dissect people’s descriptions of the newly adapted techniques of the body that emerged in the context of a crisis. Thus, I was offered a snapshot of a process which is often difficult to see due to its long-term nature. In that context, three dimensions of embodied practices came to light: time, space and materialities. I proceed by giving an overview of how these dimensions featured more generally in people’s accounts to illustrate my rationale for using this framework before turning to a more in-depth analysis in the second half of the article.

Time

In a major work about body techniques at a boxing gym in a black neighbourhood of Chicago, anthropologist Loïc Wacquant highlights how learning happens through ‘observant participation’, which develops over time as local boxers transition from amateurs to professionals (Wacquant, 2004). His reading offers a relevant backdrop to the learning that happened during the pandemic when people did not benefit from emulating the other over time. Time, rather than representing an evolving process as it did with the boxers in Chicago, was sensed as both stagnant and wasted. Being and feeling older, made people see time as a particularly precious resource, as opportunities to enjoy life with friends or grandchildren seemed to be ‘running out’ (Tinkler et al., 2025). Throughout the interviews, older people felt the clocks ticking in a more poignant way because, in their own words, they felt ‘stuck’ and ‘imprisoned’, so the imposed immobility made the clock tick louder. For members of diaspora with families abroad, there was the added fear of never been able to see loved ones again.

The past, present and future were a constant feature in conversations. The past was often talked about with a sense of nostalgia, as in how people missed walking down to the local mosque, and the future was almost always described as ‘uncertain’. When referring to the present, religious practices emerged as something that helped people to structure their ‘never-ending’ days and control related anxieties.

Space

We perceive space as we move through it over time (Merleau Ponty, 1962/2002) and generally speaking people perceived a contraction of movement during lockdown, but the effects of that restricted movement were arguably more acutely felt by those in later life (see Tinkler et al., 2025 for more on immobilities in later life). The embodied practices that would normally shape people’s everyday activities, such as catching the bus to go to church, or joining neighbours at the temple for the Hindu ritual of aarti, no longer applied. The strict restrictions on leaving the house that dictated people’s spatial movement generated a longing for the ‘fellowship’ and ‘sisterhood’ associated with the ‘shared timespace’ experienced in places of worship.

With the imposition of spatial boundaries between the domestic and public space, social articulation had to be reinvented. In the context of lockdown the body reaffirmed itself as a site of signification (Murphy, 2021): the body became a guarded boundary under the imposition of social distance; a reminder of the viral threat; the potential carrier of the virus; and a vector for the separation between the living and the dead. This resignified body had to find new ways of connecting without movement.

Materialities

Contrary to assumptions that contact with the divine should transcend the physical domain, humans do use material means to engage with the immaterial world (Miller, 2006), and anthropological literature has telling accounts of how objects and technologies mediate between humans and otherworldly entities (Engelke, 2015; Henkel, 2005; Hüwelmeier, 2016; Ong, 1988). With new materialities being introduced in the context of lockdown, individuals rehashed their faith practices accordingly.

During the periods of lockdown and within the limiting boundaries of the domestic space, older people enacted their faith with the help of books, mats and incense, while engaging with new collective practices mediated by technology. Mauss’s observations of the techniques of the body shifted the attention from the purely organic aspect of being a body to the reflective understanding of having a body (Schlanger, 2019), which includes an awareness of the body as a tool, and of how taken-for-granted everyday practices are actually rather revealing (Crossley, 2007). Once restrictions start to be lifted, new techniques were created to decrease the body’s vulnerability duly mediated by a range of objects, substances and devices. Thus, time, materiality and space, three dimensions of embodied practices that became salient in the context of the lockdown, provide an innovative framework to analyse the data from a broader research perspective on the effects of the pandemic on older people’s everyday life.

Methodology

This article draws on a longitudinal qualitative study on the impact of Covid-19 on older people conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Manchester in collaboration with 21 community organisations, who helped to recruit 102 participants. The criteria for the sample aimed to reflect the diverse experiences of urban ageing in Greater Manchester. To that end, recruitment was based on age (over 50), gender (a balanced mix of women and men), ethnicity (three ethnic subgroups: South Asians, White and African-Caribbean) and sexual orientation (a percentage of older LGBTQ+). Interviewers then contacted individuals from 30 different neighbourhoods in Greater Manchester to capture the spatial inequality across the city region. This present analysis draws on contributions by 75 older people from the sample of 102 who were members of faith groups, which included Methodist, Catholic, Quaker, Jehovah Witness, Protestant Evangelical, Pentecostal, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu. All the quotes in this report are followed by a pseudonym, with age and preferred self-identification.

The interviews were semi-structured, conducted over the phone with participants in their own homes at three different times with each participant from May 2020 to March 2021. Questions included: (a) changes to everyday life since social distancing rules were introduced; (b) activities in an average day; (c) changes in relationships with family, friends and neighbours; (d) biggest challenges; (e) coping resources. The questions for the second and third interviews were tailored according to each participant’s contribution in the first interview. While there were some broad themes, participants were able to guide the discussion, focusing on what was important to them.

The three sets of interviews over one year unveiled the means through which relations were made through faith over time, but they also added depth to the argument that newly embodied practices helped to maintain faith-related connections. While the first interviews offered relevant perceptions on the new techniques of the body that resulted from the imperative of social distancing, it was during the second and third interviews that these embodied practices came to light in the context of religious rituals.

The longitudinal approach enabled researchers to grasp the changes in older people’s everyday life and have a better sense of the role of faith practices in helping them to manage the resulting challenges, offering insights on how diverse people’s relation to technology panned out over time with faith activities featuring as a key motivator. Importantly, looking at changes over time sheds light on how dynamic people’s lives can be while adding the benefit of hindsight at the analytical stage.

In terms of limitations, a caveat must be made regarding the sample: the aim of the research was to have a sense of how a relatively small, yet diverse, fraction of the population in Greater Manchester coped in their everyday lives during the lockdown. While socio-economic factors and intersecting disadvantages impacted on the coping mechanisms available, the aim of the analysis that follows is not to differentiate between individual experiences on the basis of class, ethnicity or gender, although those may at times surface. Likewise, while there were a few participants with mobility issues and/or chronic pain in the sample, I decided not to include those experiences in my analysis as I would have needed a broader theoretical framework to include literature on health.

Finally, in terms of my positionality, I had to reassess my own attitudes towards belief to avoid potential judgement of other people’s rationalities. As I do not belong to a faith group, it was crucial that I understood people’s faith-based reasoning in their own terms. The choice of using Marcel Mauss’s framing at a time when I was unable to do embodied participant observation made me reflect on my own bodily limitations, not only because I was deprived of the sensory experience of interacting with interviewees and the space surrounding them, but also as an older person myself.

The Greater Manchester context

The global aspect of this health crisis helped make salient existing inequalities which became ‘condensed’ (Massey & Hall, 2010, p. 57) and magnified by the challenges and losses people faced. Intersecting disadvantages, such as ethnicity, disability and long-term unemployment, both shaped and reflected the unequal geographies across the globe, and it was no different in Greater Manchester. Migratory movements of people over the last 200 years made Greater Manchester one of the most diverse regions in the UK, second only to London (Office for National Statistics, 2021). According to the 2021 Census, the population in Greater Manchester is predominantly white (76%), with non-white minorities accounting for 24% of the population. The transformations in ethnic diversity are ongoing and the older population in the city region will continue to become more ethnically diverse in the future (Centre for Ageing Better, 2023).

In addition to being very diverse, Greater Manchester is also very unequal, and faith spaces reflect this. As providers of services, emotional support and social capital (Putnam, 1995; Wiktor-Mach, 2017), faith infrastructures are vital for older people’s wellbeing. Research conducted in Greater Manchester has revealed how older people who had to shield suffered ‘a double lockdown’ (Buffel et al., 2021) as they faced enforced social isolation in addition to lack of support reinforced by the pandemic. Some interviewees remarked on the ageist discourse used by public figures and reproduced in the media depicting the over-70s as a homogeneous group of vulnerable people. In particular, the letters sent nationwide by the government to (mostly) older people advising them to shield had a devastating effect on some participants, who described being in shock as they did not see themselves as ‘vulnerable’.

Social distancing and self-tailored temporalities

The imposition of new techniques of the body that came with social distance restrictions was a key theme in the first phase of interviews. When prompted to highlight significant changes in their everyday lives participants overwhelmingly turned to shopping and new anxieties associated with it, such as hand washing, mask wearing and cleaning. Many described feeling quite emotional as they clapped to give tribute to NHS workers every Thursday evening, a new bodily practice that united residents in the UK in the first few months of the pandemic. Others highlighted how the absence of physical contact affected them. Not being able to hug was often described as ‘not natural’. In this context, many participants found comfort in their belief, and when asked if anything in their life trajectories prepared them for the challenges of the pandemic, 16 out of 75 participants answered ‘my faith’.

The positive effect of spiritual practice during the pandemic or at other challenging times was noted in a number of studies (Harrington, 2016; Koenig, 2020; Kowalczyk et al., 2020; Tan et al., 2022; Whitehead & Torossian, 2020). Also noted in the literature is that one specificity about faith communities is the social capital available through those networks (Becares & Nazroo, 2013), which may help them to overcome obstacles in moments of crisis. Central in this section is how faith practices, after moving to the domestic realm, helped devotees make sense of social distancing. Of importance to the framing of this article is the fact that many of the faith-based practices participants performed during lockdown involved techniques of the body in Mauss’s sense of the term: a traditional action. Muslim participants described how they prayed five times a day in specific places in their homes facing Mecca; for Anglican Christians Bible reading was taken up at specific times and sometimes in bed; Pentecostal Christians sang along with their congregation on Sabbath through remote transmissions; and Hindu participants tended to their domestic shrines and chanted a bhajan ³ after lighting incense to Hanuman or another deity.

The impact of the closure of faith spaces on older people cannot be overstated. From the very first set of interviews, it became clear that attending a place of worship was an intrinsic part of everyday life before Covid for the majority of older members of faith communities. Denise, an 88-year-old woman, used to go to the cinema and day trips with her (Anglican) church; Kamal, a 61-year-old man used to go to the mosque everyday ‘and meet many friends and neighbours there’; while Sharon, a 53-year-old woman, would go to her (Pentecostal) church ‘twice in the week, for Sunday service, and Friday for prayer meeting’. Doris, an 86-year-old woman, summarised what many others suggested:

It’s not about the mass; it’s a social event.

For Doris, the most significant disruption brought about by the pandemic was not being able to get together with the congregation following the service, often accompanied by cups of tea and biscuits:

My biggest disappointment is the closure of churches. I think what they’ve forgotten is there was a big social aspect to churches . . . I think that’s quite important to a lot of older people because it’s sort of an anchor. They’ve always done this.

The fact that ‘they’ve always done this’ shows how embedded the particular action of going to faith spaces is for older devotees. Gatik, a 59-year-old man who was unemployed after working for many years in the textile trade, used to go to the mosque five times a day:

Not being able to go to mosques was hard, as that was part of my daily routine. It affects your mental wellbeing, when routine changes.

For the majority of Muslim female participants, however, going to the mosque was not part of their daily activities. Instead, praying, a practice already embedded in their daily life, was vital as a means to structure their day when all the other activities, such as visiting family members, going shopping or looking after grandchildren, had suddenly disappeared. Consequently, praying became more salient and always associated with time:

I am up early as I am the main carer for my husband who is the recovering from Covid-19. I also do five prayers each day besides the household chores each day. (Buhmi, a 68-year-old Muslim woman)

Noreen, a 78-year-old Christian woman, described the role of sacred texts, psalms and the scripture before she got up in the morning. By the third interview, church going was back in people’s routine, albeit with quite a few changes. Like other social infrastructure, faith-based organisations had to balance the tension of ensuring the safety of members of their congregations, while simultaneously offering support. Busier congregations had to follow a ‘first come, first served’ system because they were not supposed to have more than 30 people at one time.

The social distancing between bodies proved to be a spatial challenge. Busy congregations had to accommodate returning members of the congregation, while faith spaces with older demographics were short of volunteers to help with the new cleaning practices to allow collective worship. Bernadette, a 69-year-old woman, explains that because the majority of her congregation are over 80, there were not enough people to set everything out and to make sure everything is cleaned down afterwards. Pre-Covid, any member of the congregation could do cleaning, but now only those below the age of 70 who were not classed as ‘vulnerable’ would be doing so.

Approaches varied according to specific faith institutions, with some preventing the older section of the congregation from attending, or requiring people to queue up:

You have to queue up outside and wait until they take you in . . . you know our churches, they’re an ageing congregation. (Dorothy, 78-year-old White British woman)

Some of our respondents became volunteers in their faith congregations during the pandemic either because they felt the need to support their faith community during difficult times or because they really missed being active and ‘out and about’. Sharon, a 53-year-old who had moved to the UK from Ghana a few years previously, went back to church as a volunteer after the second lockdown, a role that required the learning of new embodied practices. She was trained to let people in and out of the church and to take people’s temperature when they came in:

People have to register then book a slot to come in. Only 30 people are allowed at one time . . . it’s scary because you don’t know who these people have been with.

Layla, a 56-year-old woman, wanted to help at her Pentecostal church but because she was shielding she could not deliver shopping for people:

They [volunteers from church] got my meds and I said, ‘If there is anything I can do, let me know . . . I can cook food, I love cooking, I’ll do some soup if anybody wants some soup.’ So, it became a weekly thing, well a twice-weekly thing. I was doing different meals for people in the community.

This new activity made Layla feel much better because she had a purpose and her body was on the move in her otherwise restricted domestic space. These accounts show how techniques of the body that were transferable to the domestic realm helped people to structure the day. They also point to how there is agency regarding how people used their bodies: time was people’s own under lockdown and they could actively choose when to perform their bodily practices. Before Covid, places of worship were social spaces where people worked, studied, ate and socialised, as well as prayed, chanted and sang along with their community of faith: activities that were intertwined with older people’s everyday lives. Some of these embodied practices, such as praying, were transferred to the domestic space without changes, while others, such as eating or ‘having a cuppa’ together, were greatly missed. Other faith-related practices, such as volunteering, helped older people to stay active and to challenge conceptions of older adults as a homogeneous group of vulnerable people.

Navigating the ‘new normal’: Rehashing rituals through space and adapted materialities

During the post-lockdown period in August and September 2020 some churches opened with several adaptations to allow for social distancing and with practices changing drastically: ‘there’s mask wearing’, ‘no singing’, ‘shorter services’ and ‘printed sermon’. Many participants accepted changes but were nostalgic about past forms of worship:

There’s a thing there for sanitising your hands before you go in . . . and obviously we’re wearing masks as well, you know. We don’t have communion like we would normally have bread and wine, they just have bread . . . she uses tongs to give it to you. It would be very nice singing hymns. (Betsy, an 82-year-old Christian woman living on her own)

Adaptations to social distancing varied according to the availability of space to accommodate the two-metre restrictions and were informed by the introduction of new materialities such as hand sanitiser, face masks and tongs for the holy bread. Some collective rituals changed in terms of the materials being used, while keeping the process intact: many were still having the holy communion but taking their own bread, wine or juice. Seating required adaptations that were deeply disliked with participants commenting on how the socialising was gone because you could not sit together if you were not from the same household: ‘everyone was separated’. Generally speaking, people who went back to their places of worship were happy that they had reopened but they missed the tea and coffee with others afterwards. Chika, a 51-year-old woman, explained the changes at her Pentecostal church:

We were able to come together but it wasn’t like it used to be. We couldn’t hug, we couldn’t have a long conversation, it wasn’t allowed. So, you kind of like had to move like [laughing] in the military you know. Also, the choir you know couldn’t sing like before because they reduced the hour for the choir to sing in which you would dance and it’s always a happy time. I mean at my church we do dance, there’s a lot of music and all that.

Chika thought that adaptations at her church did not quite work. While the practices were still being performed they did not engage her body as before. Some churches put in place a system of arrows for people to follow, which added to the experience described by Chika of being ‘like in the military’ as opposed to the ‘happy time’ associated with singing and dancing. The way Chika compared being in church under social distance restrictions with being in the army signals a more general feeling that the previously experienced spontaneity and enjoyment of such encounters had gone under Covid regulations over people’s bodies. These regulations prompted people across all ethnic groups to defy adaptations and be critical of impositions such as mask wearing, or not being able to sing at church. As observed by one participant: ‘It’s very hard; you don’t feel like a human being.’

The accounts above demonstrate how religion informed people’s understanding of the pandemic and its effects. The materialities that are intrinsic to faith infrastructures are important mediators in the practice of faith. Whether they are chairs or pews, items for communion, sacred texts, rugs or religious objects, they are inseparable from the techniques of the body. Throughout the interviews, people remarked on how challenging it was to change their embodied practices. If Marcel Mauss had been around to observe reactions to the changes he would no doubt have remarked that nothing is natural given that all techniques of the body are produced contextually and are always changing (1934/1973). However, qualifiers such as ‘unnatural’ and ‘not human’ when referring to restrictions on eating and drinking together, or singing and dancing as part of fellowship, indicated otherwise. It was against this backdrop that the emergence of virtual faith spaces translated into a new affordance enabling social connectivity beyond familiar territories.

Virtual faith spaces and shared timespaces

Some places of devotion did not reopen at all and opted for carrying out practices remotely. This trend alienated many, as shown in recent studies on the digital divide amongst older adults during the pandemic (Centre for Ageing Better, 2020; Holmes & Burgess, 2022; Marston & Morgan, 2020). While this divide did impact participants in our study we found that because members of faith communities have access to a considerable social network, even those who live alone were able to access help to connect with others mostly via WhatsApp groups, YouTube and Zoom. Once it became clear that the pandemic was going to extend beyond the first month of lockdown, formal and lay leaders started to transfer services to online platforms, with digital technology becoming a mediator between faith community members. Stewart, a 72-year-old Christian man, described changes at his local Anglican church:

Initially it had to close, and we did services through Zoom meetings you know, Zoom type which I don’t particularly like, but it worked.

Like Stewart, a significant number of participants did not particularly like meeting on Zoom, but were ready to acknowledge that it was ‘better than nothing’ – another expression repeated over and over again. A considerable proportion of church goers adapted to remote services, especially those with a younger demographic. South Asian and African-Caribbean participants seemed to take to it more eagerly, perhaps because with family members abroad there was an additional motivation to engage with digital platforms.

Many participants found this shift to online services very convenient, and some continued to attend services remotely even after churches reopened. Some faith groups offered a choice of live transmissions and pre-recordings, the former being preferred because people could contribute and ask questions in real time. Generally speaking, the younger age range, the 50- to 65-year-olds, very soon adapted to remote practices, as remarked by Idris, a 56-year-old Muslim woman:

Jumma, Friday payers, were at home . . . Ramadhan kept me occupied, too and the grandchildren. We had a number of family conversations via different video calling platforms and attended spiritual classes.

Those who had younger people in their household also learned the ropes of online engagement quite early in the pandemic, as in the case of Grace, a 72-year-old retired shop attendant who was taught by her daughter to use an iPad:

I don’t use it a lot. I only use it to read the news or hook up with the church for the Sunday service.

Eric, a 60-year-old Quaker, thinks his faith group became ‘a closer community through the computer’. Doris, who in the first interview was very upset with the closure of her church, appeared thrilled during the second interview about being taught to navigate the internet by her granddaughter:

I can now access churches online . . . So it gives you access to the masses, because of course now all the churches are streaming online, that is a big jump for me.

By the second wave of interviews, participants of every faith denomination were using Zoom for meetings, as described by Joseph, a 69-year-old Jehovah Witness living on his own:

We just carry on as we would as if we were meeting together in our Kingdom Halls. At our Zoom meetings some of us sing along . . . And then we open in prayer and then we sing another song half way through and then we close in prayer with a song.

As Mauss remarked in his 1934 essay about the body, people do the same activity differently according to culture and to generation. His insight is particularly timely when it comes to the ways digital technology has changed how people practise their religion. While this shift was clearly easier for the younger subgroup, some older participants took to it with remarkable enthusiasm turning the computer or phone into an essential faith-related object which demanded a new embodied language.

Bible studies and prayer meetings amongst the Pentecostal denominations acquired a massive online following beyond national borders, with sermons circulating through transnational faith networks. Leroy is an 84-year-old man originally from Barbados who has been a pastor for years; he had never used Zoom before but by the second interview he was teaching on Zoom on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sundays. Each session would last around 50 minutes and there were people in Jamaica, Barbados, the US and Canada listening to his teachings. However, it was also the case that many people missed the face-to-face of collective rituals in faith physical spaces. Some mentioned that ‘there’s no fellowship’ in digital platforms because the social interaction is gone. It therefore came as a surprise that while many faith spaces had reopened by the third interview, some participants opted to carry on with Zoom meetings in order to stay safe. Cameron, a 56-year-old working nurse, would normally attend a Charismatic church, but he did not return to his faith space after the beginning of the lockdown in March 2020. Instead, he and his family carried on attending services on Zoom and singing along with the preacher with their microphones on mute:

I miss going to church but on the other hand I also have to follow the precautions and also make sure that I’m safe, my family are safe.

This shift to online worship demonstrates the extent of digital engagement within faith communities during the pandemic already observed by other authors (Campbell & Connelly, 2020). But the accounts go further as they elucidate how the mediation between those shielding and their faith communities was intensified through digital technology, in some cases substituting the physicality of the religious experience (Evolvi, 2022). Participants adopted new ways of engaging with their faith communities and learned new embodied skills in order to maintain those connections. Technology not only removed the geographical constraints but also the temporal ones, as in the case of Leroy’s sermons now available at any time to people all over the world.

Contraction and expansion of embodied experiences, and the afterlife

This last section showed how timespaces were expanded as older people learned new techniques of the body to maintain faith-related connectivities. However, given the scale of losses through Covid-19, relations with the deceased and the rituals surrounding their parting became a far more regular part of faith practices than before the pandemic, and one that also enabled new ways of marking the transition from the physical to the spiritual body, and of mourning one’s passing.

As a ritual that helps humans deal with the death of the material body, the characteristics of which will vary according to the faith, the funeral is arguably the most important and emotional of all rites of passage. Furthermore, the funeral is one ritual that is still performed even amongst people who do not subscribe to a particular faith, thus positioning it as (mostly) a faith-based ritual that is enacted by communities of all and no faiths. Central to this rite of passage are the human-made materialities, such as coffins, flowers and food and drink, which mediate between life on earth and the spiritual world, hence the difficulty some participants had to accept changes that interfered with the sensory aspects of this tradition.

Veena Das’s study of ‘critical events’ (1995) shows how disruptions to everyday life prompt new modes of behaviour which may fundamentally change the way people conduct their lives (Das, 1995). This process was evident during the pandemic, which not only produced positive changes to modes of behaviour, such as learning digital skills or spending more time in nature, but also very dramatic ruptures, such as drastic restrictions on the ways people grieved. Funerals, like other faith practices, are social events that bring people together, and not being able to wish a formal farewell to the departed in this oldest of rituals ‘added insult to injury’, in the words of one participant. Douglas, a 70-year-old man living on his own, described his friend’s funeral under imposed restrictions:

Very bleak really, very, very sad. He was the kind of guy who would have loved a big funeral with lots of people there, a packed church, lots of nice songs to celebrate his life, readings, people telling stories about him, and then a celebration afterwards . . . we just went in the church, you sat separately to people and then the service was over in about 20 minutes, it was so quick and the coffin disappeared, we came out and we had to leave straight away. You couldn’t stand around talking or anything.

Covid’s interruption of that important collective rite meant that bereavement reached a new depth, and there were numerous accounts of how the absence of physical contact compounded the grief as friends and family were prohibited to come together, hug each other, cry on each other’s shoulder. The impossibility of being with a loved one as they encountered death and hugging them for the last time was for many the most tragic outcome of the pandemic. Participants referred to this painful experience as something ‘inhumane’.

Unsurprisingly, the number of accounts about funerals was higher in the third interview with most respondents having experienced the loss of someone they knew in the preceding months. An African-Caribbean participant remarked that the death rate in the black community was so high that she had experienced two deaths a week for a number of months. The way Covid-19 mortality rates were disproportionately higher amongst ethnic minority groups has been widely documented (Lewis et al., 2023; Simpson et al., 2021), but less is heard about the effect of having embodied practices interrupted at moments of loss. Soraya, a 54-year-old Nepali woman who lives with her three children, husband and grandson, felt quite depressed about not being able to go out in the first interview, but her daily practice of praying and reciting the Quran helped her to cope. By the third interview, however, she had lost three family members, including her mother:

I was very close to my mother and I couldn’t meet her in her last days; this regret is going to be with me forever.

The overwhelming amount of loss, the inability to give and receive comfort, or to perform the necessary ritual procedures according to the wishes of the deceased, made the Covid-19 scenario particularly grim. The ‘bad deaths’ that characterised the pandemic (Carr et al., 2020; Simpson et al., 2021), associated with the suffering body of someone who dies without loved ones around, was an additional emotional burden. That said, Yash, a 62-year-old man of Indian origin whose mother passed way during lockdown, could see something positive in the way the traditional rite of passage had changed:

It wasn’t normal; couldn’t say goodbye and see her . . . it felt lonely and particularly sad. Some positives, [technology support] enables us to have that small dignified funeral which we shared by Zoom for those who could not attend.

Given the restrictions on numbers of people in gatherings, funerals on digital platforms were a necessary and welcome adaptation. Respondents gave detailed accounts of how they participated remotely in real time and through recorded videos disseminated on YouTube or Facebook. Layla, a 56-year-old woman who has family in different countries including the UK, US and Jamaica, explained how her aunt’s funeral in Jamaica was a chance for the family to be together through the mediation of the internet. This did require additional embodied skills of a helpful cousin who filmed the funeral and shared it on YouTube:

It was almost like watching a film, but it wasn’t a film, it was my auntie’s funeral. We view the body, that’s what we do in our culture. So, I was able to see my auntie’s body, yeah? So, I saw her being laid, you know, in her coffin. Then, I saw people in the church, we saw the people that spoke in the church.

She described how after the funeral they went onto a Zoom platform and Layla could see all the family members as they all ‘tuned in’:

I think there might have been about 200 people on the platform . . . we actually stayed online afterwards and had a bit of a cry together . . . We were able to laugh at each other, oh, my god, I’ve not seen you for 20 years, you know, despite all the grief we were able to, kind of, like, catch up with each other.

Changes in the way funerals were performed both restricted people’s embodied participation and expanded their virtual connectivity. There were rich descriptions of adapted funeral practices, signalling the impact of remote funeral services. As an anthropologist who was unable to do traditional fieldwork, I was struck by the amount of detail and ethnographic attention people included in their accounts. While the funerary rites people participated in were traditional, they demanded new techniques of the body given the imposition of social distancing. There were accounts of people who went to the location of a church but had to stand at a distance watching family members go inside without being able to join, which made them feel dislocated and profoundly sad. For those who embraced the experience of a remote funeral, the new embodied practices involved translated into an emotional rollercoaster of seeing and talking to distant members of the family across the Atlantic from their living rooms in the UK winter. In line with Mauss’s insight, the excerpts above show that the body is humans’ primary technology, but virtual and global connectivity have irrevocably altered the affordances of the ageing body, offering new ways of engaging with time, space and materialities.

Reflections

This article advances sociological understandings about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic by looking at how faith provided a practical and reflective framework for older people to experiment with new materialities in social distancing times. The accounts of the adaptive processes presented here add to Mauss’s inventory of bodily repertoires, while offering it a twist by showing how nearly 100 years later global connections across time and space have unsettled sociological understandings about the body as technology. In line with Mauss, the body is still the primary human tool but the framing of how faith practices changed during the pandemic opens a window into the affordances of global and virtual connections in later life.

The lockdown made salient three dimensions of faith-related techniques of the body: time, space and materialities. In the temporal dimension, faith practices offered a means to structure people’s ‘ever-lasting’ days through praying, reading and volunteering. In terms of space, digital technology, for those who were able to use it, allowed for an expansion of social connectivities. As for the dimension of materialities, sacred books provided alternative interpretations for the crisis and devices such as telephones and tablets helped to maintain socially distanced connectivity. Online platforms supported new embodied versions of spirituality as they allowed people to participate in faith practices taking place overseas and in different time zones. Social distancing interrupted relationships with the living, the dying and the deceased, and grieving was dramatically impacted by the suspension of traditional techniques of the body related to funeral rites. Whilst new technologies brought together mourners in Manchester, London and Jamaica as they paid tributes to the deceased in real time, an experience described as profound, not all were willing to adapt: some restrictions were considered inhumane, as in the prohibition of hugging and supporting the bereaved; or ‘unnatural’, as in the case of mask wearing. In addition, even within the modest sample used in this study, significant differences came to light regarding older people’s abilities to cope under distressing conditions, corroborating the need for future work to address unequal access to resources through an intersectionality framework.

The longitudinal approach used in this study helps drive the article’s argument that Covid-19, with its unprecedented requirement of social distancing, engendered new techniques of the body which dramatically altered the physical ways older people carried out rituals, used faith spaces and socialised with members of their faith communities. The lens used, techniques of the body, helped to interpret the adaptations that enabled older people to perform rituals and connect with their faith communities despite social distancing restrictions.

My argument draws on Mauss’s insight and on theories that explored the body as humans’ primary technology, but by focusing on changes in faith practices during the Covid-19 pandemic and on new forms of engaging with time, space and materialities, I show how virtual and global connectivity irrevocably altered the affordances of the ageing body. The contributions of these findings to sociological theory are twofold: first, by bringing together anthropological insights about the body as technology, this article reveals how helpful Mauss’s observations still stand in a world of very different technological tools. Secondly, these new affordances, and the body techniques learned through various means during the pandemic, should not be overlooked as they shed further light on how new materialities can expand embodied experiences in later life. By motivating older people to structure their daily lives, maintain social connections and explore new ways of participating in their communities, faith worked at the personal, collective and societal levels. In the process, people learned new techniques for the ageing body, and experienced old techniques through temporal, spatial and material reconfigurations.