The Jesuit Network: Fauci, Redfield, Cuomo, and Newsom
One of the more remarkable and under-remarked features of the COVID-19 response in the United States is how many of its key architects shared the same educational formation. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and became the face of the pandemic response, was educated at Regis High School in New York — a no-tuition Jesuit college-preparatory institution on the Upper East Side — and at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, another Jesuit institution. Fauci himself has spoken openly and warmly about the formative influence of his Jesuit education on his career, crediting the Jesuit emphasis on intellectual rigour, organisation, and logic for much of his professional approach.
Dr. Robert Redfield, who served as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention throughout the pandemic, is a graduate of Georgetown University, the flagship Jesuit institution in the United States. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, whose decisions during the pandemic were among the most consequential and most damaging of any American official, is a graduate of Fordham University, another Jesuit institution. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who imposed some of the most restrictive lockdown orders in the nation — banning outdoor religious services while permitting outdoor dining and protest gatherings — attended Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school, and has credited his Jesuit education with shaping his political outlook. The World Union of Jesuit Alumni, in a 2020 article, noted with evident pride that Fauci, Cuomo, and Newsom were all Jesuit alumni playing central roles in managing the pandemic.
This is not to suggest a conspiracy in the narrow sense. But the Jesuit Order has a well-documented political philosophy that is collectivist, internationalist, and sympathetic to state management of society — a philosophy with roots going back to the Jesuit reductions in South America and forward to the social teaching of Jesuit Pope Francis. Those educated in that tradition carry its assumptions about the proper role of the state, the subordination of individual liberty to collective management, and the authority of credentialled experts. These assumptions were on full display in 2020 and 2021.
But it is important to understand what this management of society ultimately serves. The Jesuit vision of a managed, ordered, and internationally coordinated world is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end — and that end, as Rome has taught consistently for centuries, is the submission of all earthly governments and all human society to the authority of the Bishop of Rome. This is not a fringe interpretation of Catholic teaching. It is what Rome has explicitly claimed. The doctrine of papal supremacy — that the Pope holds supreme authority not only over the ‘Church’ but over the temporal affairs of nations — has never been formally withdrawn. It was reasserted in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), in which Pius IX condemned the proposition that the Pope has no right to interfere in political affairs. It was embedded in the documents of the First Vatican Council (1870), which defined papal infallibility. And it underlies the entire social encyclical tradition, from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum through to Francis’s Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, which call for a supranational political authority capable of managing global crises — the very language of world government.
What the pandemic revealed is that this ambition did not diminish in the modern era. It adapted. The Jesuit Order, historically the most politically sophisticated arm of the Roman Church — its members trained in philosophy, law, statecraft, and the management of elites — has always operated through the formation of key individuals in positions of power rather than through the crude exercise of direct force. You do not need to control governments if you have educated the men who run them. You do not need to issue orders if the men in charge already share your assumptions about how the world should be organised. Fauci, Redfield, Cuomo, Newsom — these men did not need to be directed. They had been formed. And the world they were building in the name of public health — centralised, managed, surveilled, and ultimately answerable to supranational authority — looked remarkably like the world Rome has always said it wanted. This is Romanism’s new world order: not imposed suddenly by force, but constructed gradually through crisis, through the formation of elites, and through the patient dismantling of every institution — the independent nation, the free church, the sovereign conscience — that stands between the individual and Rome’s universal claim.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s role in the nursing home catastrophe deserves particular note. In March 2020, Cuomo issued an order requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients discharged from hospitals — sending infected individuals directly into the facilities housing the most vulnerable population in the state. The result was thousands of preventable deaths. Cuomo’s administration subsequently underreported the nursing home death toll by thousands, a cover-up that the New York Attorney General later substantiated. Cuomo received an Emmy Award for his pandemic briefings while thousands of elderly New Yorkers were dying in facilities he had seeded with the infected.
The Vatican itself, under Jesuit Pope Francis, fully endorsed the global pandemic response, including vaccination mandates. Francis publicly called opposition to vaccines selfish and immoral and used the moral authority of the papacy to reinforce government pressure on populations to comply. He permitted the Vatican to implement its own vaccine passport system. The same Roman Catholic ‘Church’ that had governed its faithful through plague after plague in previous centuries — never once closing churches or suspending the sacraments on government order — in 2020 closed its churches and supported every measure the civil governments imposed.
But Francis went further than merely endorsing restrictions. In a video message in May 2020, as the world was still in the grip of the initial lockdowns, the Pope delivered what amounted to a manifesto for permanent transformation. He told Roman Catholics to seize the opportunity for change that the pandemic presented, declaring: “When we come out of the pandemic, we will no longer do what we have been doing and how we have been doing it. No, everything will be different.” Political leaders around the world were saying precisely the same thing at precisely the same time. The phrase “the new normal” entered the political vocabulary and was repeated by heads of government, health ministers, and media commentators as though it were self-evidently true that the world after COVID could not and should not resemble the world before it.
But why not? This question was rarely asked and almost never answered honestly. There was no valid reason why the world could not return to normal once the acute phase of the pandemic passed. Societies had recovered fully from far more devastating plagues throughout history — from the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions, to the Asian flu of 1957, the Hong Kong flu of 1968 — without any serious suggestion that the pre-crisis order needed to be permanently dismantled. The repeated insistence that nothing would ever be the same was not a medical assessment. It was a political objective. Those who said it were not warning us about an unavoidable consequence. They were announcing an intention.
The reason it was said repeatedly, and said by so many people in so many countries simultaneously, is simple: they did not want the world to go back to normal. The crisis had opened a window that ordinary political circumstances would never have opened. Vast expansions of state power that would have taken years to legislate — or that could never have been legislated at all — had been implemented in days by executive decree, and a frightened public had accepted them. Surveillance infrastructure had been built. Digital health credentials had been tested. The principle that the state could restrict movement, mandate medical procedures, and close businesses at will had been established and largely upheld by the courts. Returning to normal would mean surrendering all of that. And those who had acquired it had no intention of surrendering it voluntarily.
This is not a new playbook. Those who seek to expand the power of the state and advance the cause of global governance have long understood that crises — real or manufactured, exploited or engineered — are the primary vehicle through which ordinary people can be induced to accept what they would never accept in peacetime. The principle has been stated openly by some of the most prominent figures in recent political history. Rahm Emanuel, who served as White House Chief of Staff under President Barack Obama, articulated it with characteristic bluntness:
Emanuel was not speaking about the pandemic — he made that remark in the context of the 2008 financial crisis — but the principle he articulated was applied with textbook precision in 2020. The pandemic was the crisis. The things that could not be done before — universal digital surveillance, vaccine mandates, the subordination of religious assembly to state permission, the centralisation of economic decision-making — were the opportunity. The Jesuit network and its globalist allies, who had spent decades building the ideological and institutional infrastructure for exactly this kind of transformation, were positioned to move the moment the window opened. And they did.
The phrase “Build Back Better” — adopted simultaneously by Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau, and the World Economic Forum as a pandemic recovery slogan — was not a coincidence of rhetoric. It was the explicit signal that the intended destination was not a return to what had existed before, but the construction of something new on the ruins of what the lockdowns had damaged. A world with more government, more surveillance, more dependence, more international coordination — and less individual liberty, less national sovereignty, less local community, and less of the kind of independent civil society in which a free church, a free press, and a free citizen can exist. The one-worlders have been saying for years that they never let a crisis go to waste. In 2020, they had the biggest crisis in a generation. They did not waste it.
Vatican Profits From the Pandemic
It was not only the pharmaceutical companies that turned the pandemic into a financial windfall. The Roman Catholic ‘Church’ in the United States engineered one of the most consequential and least-discussed lobbying victories of the entire crisis — securing access to a taxpayer-funded relief programme from which religious organisations had always been excluded, and then drawing on it at a scale that dwarfed virtually every other institutional beneficiary.
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was created in March 2020 as part of the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion emergency spending package. It was designed to help small businesses — generally those with fewer than 500 employees — keep their workers on payroll during the lockdowns. Religious organisations were not initially eligible for the programme, and for good reason: the SBA had long maintained a policy excluding non-profit organisations engaged primarily in religious instruction or worship from its loan programmes, to avoid the entanglement of government funds with religious institutions. This was not an obscure technicality. It was a deliberate and longstanding separation.
Catholic officials moved immediately to change it. Within days of the CARES Act passing, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and affiliated Catholic organisations mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign targeting the Trump administration and Congress. Their objective was twofold: first, to make faith-based organisations eligible for PPP loans at all; and second — critically — to obtain a special waiver from the 500-employee rule that would have disqualified most large dioceses. Under normal SBA rules, a diocese would have to count all employees across its parishes, schools, and ministries as a single entity — easily pushing it over the 500-employee threshold and making it ineligible. The waiver the ‘Church’ lobbied for allowed each parish, school, diocese office, and ministry to apply as a separate independent entity, each treated as a “small” employer in its own right.
They got everything they asked for. The Trump administration granted the religious exemption and the employee-count waiver. Congress approved the access. And the Catholic ‘Church’ — an institution with billions of dollars in assets, real estate, and endowments — proceeded to collect taxpayer money at a scale that the Associated Press described as making it one of the programme’s biggest winners.
An Associated Press investigation published in July 2020 found that at least 3,500 Catholic organisations had received approval for forgivable loans, with the total reaching at least $1.4 billion in the first phase of lending alone. A subsequent AP investigation published in early 2021 revised that figure significantly upward. An extensive AP report documented that Catholic dioceses and other Catholic institutions received at least $3 billion in federal aid from the Paycheck Protection Program. The Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference estimated that approximately 9,000 Catholic entities in total received loans — roughly half of all Catholic parishes in the United States. The range between the lower figure ($1.4 billion) and the higher ($3.5 billion) reflects the incomplete public data available; the lower end represented only identifiable loans in federal records, while the higher estimates incorporated broader survey data from the dioceses themselves.
The scale of individual recipients was staggering. The Archdiocese of New York received 15 loans worth at least $28 million just for its top executive offices. Its iconic St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue was approved for at least $1 million. In Orange County, California, where a glass cathedral estimated to cost over $70 million had recently opened, diocesan officials received four loans worth at least $3 million. A loan of at least $2 million went to the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, where a church investigation had already revealed that its bishop had embezzled funds and made sexual advances toward young priests. The Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh and its affiliated entities received an estimated $15 million in loans, including $2.5 million to the diocese directly — on the same day the diocese announced it was eliminating 11 positions.
The AP also found that tens of millions of dollars flowed to dioceses that were financially strained not from COVID at all, but from years of paying out legal settlements to victims of clergy sexual abuse. The PPP, designed to keep Main Street businesses alive during a temporary emergency, was in effect being used to partially offset the financial consequences of decades of institutional misconduct. Victims’ advocates were vocal in their condemnation, noting that ordinary American taxpayers — many of whom had themselves been harmed by Roman Catholic clergy or knew those who had — were now being asked to subsidise the institutions that had wronged them.
The financial benefit to individual dioceses was measurable and significant. The Louisville Archdiocese saw its available funds grow from approximately $153 million to $157 million during the pandemic period. The Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina, and its affiliates — which received $12 million in PPP loans for its central offices and affiliated parishes and schools — saw assets rise by approximately $21 million to over $170 million, despite some collection dips from closed parishes. The Diocese of Charlotte, which took in at least $2.2 million in PPP loans across its parishes, schools, and charities, saw assets rise from $100 million to $110 million. This despite the AP finding that a majority of dioceses had enough cash on hand to cover at least six months of operating expenses before the pandemic began.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State (au.org) was among the organisations that documented and criticised the arrangement, noting that the Catholic ‘Church’ had obtained a unique and unprecedented carve-out from rules specifically designed to maintain the boundary between government funds and religious institutions. What made the lobbying effort particularly remarkable was its speed: within weeks of the pandemic being declared, the largest religious institution in the United States had rewritten federal lending rules in its favour, accessed a programme never intended for it, and begun drawing on public funds at a scale no other religious body approached.
It is worth noting the contrast. Independent Baptist churches, small evangelical congregations, and most Protestant ministries either did not seek or did not receive anything approaching this level of federal funding. Many closed their doors, absorbed their losses, and trusted God to provide through the ordinary means of their congregations’ giving. The Roman Catholic ‘Church’, with its centralised hierarchy, its experienced government affairs apparatus, and its long history of working the levers of political power, did something very different. It treated a public health emergency as a financial opportunity — and it succeeded.
Bill Gates, the WHO, and the Architecture of Global Health Control
No figure was more aggressively promoted during the pandemic as an expert on infectious disease than Bill Gates — a man whose qualifications consist of dropping out of Harvard and becoming a software billionaire. The mainstream media treated Gates as an authority on virology, vaccine development, global health policy, and pandemic preparedness, despite his having no medical training of any kind. The explanation for this extraordinary elevation lies in money.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation became, in the years before the pandemic, the World Health Organization’s second largest source of funding — contributing 9.5 percent of the WHO’s total revenues between 2010 and 2023, according to a BMJ analysis published in 2025. The Gates Foundation directed more than $4.5 billion to the WHO over this period, with more than 80 percent of that funding targeted at infectious diseases and more than half at vaccine programmes. The United States was the WHO’s largest funder, but the Gates Foundation’s influence exceeded its raw dollar contribution because its grants were targeted — they came with conditions about how the money was to be spent — while government contributions were more general. The WHO’s priorities, the BMJ analysis concluded, had been shaped by its reliance on targeted grants from donor organisations such as the Gates Foundation.
Since January 2020, the Gates Foundation committed more than $2 billion to the global COVID-19 response, including major investments in COVAX — the global vaccine distribution initiative — and in Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Gates and the Foundation were positioned at the intersection of the WHO, the vaccine manufacturers, the global distribution infrastructure, and the media narrative that promoted all of them. When the pandemic began, Gates was already on record predicting a global pandemic and calling for the world to prepare with mass vaccination programmes. When the pandemic arrived, he was immediately positioned as the expert voice on what should be done. What should be done, in his telling, was exactly what would be done: global lockdowns maintained until vaccination was achieved, vaccines developed and distributed through the organisations he funded, and dissent from this agenda suppressed as dangerous misinformation.
The financial architecture of the pandemic response — government funding, Gates Foundation funding, pharmaceutical company participation, WHO coordination, Big Tech censorship — was not a conspiracy in the sense of a secret meeting in a back room. It was an openly constructed system of interlocking interests, built over years, that happened to align perfectly around a single agenda when the pandemic arrived. Those who benefited from the system promoted it. Those who challenged it were silenced. The pharmaceutical companies that produced the vaccines under Operation Warp Speed were given billions in public money and indemnified against legal liability for adverse effects. The media companies that promoted the official narrative received advertising revenue from government vaccination campaigns. The social media platforms that censored dissent received cooperation and credit from the administration. There was no need for a conspiracy. The incentives were sufficient.
“Stop the Spread, Take the Vaccine”: The Promise That Was Not True
The central promise of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign was simple: get vaccinated to stop the spread. This was the message on every billboard, in every public service announcement, in every government briefing. The vaccines were presented not merely as a protection against severe disease for the individual but as a means of ending the pandemic for everyone — of achieving the herd immunity that would allow normal life to resume. Those who declined vaccination were portrayed as selfish, as endangering others, as morally culpable for the continuation of the pandemic.
This promise turned out not to be true. It became apparent within months of the mass vaccination rollout that the COVID vaccines — whatever their benefits in reducing severity of illness for some individuals — did not reliably prevent infection or transmission. Vaccinated people were getting COVID. In many cases, vaccinated people were getting COVID at rates that exceeded those of unvaccinated people with natural immunity from prior infection. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals, including a 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open, found that protection against laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection fell below 20 percent at 6 months from the primary vaccination cycle and below 30 percent at 9 months from a booster dose. The CDC’s own tracking acknowledged that vaccine effectiveness waned significantly over time and that, in populations with high levels of infection-induced immunity from prior COVID infection, vaccine effectiveness estimates could fall to negative values — meaning the vaccinated were, by some measures, more likely to test positive than the unvaccinated.
None of this was presented to the public at the time the mandates were imposed. People were told to take the vaccine or lose their jobs. Members of the military were told to take the vaccine or face discharge. Healthcare workers were told to take the vaccine or be terminated. Students were told to take the vaccine or be denied university attendance. These coercive measures were imposed on the basis of a promise that the vaccines would stop the spread — a promise that the manufacturers themselves had not made in their clinical trials, which were designed only to assess reduction in symptomatic illness, not transmission.
The censorship apparatus described in Part 1 was in full operation to prevent this information from reaching the public. Stories of people testing positive for COVID after vaccination were among the topics explicitly listed for suppression in the Unified Strategies Group’s coordination sessions between federal agencies and Big Tech. People sharing their personal experiences of post-vaccination COVID infection were deplatformed. The dissenting doctors and scientists — the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, the physicians who questioned the mandates, the virologists who challenged the narrative on natural immunity — were publicly denounced as dangerous and professionally undermined, while the emails later revealed that the denunciations were coordinated at the highest levels of the NIH and the Fauci apparatus.
The vaccines were about state control, not health. That is a strong statement and requires evidence to support it. The evidence is in the coercion. A health intervention that is genuinely effective for the individual does not require mandates. If the vaccine protected the vaccinated, then the unvaccinated posed no threat to them. If natural immunity was as protective as or more protective than vaccine immunity — which multiple studies suggested — then mandates for those with natural immunity served no health purpose whatever. The mandates made sense only in the context of a political objective: universal compliance, demonstrated submission, and the establishment of the principle that the state has authority to make medical decisions on behalf of citizens and punish those who refuse.
The Pandemic as Persecution
The use of pandemic restrictions to suppress Christian worship was not limited to Communist China. It occurred across the Western world — in democracies with constitutional protections for religious freedom, in countries that had never imposed such restrictions in their entire history, and in some cases with an explicit double standard that treated Christianity as a threat while accommodating every other gathering and activity. The pattern was consistent enough across different nations, different governments, and different political systems to be recognised for what it was: not merely an overreaction to a health crisis, but an opportunity seized.
New Zealand: Ten in a Church, One Hundred in a Restaurant
New Zealand’s pandemic legislation included provisions that would have been unthinkable in any previous generation. Under the Health (Combating COVID-19) Amendment Act, police were given powers to enter premises without a warrant based solely on the belief that more than ten people were gathered inside for religious worship. A gathering of eleven Christians in a home for prayer was a matter for law enforcement. The same legislation permitted gatherings of up to 100 people in restaurants, shopping centres, and cinemas. The message was clear: commerce is essential, worship is not. A hundred people spending money in a mall posed no public health concern. Ten people praying in a living room required police intervention.
This was not an accident of drafting. It was a policy decision. And it illustrated with uncomfortable clarity what governments actually think about the church when the mask — in every sense — comes off.
New York: Churches Threatened, Islam Accommodated
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio issued personal threats to churches and synagogues that continued to hold services. In April 2020 he warned publicly that houses of worship that defied the restrictions would be closed down permanently — not temporarily suspended, but shut for good. He singled out the Jewish and Christian communities by name, warning that he had instructed police to ensure gatherings did not take place, and that any congregation that refused to comply would face permanent closure.
Yet when Ramadan arrived, the same mayor who had threatened to permanently close churches provided 400,000 free meals to Muslim New Yorkers to mark the Islamic holy month. He appeared publicly to celebrate the occasion, expressed his admiration for the Muslim community, and made no equivalent gesture toward the Jewish High Holy Days or Christian Easter — both of which fell during the same period of restrictions. Churches were forbidden from gathering to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The city government was simultaneously funding Ramadan celebrations at public expense.
It is worth noting, as you rightly observe, that Christmas and Easter have pagan elements in their popular observance — that is a separate discussion entirely. The point here is the naked double standard: one religion was threatened with permanent closure for gathering, while another was actively celebrated and publicly subsidised by the same official who issued the threats. The Mayor of New York was not making a theological distinction. He was making a political one. And the political message was that Islam was a priority and Christianity was a problem.
Mississippi: A Church Raided, the Elderly Fined
In Greenville, Mississippi — in the heart of the Bible Belt — police raided a drive-in church service at Temple Baptist Church on 8th April 2020. The congregation had adapted to the restrictions by holding a drive-in service: members sat in their cars in the church car park, listening to the pastor preach over an FM transmitter, windows up, never leaving their vehicles. By any reasonable public health standard, a drive-in service of this kind posed zero transmission risk. It was safer than a grocery store. It was safer than a petrol station.
Police arrived nonetheless, issued $500 fines to every church member present, and ordered them to leave. The city of Greenville had a $1,000 fine for violations of its emergency order. Pastor Arthur Scott called it a direct attack on the Christian faith. He was right. There was no public health rationale for what happened that evening. There was only the exercise of state power against a congregation that refused to stop worshipping.
Kentucky: Nails in the Road, Numbers on the Cars
In Louisville, Kentucky, the measures taken against a church congregation attending a service on Palm Sunday 2020 were so extraordinary that they were reported nationally. Members of Maryville Baptist Church arrived to find that police had dumped nails across the entrance to the church car park to puncture the tyres of any vehicle that entered. Officers recorded the licence plate numbers of every vehicle in attendance. Members returned to their cars after the service to find notices placed on their windscreens informing them that they were required to self-quarantine for 14 days and that failure to comply would result in further enforcement action.
Governor Andy Beshear defended the measures. The church’s pastor, Jack Roberts, pointed out that the congregation had taken precautions: members remained in their cars with windows closed for the entire service. The state of Kentucky’s response was to track them, record their identities, and threaten them with further legal consequences. The comparison to the tactics of authoritarian regimes — the recording of identities, the demands for self-isolation, the enforcement notices — was not lost on observers.
Kansas City: Report Your Neighbours for Attending Church
In Kansas City, Missouri, the mayor demanded that churches submit their attendance lists to city health authorities so that worshippers could be individually tracked and contacted for COVID tracing purposes. He made clear that failure to provide these lists would result in enforcement action. The city was, in effect, demanding that pastors hand over the names of every person who attended a church service so that the government could monitor them.
The parallel to the early stages of the Nazi regime in Germany is exact and historically warranted. In the early stages of that regime, one of the first instruments of control was the requirement to register, to identify, and to report. The state demanded to know who was gathering, where, and when. The demand that Kansas City churches submit attendance lists for government tracking was structurally identical to that impulse. The stated justification was public health. The mechanism was the same: the state insisting on knowing who is in the room when Christians gather.
Michigan: Swinger Clubs Essential, Churches Non-Essential
Michigan under Governor Gretchen Whitmer produced one of the most revealing illustrations of the ideological character of pandemic enforcement. While churches were prohibited from reopening and religious gatherings were banned, the state classified homosexual swinger clubs as essential businesses — permitted to operate under the same emergency orders that kept houses of worship closed. The reasoning, to the extent any was offered, was that these establishments provided essential personal services.
The spectacle of a state government that would not permit Christians to gather for prayer but would permit swinger clubs to operate as essential services requires no additional commentary. It speaks for itself about what those in authority considered valuable and what they considered dispensable.
California: No Singing, No Bible Study, But Riots Are Fine
California under Governor Gavin Newsom — a Jesuit-educated man, as noted earlier in this article — imposed some of the most sweeping and theologically specific restrictions of any state. All indoor church activities were banned across 30 counties. This prohibition extended not merely to Sunday services but to mid-week Bible studies, home fellowship groups, and any indoor gathering for religious purposes. Church singing was specifically and explicitly banned by the California Department of Public Health, on the grounds that singing projected respiratory droplets further than normal speech.
While these bans were in force, California experienced large-scale outdoor protests and riots in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter protests drew tens of thousands of people in close proximity, many not masked, shouting and chanting at full volume. Governor Newsom and other California officials expressed their public support for these gatherings. No enforcement action was taken. No fines were issued. No attendance limits were applied. The same government that banned a family from singing hymns together in their own church building had no objection to tens of thousands gathering in the streets.
The double standard was so glaring that even secular commentators noticed it. Churches were silenced. Protests were celebrated. The virus, it appeared, had the political discernment to distinguish between gatherings the government approved of and gatherings it did not.
South Africa: Left-Wing Churches Join the Suppression
In South Africa, the government’s pandemic restrictions on religious gatherings were actively supported and reinforced by left-leaning religious organisations — the same ecumenical and mainline denominations that had historically aligned themselves with the African National Congress and with the international progressive agenda. These organisations threw their institutional weight behind the government’s ban on church gatherings, providing theological cover for the suppression of worship and condemning those churches that questioned the restrictions as irresponsible or selfish.
The South African government, like its counterparts in the United States and elsewhere, also moved to limit the flow of information that questioned the official narrative on lockdowns. Access to dissenting voices was restricted. Social media content questioning restrictions was flagged and removed in coordination with the same international tech platforms that were suppressing dissent globally. The pattern was consistent: government-aligned religious organisations provided moral legitimacy for the suppression, while government-aligned technology companies provided the infrastructure for the censorship.
This is the full picture of what happened to the church during the pandemic. It was not a uniform story of persecution in every country. Many congregations met without interference. Many governments genuinely believed their restrictions were justified. But the pattern of double standards — churches singled out while other activities continued, worshippers tracked and fined while rioters were celebrated, singing banned while protests were applauded — was consistent enough and widespread enough to constitute something more than coincidence. It was the revelation of what those who hold power in the secular West actually think about the gathering of God’s people. And the church, on the whole, was not ready for what it revealed.
China: The Pandemic Used to Intensify Existing Persecution
For the underground church in China, the COVID-19 pandemic brought not a pause in persecution but an acceleration of it. The Chinese Communist Party, which had been tightening its grip on religious practice under Xi Jinping’s Sinicization campaign since 2017, used the pandemic’s restrictions on gathering as a convenient and officially unassailable instrument for suppressing house churches entirely.
Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid and one of the foremost advocates for persecuted Chinese Christians, stated plainly: the Chinese Communist Party had intensified its persecution of Christians by banning all church activities — even worship services and prayer meetings in believers’ own homes with their own family members — under the pretext of COVID-19. While malls and restaurants in provinces like Zhejiang could operate, churches were required to remain closed. Local authorities throughout China used the pandemic period to require churches to install closed-circuit cameras with facial recognition technology, enabling them to monitor attendance, sermons, and leadership.
The crackdowns have continued and intensified as COVID restrictions lifted. In October 2025, police detained dozens of pastors and staff connected to the Zion Church network — a congregation of approximately 5,000 regular worshippers across nearly 50 cities — in what observers described as the largest crackdown since the raid on Early Rain Covenant Church in 2018. In 2024, 810 individuals were confirmed detained in China for religious reasons. The authorities have used charges of financial fraud — targeting the Christian practice of tithing — to financially strangle house church networks. Our article on the house church in China and Iran covers this situation in more detail. See The Underground Church: House Churches in China and Iran.
The World That Did Not Bounce Back
The pandemic is over, or at least the acute phase of it is. COVID-19 has receded from the front pages. The emergency powers have been formally lifted in most jurisdictions. Life has resumed, after a fashion. But the world has not bounced back. It is not the same as it was, and it is worth being honest about what has changed and what has not changed back.
Economically, the consequences of the lockdowns continue to unfold. Trillions of dollars of debt were accumulated by governments during the pandemic, much of it through direct payments, business subsidies, and healthcare spending that was largely improvised and poorly targeted. Inflation followed, eroding the savings and purchasing power of ordinary people in every major economy. Supply chains disrupted during the lockdowns have been partially restructured but not restored. Small businesses that were forced to close did not uniformly reopen. The concentration of economic power in large corporations — Amazon, Walmart, and the other entities classified as essential while independent businesses were ordered shut — increased substantially during the pandemic and has not reversed.
Politically, the precedents established during the pandemic remain in place, waiting to be invoked again. Governments demonstrated that they could, on the basis of a declared health emergency, impose lockdowns, mandate medical procedures, restrict religious assembly, censor dissent, and deploy emergency powers of enormous scope — and that a significant proportion of the population would comply, would indeed demand compliance from others, and would treat any objection as evidence of ignorance or moral failure. This knowledge has not been forgotten by those who govern. The infrastructure of surveillance, the habits of compliance, the willingness of tech platforms to enforce government narratives — none of these have been dismantled.
The next crisis is coming. It may be another pandemic — real or manufactured. It may be a climate emergency. It may be an economic crisis, a security threat, or something not yet anticipated. The template has been established. The compliance apparatus has been tested and found effective. And those who govern — whether by malice, by genuine emergency belief, or by opportunism — now know what is possible when the public is frightened enough.
A Word to the Lord’s People
It is appropriate to speak directly to the Lord’s people about what happened and what it means.
Many of God’s people were deceived during the pandemic, not because they are foolish, but because they are trusting. They trusted their governments to act in their best interests. They trusted their pastors to exercise discernment on their behalf. They trusted the medical authorities to tell them the truth. That trust was, in many cases, misplaced — not because everyone who participated in the management of the pandemic was dishonest, but because a system that incentivises compliance and punishes dissent cannot produce honest advice. The individual doctor, the individual official, the individual pastor who wanted to say something different faced enormous social and professional pressure not to do so. And many did not.
The lesson is not that Christians should be reflexively suspicious of all authority. Romans 13 is still in the Bible. We are to be subject to governing authorities and to pray for kings and all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty (1 Tim 2:1–2). But submission to governing authority does not mean surrendering the faculty of critical thought, and it does not mean obeying commands that violate the law of God. The early church did not stop meeting because the Roman authorities had concerns about public gatherings. The Reformation did not happen because Luther and his colleagues deferred to the religious authorities of their day. The Baptist tradition — which has always maintained that Christ alone is the head of His church and that no civil or ecclesiastical power has authority over the gathered body of believers — has a particular obligation to exercise discernment.
Ask the questions. Isolating the sick rather than locking down the healthy was not a fringe medical opinion — it was the standard practice of epidemic management for centuries. A six-foot social distancing rule that a senior health official later admitted had no scientific basis should have been met with the question: what is the evidence for this? The claim that the virus could not have come from a laboratory should have been met with: why not, and who says so, and what are their interests? The proposition that a vaccine that did not prevent transmission should be mandated as a condition of employment should have been met with: on what principle, and who authorised this?
These are not the questions of conspiracy theorists. They are the questions of responsible citizens and of Christians who understand that the governments of this world are not the government of God, that even well-intentioned rulers can be wrong, and that poorly-intentioned rulers can do enormous harm when they encounter a frightened and compliant population.
We pray for governments — genuinely, and without irony — that they would do right, that God would restrain the wickedness of those in power, and that His people would be given the wisdom to discern truth from falsehood in the next crisis, as they were not always given in this one. God is sovereign. The kingdoms of this world do not surprise Him. And the gates of hell — including the gates of totalitarian health policy — have not and will not prevail against the church that Jesus Christ is building.