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

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.