The 2020 pandemic was a privileged setting to record these interactions. The very rapid expansion of covid-19 affected the entire planet: at this time, what can move, moves. It is the global circulation of everything: airplanes, viruses, policies, speeches, conspiracy Whatsapp Mobile Number List theories, vaccines. The flows of different speed and intensity draw an unequal world in goods, population and resources. And, in this context, churches and religious groups also circulated discourses and meanings in the pandemic, a scene that, on the other hand, lent itself to spiritual interventions: along with disease and death, the epidemic brought fear, uncertainty, isolation, loneliness. . Religion has experience in offering answers in these scenarios.
The 2020 pandemic surprised Argentina with a government that had taken office just three months before the arrival of covid-19. The change of political sign Whatsapp Mobile Number List brought new airs and a general rethinking of public policies, but some things remained: the relationship between religious groups and the State is one of them. Like so many Whatsapp Mobile Number List difficult 2020, the pandemic intensified existing situations, conflicts or agreements rather than generating new ones. At the beginning of the pandemic, the churches sought to contact the State through the channels they knew so well: in Argentina there is a Ministry of Worship that reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that centralizes formal relations between the government and organized religions. . The secretary who took office in 2019, Guillermo Oliveri,
Churches and temples were also mobilized: their assistance work in popular neighborhoods characterizes the dynamics of these territories, in which priests, pastors and religious communities dialogue with municipal governments. In the first weeks of the aspo, contacts intensified at Whatsapp Mobile Number List different levels of the State. President Alberto Fernández met, after the mediation of the Secretary of Cults, with Catholic bishops and evangelical pastors, and with the two groups of priests with the most work in popular neighborhoods: the priests in the villeros and the priests in the option for the poor4.