ABSTRACT
Summary: The Covid-19 measures, social distancing and lockdown, posed a significant challenge to institutionalized religious observance. In some instances, religious institutions tried to carve an exceptional space for themselves; it was widely reported, however, that many mainstream religious institutions bent their practices to comply with the measures taken. This chapter considers how believers might understand the pandemic from a religious perspective. Theodicy naturally comes up as the conceptual area where such a perspective would be centred; some of the contradictions and scope of theodicy are considered. Interventions here move from the theological to the economic underpinnings of institutionalized religion and then to current collaborations between right-wing politics and fundamentalist religious practice.
