Church Life LIVE: Ritual Innovations and Repertoires of Belonging in Czech and Slovak Christian Communities during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The unprecedented halt of social gatherings imposed by the COVID -19 pandemic that began in the spring of 2020 highlighted the centrality of ritual participation in the Christian sense of belonging. Offering members of religious communities opportunities and instruments for sustaining their religiosity became a challenge. This time of crisis, adaptation and improvisation thus also shook what it meant to belong to a community of believers. Based on pre-pandemic in-person observations, interviews and online ethnography in four Christian communities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, our paper maps how different approaches to ritual practices during the pandemic affected the available repertoires of belonging to Christianity. Upon discussing the relevance of Hervieu-Léger’s vital types of religiosity (the universalist and independent pilgrim and the particularist and interconnected convert) throughout the pandemic, we conclude that the traditional approach to the church as a place of dwelling, as Wuthnow labelled it, was strengthened most.