The Impact of War-Metaphors and Other Science-Religion Narratives on Science Communication Environments During the Covid-19 Crisis Franziska E

“Over by Christmas”: The impact of war-metaphors and other science-religion narratives on science communication environments during the Covid-19 crisis Franziska E. Kohlt Department of Sociology, University of York, UK Corresponding author: Franziska E. Kohlt, Department of Sociology, University of York, 292 Wentworth Way, Heslington, York, YO10 5NG Email: [email protected] Acknowledgment: This research was supported by the Templeton Religion Trust (Grant No. TR0294) 1 Abstract: Narratives are crucial for understanding the world, making decisions within it, but may also distort realities, and redirect actions in more damaging directions. This underlines their vital role in public health crisis. Studies of narrative in health crises have negatively assessed the overall impact of warfare rhetoric, judging according to discrepancies between projected and achieved outcomes. Yet the warfare narrative dominated the framing of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. Through a historical alignment of Christian, military and national virtues, the warfare narrative provided a guiding framework for collective response to crisis, simultaneously hoping to reassure and ‘bring the Nation together’. The narrative, however, polarised British society, accentuating divisions and exacerbating political tensions coinciding with the pandemic. This article analyses the implications and effects that Covid-19 war narratives had on public life, and what their usage tells us about effective science communication in a crisis. Keywords: COVID-19; Science Narratives; health and media; health communication; metaphors; public understanding of science; science and religion; science communication 2 “Over by Christmas”: The impact of war-metaphors and other science-religion narratives on science communication environments during the Covid-19 crisis Introduction: Science communication and narrative in the UK Covid-19 pandemic Narratives are crucial for how we come to understand the world and make decisions within it: they not only explain but form our worlds. Narratives seek to provide orientation in unfamiliar, confusing situations in order to combat anxieties arising from such disorientation. They may thus act in a healing function. They may, however, also distort realities, consciously or not, and redirect actions in more damaging directions (White, 1990; Lakoff and Johnson, 2003 [1980]). This underlines their vital role in public health crisis. Studies of narrative in health crises, both at the personal and on population level, have examined the impact of recurring tropes, and highlighted repeatedly that the use of metaphors and narratives associated with warfare, including that of “sacrifice”, are ‘ironic, unfortunate and unnecessary’ – from a practitioner’s perspective, judging by discrepancies between projected outcomes and those actually achieved (Nie et al., 2016: 1), and from the perspective of those framed by rhetoric (Segal, 2008, 2012; Raoul et al., 2007, etc.). This applied particularly to health-care and public health settings (Wise, 2020; Clarke, 2020; Behrman, 2020, etc.). Yet, as this article will show, such narratives of combative sacrifice became the dominant framing narrative during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, largely out of cultural preference and historical continuity, and under the assumption that framing the struggles as a war or combat would lead to positive effects. Narratives, as Friedmann observes, ‘do not happen, they are made’ (Friedmann, 2019: 10). As a ‘purposeful communicative act’, they are consciously constructed towards a distinct intended effect: ‘to engage and influence their audiences’ cognition, emotions and values (Phelan, 2007: 203). And yet ‘our conceptual system’ shaped by metaphor and narrative may operate unconsciously, it may be ‘not something we are normally aware of’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003 [1980]). We adopt narratives into our interpretative repertoire, apply them ‘readily and familiarly’ so that we ‘do not see [the narratives], we see through them’ (Curtis, 1994: 434). In such scenarios as pandemics or other urgent risk to human populations, awareness of what constitutes effective communication, with particular attention to the possible unintended consequences of inappropriate narratives could mean the difference between ‘life and death’ (Rogers and Pearce, 2013: 67). The measure of effective communication in public health crises that it: (i) is clear, (ii) is communicated by trustworthy sources, (iii) generates and sustains trust in those communicating guidance, and (iv) achieves the prevention of morbidity and mortality (Rogers and Pearce, 2013; Bish, 2012, etc.). The measure of an appropriate metaphor, which will be situated within a larger narrative conducive to these measures, is determined by the word itself: to transfer meaning, to support clear advice and to reinforce those aims. A metaphoric narrative chosen in a public health situation, should therefore sustain or amplify the transfer of meaning. It should not hinder this process or exclude parts of the population from its benefits. This poses a challenge: how to achieve desired emotional effects, and to realise science communication and policy aims without unintended side effects? But the broader significance of this point is clear: narrative and metaphors, particularly in times of emergency, are not matters of personal preference, but have profound ethical implications. 3 This article will examine how the warfare rhetoric used during the Covid-19 pandemic performed when set against these criteria. It will employ a rhetorical approach to science communication in a pandemic, which ‘attends to both an ethics of the told and an ethics of the telling’ (Phelan, 2007: 203). It will both provide guidance on the communication of science in crisis, and demonstrate the impact of making inappropriate choices, by firstly examining the dynamics of Covid-19 narratives, with a focus on the significance of religious motifs in this cultural context. Religion has been a prominent theme in public communication of science (Singler, 2020; Ecklund et al., 2019, etc.), but its theoretical analysis has often been under-explored. It will secondly illuminate the use of the warfare narrative, to explore reasons for this narrative’s use, but also the unconscious complications it imports from historical context. Importantly, this analysis will place narratives using metaphors of military conflict in their historical and cultural setting, but will also analyse them within a theoretical framework of effective communication in risk and health scenarios. The analysis takes into account the particular case of politically polarised environments, in which conflict-narratives are not only unconsciously used in respect of the crisis in question, but are also harnessed to political ends. The discussion concludes with recommendations on a more reflective and aware use of narratives in public discourse applicable to communication policy in crisis beyond Covid-19. 1. Narrative responses to the Covid-19 pandemic prior to lockdown, in religious and non-religious settings When we began monitoring narrative framings of Covid-19, we were particularly interested in the response of faith communities. But we found that the same narratives were also consistently and commonly used throughout in settings or by actors that were not explicitly or implicitly religious, such as politics, journalism or science writing.1 From 10 February 2020, we monitored on a daily basis websites, blogs, social media, journalistic coverage, as well as responses of governments, scientists and science writers, returned by Google for the search phrases, entered manually, ‘response to coronavirus’, ‘response to Covid-19’, ‘coronavirus’ etc. in the US, the UK’s four nations, and Germany, adding in specifiers, such as ‘Christian’, or ‘in the UK’, compiling a database, with searchable tags, containing 972 items for the periods this article examines. We applied rhetorical narrative analysis to examine these items in phases, determined by such milestones as the UK index case on 31 January, to the start of the first lockdown period, beginning on 23 March 2020 (hereafter referred to as ‘Phase 1’). While the monitoring continues, this article will cover two of these phases, Phase 2 spanning from 23 March to 17 September. While narratives intersected2, they broadly fell into the following distinct categories: (1) Punishment; (2) Temptation (3) Responsibility; (4) Sacrifice; (5) Life-in-Death (6) 1 To clarify the use of ‘religious’ and non-religious’ in this article, this will denote explicitly and not explicitly or implicitly religious settings. As ‘explicitly religious’ settings we considered such publications that were associated with a specific faith or church, or where the author foregrounded such an affiliation or theme. Not explicitly religious publications, such as National newspapers or radio stations, can still contain articles written by faith leaders or individuals of faith, or run programmes that foreground religious themes. Writers of ‘not explicitly religious’ settings may still be of faith, but if this was not identifiable or a major theme of the publication, we considered this item as ‘not explicitly religious’/ ‘non-religious’. 2 We chose to focus on the dominant theme; i.e. whereas the underlying theme may that of punishment, the focus of that trajectory was to define the ‘chosen people’, who were fairly spared/ unfairly hit – which is a theme to which we will return in the analysis

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