“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 . 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 of the use of the warfare/sacrifice narrative in the UK.

4 Exceptionality/ ‘Chosen People’/ ‘Holy war’; (7) Prayer; (8) Over-reaction/ ‘Hoax’ (secular); and (9) Prophesy. Narrative framings depended on a number of factors that were immediately identifiable. Some narratives were more peculiar to certain faith communities and locations than others, and popularity and prevalence of narratives, throughout, varied depending on the point in time, spread of the virus, mitigating policies and mortality. Narrative (6), for example, which centred on ‘chosen people’ was particularly prevalent in US evangelical communities, especially those close to government, such as Rev Ralph Drollinger, whose White House Bible Study group provides spiritual guidance, amongst others, to members of the US president’s Cabinet (Sopelsa, 2020; Drollinger, 2020). This first phase, when the virus was mostly prevalent in Asia and some southern European countries, was characterised by disorientation and uncertainty, and corresponded to greater narrative variety. In that variety, the most prevalent narrative framed SARS-CoV-2 as “Punishment” (1). This was also one of the most varied narratives: within it we distinguished the following sub-categories: (a) Blame; a punishment to serve as (b) Warning/ Lesson/ Guidance; open-ended narratives, such as (c) Opportunity to learn from/ reflect upon Scripture (religious)/ History (secular); (d) Opportunity for Mission; and the non-open-ended one considering the pandemic the (e) Apocalypse. The simplest and most linear form was that of “Blame” (1.a.), i.e. that the novel coronavirus is a punishment for a sin of an individual, a group of people or an institution, which as an article in Forbes noted, most commonly manifested itself as ‘punishment for fill-in-the- blank’ (Bruce, 2020). Examples included the Times of Israel headline ‘Coronavirus outbreak is divine punishment for gay pride parades’ (Staff, 2020), with similar example appearing predominantly within the orthodox wings of all Abrahamic religions, or conservative cultural settings. The Daily Express in the UK reported, less critically than the headline would suggest, ‘Coronavirus in the Bible: Bizarre Claim Virus is Punishment for Christian Persecution’, others asked ‘Virus is God’s Punishment of West, Says Zimbabwe Minister’ (Naharnet, 2020). Often, punishment narratives were corroborated with passages from scripture (e.g. Leviticus 26:14-24; Exodus 7-11; Revelation 6; Numbers 14:12), which, in the case of (6) justified the assertion that the novel coronavirus would not affect (certain) believers in the US, or indeed the US, because they were ‘friends of Israel’ – it would pass over in the same way the plague of Exodus that brought the death of firstborns passed over the Israelites in Egypt (Exodus 11:4-6; 12:27). Shifting the focus from the punishment of a past behaviour, to the desired outcome (1b) typically saw the punishment as the vehicle of specific lesson or guidance for cultural behaviour changes. In this vein, the British politically right-leaning tabloid The Sun reported ‘God “using Coronavirus for Good”: Because Women Being “Pushed Back into Homes”’ (Sun 2020). A comment on a popular US evangelist preacher’s YouTube message read: I saw an amazing quote about the Coronavirus situation; it was basically saying how this virus has removed our idols (sports, Disneyland, etc.) so that now we can turn our eyes back to the Creator. Powerful words ’. (‘Revelation Angel’, 2020)

5 Even though these narratives may appear isolated within such groups of recipients, such as followers of a particular faith, they acquired a wide reach through celebrities with large social media followings, whose stories (ironically in the circumstances) “went viral”, with them acting as narrative “super-spreaders”. Celebrity takes were more often amplified by traditional news media, especially tabloids. An example is a post by Kourtney Kardashian, which reached 12 700 likes, and 2 900 retweets on her 25.2m follower account, and was reported amongst others, by The Sun, which has an average daily circulation of 1.2m (‘Kourtney Kardashian thinks the coronavirus pandemic is punishment from God for “evil”’, The Sun, 18 Mar 2020). Such coverage increased the narrative’s public currency, but also blurs religious and secular spheres, conflating Christian definitions of sin with personal, cultural and political values. The punishment narrative functions on the basis of a (personified) agency consciously deciding to send a punishment, after weighing the status quo, and finding it wanting, suggesting a moral dimension and a linear causal relationship to the pandemic. In secular renderings, this agency may not be God, but, for instance, an equally personified ‘Nature’ whose assigned moral preferences assume “natural” orders, but which are socially constructed.

The ‘Nature vs Human’ diatribe, was the most frequent premise of the secular punishment narrative. Variations of this theme were so numerous that they were accompanied by a shadow-genre exposing ‘Lazy Ecofascism’ (Joshi, 2020). The term ‘ecofascism’ refers to a philosophy in which the political, scientific and religious were deliberately conflated to sustain a ‘totalitarian form of government that requires individuals to sacrifice their interests and even their lives to the well-being and glory of the state’ (Biehl and Staudenmeier, 1996: 2–3). In ecofascism, the death of those ‘polluting the land’, Nature, in which divinity was purely immanent, is condoned (Zimmermann, 2010). It reverberated in the case of a widely- noted counterfeit social media post under the branding of the environmental action group Extinction Rebellion, which stated ‘Earth is Healing. Humans are the Disease!’ (@XR_east, 24 Mar 2020). It was one example of a host of similar pieces from across the political spectrum conceiving of Covid-19 as a rightful punishment for ecological, fiscal, and moral transgressions. Some were more contemplative, encouraging political reorientation, especially in environmentalism, but more extreme versions elicited strong criticism for their narrative echoes of ecofascism, highlighting how ‘virulent strains’ of ideology can continue to run through ‘political culture’ and through the historical baggage of narrative and language (Staudenmeier, 1996: 14). Quasi-theistic notions can be imported into current discourses, such as AI, environmentalism – and Covid-19 – when blamed, and chosen people are situated within a righteous, Nature, infused with religious morals, knowable through science (Singler, 2020). But, as this example shows, narrative patterns can also import problematic notions, in the past justified by science, such as eugenic principles of supposedly disposable sections of populations (Joshi, 2020; Zimmermann, 2008; Biehl and Staudenmaier, 1996). The appeal of narrative in these examples of ‘punishment’ narrative is clear. It reduces a complex threat to explainable chains of causation, provides clarity and orientation, as well as structure and organisation to a chaotic, unfamiliar situation. Familiar Biblical narratives are attractive as they provide a potent orientational framework with seemingly clearly distributed dynamics of blame and role distribution, clearly delineating responsibility for both events and

6 further action. However, this class of narrative – like that of warfare and sacrifice that will be examined below – swiftly provides a route to ‘othering’ sections of society, often arbitrarily or imprecisely, in a way that is open to misinterpretation and at worst (as historical consequences of lived ecofasicsm have shown) to deliberate abuse. Religious communities have, therefore, not universally supported such uses of religious narratives. A qualitative study among Bishops of the showed they considered the “Punishment” (or “Judgment”) Narrative as particularly unhelpful. When asked about helpful and unhelpful narratives during the coronavirus crisis, they clearly identified this as an example of ‘bad theology’ (Kamwendo, 2020). For the purposes of this analysis, however, the use of this narrative within and outside theological settings demonstrates that religious narratives can function independently of the theological context in which they originate, with critically important social consequences. This was even more clearly the case in relation to the twin-narratives of warfare and sacrifice in the UK, to which the next section of this article will turn. 2. “Warfare” and “Sacrifice” narratives in the UK response to the Covid-19 pandemic 2.1. Covid-19 as warfare Compared to phase 1, the beginning of the nation-wide UK lockdown on March 23, 2020 saw the initial multiplicity of narrative framings become narrowed and concentrated into mainly two: narratives that centred around sacrifice and warfare. This narrative framing became so omnipresent, pervasive and persistent in its use, that it defined the cultural response to Covid- 19 in the UK during its mature stage. But before examining the implications of this narrative framing on the science communication environment, the public understanding of the science of Covid-19, and crisis management in this framework, it is crucial to outline its emergence, its dimensions, and cultural context. The spread of this narrative was largely top-down. From the beginning of its public response, government and its representatives ‘declared war on coronavirus’, framed themselves as a ‘wartime government’ (Johnson 2020a), and described their response as a ‘battle plan’ (Hancock, 2020a). In response, newspapers framed their response around the same kind of cultural cues. Thus, the Prime Minister’s hope to ‘allow a more significant return to normality from November at the earliest – possibly in time for Christmas’ as ‘It’ll be over by Christmas’ (e.g. Independent 2020; Guardian 2020), even though this was not the original wording of his speech (though, unlikely to have been coincidental in this environment). It recalled a slogan made popular in the historiography of World War I, even though, as historians have since pointed out, it had no equivalent contemporary currency (Halifax, 2010). While the use of this rhetoric simmered on after the end of the most serious lockdown restrictions, it was used with renewed strength as cases rose again in September, when Health Secretary ’s House of Commons statement made reference to the ‘common enemy’ and other such terms established earlier on several times a minute (Hancock, 2020b). The titular head of UK government adapted the same language as its acting representatives, as Queen Elizabeth II ‘invoked the Blitz spirit’ by ‘recall[ing] WWII song’ – ‘We will meet again’ – thus anchoring the warfare framing prominently on the front pages of newspapers across the political spectrum (Mills, 2020; Elizabeth II, 2020). The phrase was subsequently projected from Piccadilly Circus’s famous billboards (McGonagle, 2020), could be found

7 sprayed onto buildings and displayed in the windows of closed businesses (Fig. 1) transcending from political, and journalistic realms into popular usage. Linguistic framing, as Johnson and Lakoff highlight, is significant, not only because it shapes the way a situation becomes understood, as the “Punishment” narrative illustrated, but also how it becomes experienced, and, in due course, how it informs actions and behaviours. In ‘Argument is War’, they explain that: we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose an argument. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent […]. Many of the things we do in argument are partially structured by the concept of war. (Johnson and Lakoff, 2003 [1980]: 4) In the same way in which our ‘conventional ways of talking about arguments presuppose a metaphor we are hardly ever conscious of’, but through which the world is seen and interpreted, the widespread metaphorical framing of the pandemic as war in the UK directed collective behaviours, even where individuals had only limited awareness of the Fig. 1: "We'll meet again" graffiti on closed pub process (Johnson and Lakoff 2003 [1980]: 5; Curtis, 1994: 434). War rhetoric, perhaps counter-intuitively considering its non-metaphorical nature, has come to have overwhelmingly – if not unproblematically – positive connotations in the British context. ‘The war’, usually meaning the second world war, is a ‘key aspect of British national identity’ and ‘popular culture’, where it has lived on in ‘artefacts’ and ‘numerous acts of memorialization and commemoration’ (Noakes and Pattinson, 2013: 20). It is ‘seemingly constant[ly]’ invoked, especially in its perceptions as a ‘good war’, and in the past three decades, as the ‘people’s war’ (Noakes and Pattinson, 2013: 21; Kowol, 2020). Because of this established, participatory culture accompanying war rhetoric, those using can rely on collective compliance of a certain kind, which pre-existing framings have rendered desirable. As lockdown coincided with ‘Victory in Europe Day’, a ‘We’ll Meet Again’ singalong was provided by the BBC ‘[T]o make sure you can get involved’, a background photo montage depicted street-parties with Union-Jack bunting, Spitfire planes in the sky. The participatory nature of the occasion, and what it entailed, required no long explanation: ‘on Friday 8th May the nation is invited to sing along to a rendition of We’ll Meet Again at 9pm, just after an address from Her Majesty the Queen’ (BBC, 2020). And subsequently such street parties and singalongs took place across the country, despite few VE Days having previously been celebrated in this manner. It thus followed the choreography of patriotic and particularly royal occasions – royal weddings, the 2012 Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II –

8 anchoring the Covid-19 crisis in acts of collective nationalism – significantly, in a country consisting of four nations. The confluence of crisis, public health concern, military language and ritual also has history, continuity; it is through it that collective history that many of the positive connotations arise in the cultural setting of the UK. As Roberta Bivins and others have elaborated in detail, the language, ‘political representations, popular understandings, visual depictions and individual experiences of the [British National Health] Service remain haunted by […] the language of the military crisis that had preceded [the establishment of] it’ in 1947. ‘Emotive’ public communication ensured through ongoing use of ‘warlike language’ that work in the NHS was, at times, ‘directly equated to military service’, and that the British public felt ‘duty- bound’ to support their health service – leading to a ‘sense of continuity between Britain at war and the NHS’. The post-war welfare state was, in a similar tone defined by William Beveridge’s ‘war’ on want, squalor, disease, ignorance and idleness. This language framed the early NHS ‘as a site for continue patriotic effort and even sacrifice’, and thus also extends the mindset of ‘an embattled and rationed nation’ into the current day (Bivins, 2020:154- 155). Such language extends this mindset also to the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. The fundraisers for health services that gained the widest public recognition and press coverage through were those with apparent military connections, and thus, in turn, shaped the public discourse and the every-day visible cultural response to Covid-19. ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was recorded as a charity single in support of the NHS by Vera Lynn and Katherine Jenkins in the wake of Covid-19. Lynn and Jenkins had previously performed the song together at the BBC D-Day anniversary concert in 2017, together with musicians from the British Armed Forces, so the 2020 fundraiser’s success was almost guaranteed (BBC, 2017). Under the hashtag #NHSSpitfire, approximately £60 000 were raised for a military honours-style fly-over by the World War II war-plane to take place during the August bank holiday, making prescient the visual framings as the BBC singalong landing page, and giving another holiday the character of a national or military occasion (BBC, 2020). Most prominently, veteran Captain Thomas Moore’s fundraising efforts in April generated £32 million, as well as innumerable news items, a number one single, a special birthday post stamp and post box, artworks, and cumulated in Moore’s knighthood on 17 June 2020. That the fundraiser centred around ‘Captain Tom’s’ 100th birthday highlights the discrepancy between remembering and experiencing remembrance, as Moore is one of only few still alive to remember. 2.2. ‘We will remember their sacrifice’: Health, warfare and Christianity The language of warfare gave focus and intensity to the initially disparate character of the public response to Covid-19. Warfare, and the kindred narrative of ‘sacrifice’ became structuring elements of the epidemic in Britain, allocating preconceived roles and scripted actions to the population. Charles Rosenberg noted, every ‘epidemic has a dramaturgic form’, and, as the desirable, and ‘heroic’ connotations of participation in the narrative indicated, this dramatic arch is moralising – a primary function of narrative noted by Hayden White (Rosenberg, 1992: 279). With it, as White also notes, come also the dangers of ‘mythic’ narratives, which may become a problem when they seek to give ‘real events the form of story’, but where the mapped narrative is not suggested by the events themselves but overlaid

9 upon them, leading to misinterpretation of reality, and misdirected action within it (White, 1980: 8). Through the historical connections of the NHS and WWII, it was possible to swiftly align health care with war and soldiers, health and care workers consistently being referred to as ‘frontline workers’, when especially experienced, as ‘veterans’, their deaths as ‘sacrifice’ (e.g. Kinnair, 2020; Mitchell and Wright, 2020). Not only language and understanding, but also performed actions, could rely on wide uptake of these narratives, as it employed well- rehearsed set-pieces echoing practices of war remembrance. This is exemplified by Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s opening lines of the government’s daily briefing after a renewed sharp rise in deaths, responding, for the first time in this framework to the deaths of health workers: This morning, at 11 o’clock, we paused to remember the 85 NHS colleagues and 19 social care colleagues who have lost their lives with coronavirus. […] They are the nation’s fallen heroes. And we will remember them. (Hancock, 2020c) Not only the timing and military character of this opening was conspicuous, but especially the performative aspect, the invitation to participate in a well-rehearsed ritual. Ordinarily, a two-minute silence at 11am is observed on Remembrance Day, which at 11:00 on 11 November remembers deaths in conflict. A recitation of the Exhortation, lines from John Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, the formulaic linguistic act of Remembrance ends with the line ‘We will remember them’. In addition, remembrance culture and its formulae bring a religious aspect into the language of the pandemic response. In this way, however subliminally, Covid-19 was not only framed as a nationalised conflict, but as an attack on a divine status quo – and, by implication, what is right, natural and moral. Remembrance culture and the ‘war-language’ found in health care provision are historically steeped in religious practice and language – even though it is not equally well-recognised as such publicly. Cultural historians of Christianity and warfare, such as Snape and Brown, call this phenomenon ‘Diffusive Christianity’: a manifestation of Christianity which more frequently presents not as religious practice, such as ‘churchgoing’, or indeed ‘religious faith’, but as a ‘code of behaviour’ (Drewett, 1942: 84; Brown, 2001: 8). Thus, ‘the famous wartime eloquence’ of the speeches of Churchill or Edward VI other drew much ‘of its force from its invocation of religious themes and motifs’, including included the ‘rhetoric of martyrdom and sacrifice’, and a pre-existing ‘strongly religious dimension of British patriotism’ – and with it, an orientational framework of what actions and events are moral or desirable, in war, but by narrative extension, analogously on a national level and before God (Snape, 2005: 242; 163; 94). Diffusive Christianity infused the establishment of the National Service of Remembrance, which anchored this moral orientational framework in the public imagination. The service, however, now belongs to a group of examples of religious practices, led by a member of clergy in a religious institution, that have become part of a performance of British Culture – a ‘code of behaviour’ which it is perilous to transgress.3 Even though such practices and language may have lost their primarily religious significance in the current setting, they perform a culturally powerful, persuasive, and performative function, to indicate what is right

3 The service is co-led by the incumbent Bishop of .

10 or wrong, good, or virtuous, as they align Christian, with military and national virtues, as seemingly affirmed by a notion higher than that of a national government. From a performative aspect, it casts the villains and virtuous. As cultural historians have argued, ‘diffusive Christianity’ represents the ‘pervasive influence of religion in the British media and in British popular culture’, which has since the interwar period ‘commandeered the vehicles of public discourse’ (Snape, 2005: 3, 19; Brown, 2001: 57). Thus it functioned alongside the war and sacrifice narrative in interpreting the details of how the government’s pandemic response had effected Britain – and especially its health service and its workers. In an episode of BBC Question Time on 2 April, exchanges between the outgoing Archbishop of York, John Sentamu and UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, demonstrated the code-like nature of this resource and its language. Both drew on many of the linguistic elements of the cultural narrative of warfare: the Archbishop set the tone for the episode, stressing three times, ‘We are at war’, asking the Health Secretary to be ‘more of a Lord Kitchener’, suggesting in addition that the (non-metaphorical in this case) army should take charge. He added, Hancock should ‘command these files’, to which the Health Secretary responded in kind, that he would ‘not cease from this fight’ (Question Time, 2020). Artefacts borrowed from Remembrance culture, such as song, perform alongside language, enhancing enacted orientations – moral, temporal, emotional, and otherwise. Both Sentamu and Hancock drew on the popular choral pieces, composed during World War I, and since used frequently in both ecclesiastical and – crucially – in national celebrations, such as the Last Night of the Proms, or Remembrance Day services: ‘Command these [beauteous] files’ from ‘My soul, there is a country’, and ‘I will not cease from [mental] fight’, drawn from ‘And did those feet in ancient time (Jerusalem)’.4 Such ‘popular songs’, as Lynn’s or the Hubert Parry pieces, primarily serve ‘social functions’, as Storr notes, of ‘ordering the human experience’, and to provide ‘ways of managing the relationships between our public and private emotional lives; [they] shape popular memory and organize[s] our sense of time; and [it] create[s] collective identity’ – the narrative through which we, whether consciously or not, come to see and interpret the events around us (Storr, 1992: 24-25, Frith, 1987: 133; Richards, 2001: 6). The theme of ‘sacrifice’ is allocated a main role in the dramaturgic dimension of the Covid- response. As it dominates these and other songs included in such celebrations, such as ‘The supreme sacrifice (O Valiant Hearts)’, ‘I vow to thee, my country’ or ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’, it gives comfort: linking the fate of soldiers in national conflict that the death of Christ, so that death in service of the defence of country from foreign invasion transcends the mundane National nature of warfare, to serve a higher, more universal moral Right. Representatives of church and state – governing and representative – through such references, spoke the same language: health workers have died in the greater service, not only, as historical framing of health care in Britain have seen, in the service of their country, but to an even greater good. However, it also implies a concluded chapter. When, as it was then, and indeed at the time of writing, the ‘drama’ is ongoing, and not restricted to the ‘national’, it requires further script to sustain the emotions it seeks to arouse, and to guide desired actions – a shortcoming of the warfare and sacrifice narratives, which will be addressed below.

4 Cf. Blake, William ‘And did those feet in ancient time’. Hymnary. Available at: https://hymnary.org/text/and_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time; Vaughan, Henry, ‘My soul, there is a country’, Hymnary. Available at: https://hymnary.org/text/my_soul_there_is_a_country.

11 2.3. Covid-warfare and nationhood With the aim of managing emotions, songs and remembered rhetoric, such as the examples of the previous section, do important social emotional labour. They were used throughout both world wars for their perceived ‘morale-raising’ and ‘unifying’ powers – effects that their use seeks to replicate in the context of the coronavirus pandemic (Snape, 2005: 20). Storr (1992: 24) emphasises that ‘music ensures that the emotions aroused by a particular event peal at the same moment’ – and narrative is devised and employed to evoke certain effects in certain audiences. The self-identified aim of the government’s and media’s use of this narrative, repeated, mantra-like: ‘to bring the Nation together’ casts light on the difficulty that popular British war commemoration encounters in regard to the consequent othering, obscuring and silencing – and thus, ultimately, polarising and dividing, even when they profess to desire the opposite (Watson, 2013; Noakes and Pattinson, 2013, etc.). Re-inventing British nationhood in a time of crisis, too, has history (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 2019 [1983]; Anderson, 2016 [1983], etc.) As Pamela Gilbert states in relation to the Victorian cholera epidemic, the ‘rhetoric’ and ‘impact of medical science […] permeates the entire culture and is inseparable from the larger political and cultural history of the nation’; much as it was the case in post-war Britain in the infancy of the NHS (Gilbert, 2008: 4; Bivins, 2020). The UK’s response to Covid-19 coincided with the political turmoil surrounding the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union with odd precision: 31 January marked both “ Day” and the UK index case for Covid-19. Language and actors in both crises overlapped, much as Gilbert noted in the case of the Cholera in Victorian England. Prime Minister had already drawn on the language of ‘war time eloquence’, which Remembrance canonised, in his Brexit Day speeches5 where he spoke of a forthcoming time of ‘Uniting the nation’ – the words ‘free’, ‘freedom’ dominated (Johnson, 2020c). This freedom, which the UK would, in trade, achieve through Brexit, he defined as ‘God’s diplomacy’ – trade and economy to which, he warned, enemies of Brexit would soon put up barriers under the guise of the novel coronavirus (Johnson, 2020d). Such language was reminiscent of King George VI – father of Elizabeth II – who in his VE Day speech invoked military, Christian and National issues; he also called his hearers to ‘remember’ the ‘sacrifice’, but to celebrate ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ from ‘tyranny’ of a ‘determined and cruel foe’ and ‘enemy’, a ‘victory’ and ‘triumph’, brought to Britain by the ‘Almighty God’, to whose ‘virtues’ the British people had adhered (Edward VI, 1945). Framing Britain as agent of God’s diplomacy, and its plans as ‘healthy’, ‘beneficial’, and an ‘instinct’ – it followed logically, that Johnson, when eventually erecting these ‘barriers’ himself, he would frame the virus as ‘devilish’ and ‘evil’ (Johnson, 2020e). An ‘invisible mugger’, and ‘physical assailant’ (Johnson, 2020b) coronavirus was unnatural, evil, criminal, against Britain, and against God: all of which were thus rhetorically aligned. Such an invocation of both a national moral “high ground” and a national privilege suggests dangerous flexibility to assign opposites of these virtues and characteristics to the non-British or the non-Christian, or indeed any ‘other’, as was the case with the “Punishment” narrative, but raises numerous issues in the setting of science communication, which will be examined in the following section to highlight the necessity for reflection, from linguistic, historical and cultural perspectives, and severance from such narrative tropes in health and science communication, in favour of more strictly metaphorical narratives. 5 From Downing Street on 31 January and Greenwich 3 February.

12 3. A communication science perspective on Covid-19 narratives As this outline shows, the dominant cultural framing in the UK did not merely rhetorically liken the management of the coronavirus crisis to warfare, but communicated and acted as if it were, or had been, really undergoing stages of a war. This established a loaded framework for science communication. Primarily, the war-framing aligned military with National virtues, and Christian moralities, to form the guiding framework of right or wrong in the management of the UK pandemic – values with no currency in the scientific realities of the novel coronavirus, or guidance issued on the basis of it. This resulted in confused messaging, contradictory interpretations of enactments of compliance, and loss of trust in government, which attests no advantage of this rhetoric in either positively influencing desired behaviour changes, greater under understanding of the science, or long-term benefit in managing the anxieties arising from a major public health risk. Rather, it describes typical complications arising from lack of alignment of reality and story that marks a functional metaphor.

Further, and perhaps most importantly in the British context, their power to create ‘collective identity’, cuts two ways. That war narratives remain so popular in the UK is not just due to their unquestioned popularity, but rather precisely because of their contested public role (Kowol, 2020). The subtle shift over decades of war-commemoration, towards the ‘glory’ of war narratives to ‘include seemingly everyone’, has made it ‘harder to see those who were still excluded’, or rendered ‘almost invisible’, prescribed roles by it, or otherwise othered by its moralising edge by extension of patterns imported as historical baggage of metaphor. Rather than a unifying, warfare emerges as an ultimately polarising narrative, whether this effect is imported unintendedly, or employed deliberately to this end. That divisive narratives have been commonly used deliberately, but unconsciously to many recipients, and in other contemporary politically charged issues such as climate change, highlights the need for greater sensitivity for these dynamics and effects of narrative (Garrard et al., 2019; Lupia, 2013; Fischoff and Scheufele, 2013; Kaplan and Daehlstrom, 2017; Kahan, 2017). Segal (2005: 5) helpfully points out, that despite ‘negative connotations’ of the term ‘rhetoric’ often equated with the ‘opposite of reality’, rhetorical analysis is not, and is not in this article, conducted under the assumption of deceit. Instead, it is conducted in to ‘unmask’, in order to ‘know with greater accuracy’. The need to ‘know more accurately’ the workings of the ‘subconscious power’ of narrative, that is so common it has become a ‘truism’, arises especially in an economy where its potential ill effects could mean the difference between life and death, such as in a health crisis (Garrard, 2019: 80). This section will juxtapose the dynamics of warfare narrative with contemporary responses and existing research in science communication to unmask, to know with greater accuracy, their effects in the Covid-19 pandemic, and will also indicate lessons for crises beyond it. 3.1. Sacrifice and Silence As noted initially, the measure of effective communication in public health crises are clarity, trust in communicators and sources, and the prevention of deaths; the measure of an appropriate metaphor or narrative to translate, amplify and accurately transfer and not to hinder the advice, or exclude parts of the population from its benefits and to minimise

13 ‘morbidity’ and ‘mortality’ (Lupia, 2013: 14048; Bish, 2019; Rogers and Pearce 2013: 6; Rogers, 2007). These objectives stand against a paradox of reception of policy and communication in the UK context. While the beginning of lockdown coincided with a sharp rise in deaths from Covid- 19 (Fig. 2), government approval ratings were also the highest at this time; conversely, with the loosening of lockdown restrictions and fall in infections and deaths, satisfaction with government was also lowest (Fig. 3). There was a clear discrepancy between scientific reality and narrative of Covid-19 in the UK.

Fig. 2: Deaths from Covid-19 January - October 2020 in the UK

Fig. 3: Government approval June 2019- July 2020

14 This apparent paradox is explicable by looking at the ‘other’ side of the warfare narrative as dramaturgic device of the pandemic: at those who were passively framed by it, and affected by the known side-effects of usage of war rhetoric in health settings. Returning to the initially referenced press-coverage, the narratives of warfare and sacrifice elicited numerous responses from healthcare professionals who pleaded for war metaphors to be abandoned. In the UK, an anonymous contribution read ‘the health service is […] not staffed by heroes’, ‘I’m not in the army and we aren’t engaged in military combat […] I really don’t need […] people clapping […] I don’t even (whisper it) need Colonel Tom’ (Guardian, 2020). ‘You cannot sing Rule Britannia to a virus’, another medic concluded (Okwonga, 2020). And yet another acknowledged the ‘eloquent and moving’ nature of military ritual, but pleaded: ‘forget medals and flypasts’, as the ‘increasingly bombastic proposals for honouring our “sacrifice” are beginning to feel more burdensome than uplifting’ (Clarke, 2020). Instead, they desired to have their voices heard, and amplified on the same, prominent stage – but felt silenced. Albeit in a different cultural setting, yet one in which warfare rhetoric was also common, US clinician Adina Wise asserted that the metaphor misrepresents the nature of her profession fundamentally: ‘militarised diction to describe doctors’ sense of duty conflates and confuses the reality of our responsibilities’. This, she writes has detrimental impact on its public perception, on what provisions it suggests as necessary and on what conditions are perceived as acceptable: Regardless of the patient’s ailment, the provider was not putting their own life at risk. A wartime mindset demands death, suffering and sacrifice in the service of one’s country. […] War is dangerous by definition, but danger should never be inherent in the hospital. (Wise, 2020) The flip-side of this narrative also affected other ‘key-workers’, such as teachers.6 Prevented by government-imposed restrictions on schools, teachers could not, to borrow the war- framing “serve at the frontlines”. Press coverage, in this framing, however, pressured teachers to do so, even if scientific guidance suggested the opposite. A Daily Mail title page, for instance, ‘implore[d]’ ‘militant unions’ to ‘let our teachers be heroes’, as ‘magnificent staff across the nation are desperate to help millions of children get back to the classroom’ – subtly framing as ‘magnificent staff’ only those teachers who opposed remote teaching to continue (Groves and White, 2020). Performing the same, and often increased, labour remotely became invalidated, concerns in response to scientific discussion was framed as tyranny of forces other than those who were ‘heroes’ and ‘magnificent’: potential enemies within. Consequently, a qualitative study showed teachers ‘reported discomfort and distress about media reports that asked them to be heroes and criticized them as villains’, as ‘lazy’ and ‘scaremongers’ when they raised safety concerns (Asbury and Kim 2020, p.2). The same sentiments echoed in the concerns of health workers about the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE). Teachers themselves borrowed the war-metaphor to express their fear of ‘going into battle without the armour’ (Ishisaka, 2020; Kinnair, 2020). Such headlines resonated strongly with those that had in recent history decried avoidable deaths among

6 Key-workers became the term for the 33% of the workforce who continued work through the pandemic. This group comprised those employed in health and care, education and childcare, but also transport and retail workers (ONS, 2020).

15 military forces deployed in Iraq despite, what inquiries later found to be ‘serious equipment shortfalls, especially in ‘body armour’ (Stirrup, 2010: 13). When an expectation of death arises in a profession that aims for healing, and when these deaths are perceived as potentially ‘avoidable’, recognisable cultural framings of warfare can become problematic, especially when their historical shortcomings resonate with present-day injustices. Watson, Noakes and Pattinson have noted with concern the ongoing underrepresentation of non-white and non-British forces, but also the historical exclusion of other groups in the commemoration of war events in which they were, at times disproportionately, represented (Watson, 2013: 175; Noakes and Pattinson, 2013: 25). At the ‘frontlines’ in the Covid-19 pandemic BAME workers represent 20.7% of the NHS workforce, but 64% of deaths. This was occurring at a time of increased media attention on resurgent Black Lives Matter and similar Social Justice movements, when their calls for decolonisation and confrontation of racism culminated in symbolic acts such as the toppling of statues (Public Health England 2020; Cook et al., 2020). The divisive effect of those narratives of remembrance, historical exclusions, and the silencing in the structures lamented by contemporary movements run along near-identical fissure lines in society. Similarly, nation-centric narratives recalling times in which health-care is a rationed resource, depleted due to hostile foreign interference (non-metaphorical warfare), can prove counter- productive in a global health challenge in the midst of major renegotiations of international relations such as those triggered by Brexit. Evocations of ‘world-beating solutions’, in vaccines and tracing technologies, suggest a national competition, and assumption of rightful dominance, when a global solution, collaboration, and shared strategy is needed (Johnson, 2020f). They act, ultimately, divisively, and counter to global efforts needed to engage with the pandemic. 3.2. ‘Ironic, unfortunate and unnecessary’: War in health and risk communication The overwhelmingly positive connotations of wartime heroics in political rhetoric sits, at best, uncomfortably alongside such voices of health workers and other professional groups, whose sentiments are corroborated by historical qualitative and theoretical studies on the use of the war metaphor in medical settings. This has assessed it overwhelmingly sceptically, as ‘ironic, unfortunate and unnecessary’, and even harmful in their ‘unintended consequences’ which are particularly common in politicised settings (Nie et al., 2016: 1; Flusberg et al., 2018). Warfare narratives in medicine have been under scrutiny in their use in public and private health settings, in HIV, cancer, or Zika-virus, and a broad variety of chronic health discourses (Fuks and Slobod, 2012; Hansen, 2019; Hodgkin, 1985; Nie et al., 2016; Segal, 2012; Raoul et al., 2007, etc.) and thus with Covid-19 (Musu, 2020; Okwonga, 2020; Shors, 2020, etc.). Prior to 2020, research on this subject has stressed that ‘war metaphors create an artificial win-lose dichotomy’ and by ‘obligating’ a fight may encourage the pursuit of ‘futile or harmful options’, stigmatising hesitancy, periods of contemplation or retreat (Peryakoil, 2008: 842). They transpose ‘military virtues’, such as courage and perseverance, into contexts in which they have no currency, projecting options which medical reality does not recognise (Nie et al., 2016: 8, 4; Segal, 2008; 2012). Virtue – Christian, military or patriotic – cannot alter the nature and course of a disease.

16 As metaphors and narratives possess the potential to influence understanding, and to determine action and behaviours, better knowledge of their potential adverse effects is particularly vital in crisis where ‘risk-communication messages inform the public psychological and behavioural responses to risks, and as a result, help determine subsequent likelihood of disease […] and survival’ (Rogers et al., 2007). Suggestions conveyed by combat-rhetoric that battle and action can change the likelihood of disease, its severity or outcome, not only risk stigmatising retreat from confrontation, but can prove harmful in communicable diseases by endorsing ‘coming together’, in collective activities or social gathering, at times when isolation (‘retreat’) is essential to the successful containment. War metaphors, as the above has shown, can galvanise populations into action, which can bring psychological reward of collective endeavour and shared identity – where passive behaviour is required. It frames these actions as virtuous and desirable, and can thus act counter- productively, when they ‘bring the nation together’ in street parties and associated ‘defiant’ group activities, when scientific advice dictates ‘social distancing’ and ‘staying at home’. This is not unexpected, but precisely the way in which warfare narratives in health settings have repeatedly been shown to ‘negatively control the problem-solving that was the originally intended’, or even create additional problems (Hansen, 2018: 225–226). One palpable result in this case was a paradox of self-perception of compliance, when scientific advice was not being complied with - impressions of compliance are further rewarded by the validation of visible collective practice, especially through well-rehearsed practices, as illustrated through remembrance rituals. This is problematic not only in terms of action, but also of its description, measure and reporting, with regard to compliance in crisis generally being over-estimated. Reflecting on a hypothetical crisis scenario, 95% of respondents in the UK estimated their general compliance to be ‘very high’, but when given one specific instruction, compliance dropped to 30% among UK respondents (as compared to 70% in Poland), and to 10% when given two instructions (Rogers and Pearce 2013: 73). This has been corroborated in the Covid-19 crisis and lockdown regulations (Cartwright and Rose, 2020; Duffy, 2020). Conclusions drawn from a survey indicated: ‘despite general continued compliance, more people report breaking the rules by having friends or family visit them at home. 5% had done this at the beginning of April, but this has now [May 2020] almost tripled, to 14%’ (Duffy, 2020). This complicates a shift from clear messaging at the beginning of lockdown , Stay Home’, to more diffuse messaging, ‘Stay Alert’, by employing ‘common sense’, or, alternatively, ‘act[ing] fearlessly but with common sense’, again playing into a national stereotype (Johnson, 2020g; Andrew Marr Show, 2020). Supporters of the ‘common sense’ rhetoric welcomed it as they felt they were no longer being addressed ‘like children’, associating more diffusive messaging with assumption of maturity and rationality (Campbell, 2020; Hickman, 2020). This approach, however, stands in an inverted relationship with aims and strategies of health messaging, again, highlighting the potentially counteracting function of war culture in a UK setting, where it is a matter of national identity. As has been shown, among the aims of warfare rhetoric, besides bringing population together in spirit, is also to lift these spirits and morale, reassure and comfort. Such rhetoric strategies, are however, most commonly employed when a blanket response of panic, irrational behaviour, and non-compliance is

17 presumed, whereas clear communication appeals to mature and reasonable responses, and is more frequently successful (Rogers and Pearce, 2013; Drummond and Fischoff, 2020). Evoking a combat-rhetoric is, therefore, a pre-emptive strategy to address reactions which research has generally not found to arise most prominently, and whose associated positive effects have furthermore, been shown to be only of short-term effect, while, more significantly, creating long-term problems. Putting first the combating of presumed, and existing, anxiety arising from the unfamiliar, by evoking familiar slogans and shared cultural artefacts, may seem ‘logical on the surface’, but ‘considerable evidence’ of past and present research suggests, ‘does not work’ (Wessely and Daniels, 2020). Reassurance offers transient false comfort that rapidly fades; when unwarranted, it promotes distress – particularly in relation to health-related anxiety. […] When it is accompanied by facts from a credible source, reassurance can be effective. But this is not what is being offered at the moment. In the absence of this, reassurance will rarely change behaviour or ameliorate distress, but might do the opposite… [and] elicit fear (Wessely and Daniels, 2020). The most crucial hallmark of successful risk communication, besides transparency, clarity, and consistency, is trust. As war rhetoric, used to create sentiments of familiarity, or as ’crowd-pleaser’, can in the long term lead to increased anxiety, and damage trust in those communicating science in public, when optimism is not backed up by data that supports it, it will thus leads to decreased levels of compliance (Rogers and Pearce, 2013; Drummond and Fischoff, 2020; Wessely and Daniels, 2020; Bish et al., 2011; Pearce, 2020). This had already started becoming evident from UK data towards the end of the first national lockdown, and is at the time of writing punctuating the responses to announcements of local lockdowns, further highlighting the need for reflection on and adjustment of the war narrative as employed in framing Covid-19 in the UK, which is, as the conclusion will touch upon, also not without difficulty (Cartwright and Rose, 2020). 4. Conclusion: Identity and science communication in times of political polarisation The complications arising from the use of narrative during the Covid-19 pandemic correspond to a variety of problems that have been discussed in science communication, but especially, more recently, its challenges in politically polarised environments. The complications arising from the ‘good war’ framing, for instance, resonate strongly with Ron Curtis’s critique of detective-story-like plots, focusing on ‘good guys’, their hard, morally virtuous and ultimately successful work as distorting lenses through which the realities of science become understood. Curtis highlights that such plots break a contract with readers, when the realities of the events they frame fail to comply with what the narrative suggests. This results in disappointment and disengagement (Curtis, 1994). This criticism was echoed more recently in a lack of public understanding of the self-refining nature of science, at best misinterpreted, at worst weaponised, as failure, as seen recently in debates surrounding immunisation, or computer-based modelling in the management of virus outbreaks, such as Zika or in climate change (Monaghan et al., 2016; Kahan et al., 2017; Garrard et al., 2019). In such ‘polluted science communication environments’, a particular challenge arises from criticisms of narratives that establish a framework of what’s moral, which are deeply bound

18 up in questions of identity (Kahan, 2017). Criticisms of them are therefore most frequently perceived as an attack on identity (Garrard et al., 2019), which has also been the case with criticisms of the use of war narratives during the coronavirus pandemic in the UK (cf. Hodge, 2020; Spence, 2020). An editorial in the Daily Mail asserted it was the ‘Left’s hate mob’, and the ‘British liberal elite’ dictating ‘we are no longer supposed to use language like that’; Covid-19 was a ‘culture war’, a ‘D-Day’ in which these groups were ‘beaten’ (Hodge, 2020). Addressing the unwanted and additional effects of war-narratives is, as the above example proves, difficult. Yet war-narratives, in general, offer no advantages in health communication, making a strong case for avoiding them, if not in general, then certainly in this setting. Kowol (2020) concludes that ‘asking Britons not to be encumbered by myths of [war]’ was ‘not impossible but exceedingly difficult’ – but, as this paper has sought to show, an urgent priority in a health setting. Its perceived positives are at best short-term, and one- sided, while effects on compliance are potentially extremely severe. In other settings, a revisiting of conflict narratives is also at least pressing, with the invocation of (post-)war ‘heroes’, such as Kitchener and Beveridge, and their at best ambiguous role in contemporary debates around racial discrimination, decolonising institutions, and revisiting the history and cult(ure) of the British Empire. This ubiquitous emerging necessity to re-evaluate the use of explicit conflict rhetoric in public discourse appears to be endorsed by marketing research conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic showed there was decreased public preference for ‘fighting talk’ and increased desire for narratives of care and connection (Ulquinaku, 2020). These findings foreground the need to ‘unmask’ the functions of narrative, and to promote the ways in which narrative can be inclusive, instruct clearly to action, and anticipate manifest and realistic effect, if deliberately, thoughtfully and wisely chosen. They also identify the potential rewards, and positive impacts on behaviour-change that more appropriate, truth-bearing and reconciliatory narratives can bring, including the healing of internal and external relationships (Baden, 2019) rather than the generation of ‘others’. As the ‘invented traditions’ of nationhood, as Hobsbawm notes, fundamentally served to ‘ensure or express social cohesion’, and ‘to structure social relations’, often sprung from crisis, this time also offers to nations caught up in the pandemic, and to the UK in particular, an opportunity to rethink relationships with their social and natural environments in this century (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 2019 [1983]: 263, 267; Gilbert, 2008: 4; Brown, 2001: 8). To grasp these opportunities requires, however, the deliberate and ethical choice in the narratives with which the current crisis is navigated. With the observed gravitation towards religious narrative, a consideration of ‘Religion’ is timely. It embodies, even etymologically, the aim to mend broken relationships, to re-tie the ‘ligands’ that bind communities, and beyond that, the orders of living things, including animals – and even viruses. In those traditions there is indeed a rich and complex memory of conflicts, but they also possess a large narrative store of non-conflictual story, that reliance on those coloured by notions of warfare is not only inadvisable, but unnecessary, as the stories we tell possess the power either to realise or to refuse opportunities to work together for a healthier global future.

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