Cyber-Christianity in Qatar: “Migrant” and “Expat” Theologies of COVID-19

Abstract

In the year 2020, COVID-19 wreaked havoc on everyday life in the Persian Gulf. Yet little is known about how non-citizens responded to a virus that inexorably exposed their transience and precarity. This article addresses a much-neglected aspect of local responses to COVID-19, namely, how non-citizens made sense of the virus theologically. Drawing on existing scholarship on cyber religion and migrant religiosity in the Gulf, I examine the theological responses of a distinctive subset of non-citizens –– Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians in Qatar. My approach, rooted in digital ethnographic methods, led me to uncover divergent theological responses to COVID-19 among lower-income “migrants” and higher-income “expats”. Lower-income “migrants” sought spiritual remedies to counter what they deemed to be a man-made virus, whereas higher-income “expats” strove for spiritual perfection during what they believed was a divine trial. Working through these divergent theological responses, I argue that both “migrants” and “expats” built stronger affinities to their host state during the pandemic as they developed new forms of spiritual communitas online.

Keywords:

• Qatar
• migrants
• expats
• Christianity
• COVID-19
• digital ethnography

1 Introduction

In the year 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the hydrocarbon economies of the Persian Gulf states. With the pandemic severely depressing the global demand for oil exports, the Gulf monarchies faced a reckoning with the status quo and a pressing need to move towards a post-hydrocarbon future.¹ For non-citizens in the Gulf, the twin shocks of falling oil prices and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in unemployment and financial precarity.² Many poorer non-citizens were affected disproportionately and left impoverished by the virus.³ But caught unawares in this reckoning, non-citizens who have, since the 1970s, supplied the labour and skills needed for the high-modernist projects of Gulf urbanization faced crippling uncertainties about their future in the region amidst salary cuts and job losses en masse.

Beyond broad overviews of the socioeconomic plight of non-citizens in the Gulf, however, little is known about how lower- and higher-income non-citizens responded to a virus that laid bare their transience and worsened their socio-economic precarity in a foreign land. As such, this paper asks three questions. Firstly, how did poorer and wealthier non-citizens understand and respond to the virus in their everyday lives? Secondly, in what ways are their responses to the virus tied to their socioeconomic status in their host state? And finally, what do their responses to the virus reveal about the micropolitics of care and suffering within their respective communities? I try to answer these questions by probing into a woefully understudied aspect of regional and global responses to COVID-19: how individuals understand and respond to the virus theologically or, put another way, their theologies of COVID-19. Historical scholarship on pandemics and religion shows us how past pandemics such as the Plague of Cyprian and the Black Death in Europe led to the emergence of new theologies among affected human populations to cope with disease and death. These theologies emerged due to the seemingly inscrutable ways of God and the microbial world, and theological explanations helped people find answers amidst rampant death and loss.⁴ In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, too, I show how people turn to faith communities and engender new theologies not only for succor but also to help others both within and without their religious communities in a time of need.

By studying a small yet ever-growing religious subset of non-citizens –– Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians –– in the capital city of Doha, Qatar, I show how the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated economistic understandings of non-citizens in the Muslim-majority Gulf states and brought their religious and theological subjectivities to the fore. Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian churches are one of the fastest-growing diasporic religious networks not just in the Persian Gulf but worldwide.⁵ While the presence of Christianity in the Persian Gulf is far from a contemporary migrant-bound phenomenon,⁶ the nation-building exercises of the Gulf monarchies have tended to cast the religious lives of non-citizen Christians in the shadows of the oil-migration complex. This paper thus provides new ethnographic evidence of the textured and precarity-driven forms of everyday religiosity among non-citizen Christians in a Gulf state. In particular, I argue that their theologies of COVID-19 mirror their socioeconomic anxieties and produce liminal forms of diasporic belonging and spiritual communitas online.

This article contributes to two areas of scholarship that have come to overlap with each other in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: digital religion and everyday life in the Persian Gulf. Scholarship in the field of cyber-Christianity and digital religion studies⁷ shows us how the nascent rise of mediatized religion in cyberspace transforms religious life itself as the Internet and its users move past parochial notions of time, self, space, and the sacred. In her analysis of the transformations of religious expression that take place at the nexus of technology and religion, Susan George argues that at the heart of Christian community-building practices online lies the problem of physical presence and personal connectedness. People, she notes, often struggle to “bond” and form virtual communities akin to those offline.⁸ In a similar vein, Heidi Campbell highlights the confluence of Internet technology and social organization in creating “spiritual networks” that grow to define individual and collective religiosity online.⁹ Arguing that cyberspace –– a sacralized “tool” –– serves as a new “mission field” with emergent possibilities for missionization, spiritual growth, and supernatural encounter,¹⁰ Campbell paved the way for new avenues of research into the immense religious potential of cyberspace for Christian believers. Most notably, Innocent Chiluwa built on Campbell’s work by showing how Nigerian churches “spiritualize the Internet” by performing miracles and reporting “testimonies” of healing that church members claim take place through online forms of worship. My ethnography of the cyber-religious practices of non-citizen Christians in Qatar, however, adopts a different approach to the study of digital religion. Much of the existing scholarship on digital religion places cyberspace as a site of religious activity at a significant distance from the everyday lives of the believers themselves. Cyberspace has also been defined and studied almost entirely as a sacralized alternative or “add-on” to offline forms of worship, supernatural encounter, and religious expression. This paper, on the other hand, examines how the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a state of liminality for non-citizen Christians in Qatar, as elsewhere. They were forced to adopt new kinds of cyber-religiosity, not as an alternative to offline forms of worship but out of necessity in an unprecedented time of crisis. Due to moratoria on religious gatherings in churches and mosques in Qatar,¹¹ I show how members of faith communities turned to cyberspace as a liminal space of worship, prayer, and spiritual intercession for healing and economic recovery in Qatar. As such, this paper raises a fresh set of questions about the cyber-religious practices and theological discourses of non-citizens in the Gulf vis-à-vis their everyday lives and existential concerns during COVID-19.

Secondly, my paper speaks to recent anthropological work on religion and migration in the Persian Gulf.¹² It focuses, in particular, on the religious lifeworlds of non-citizens in the Persian Gulf and the various forms of diasporic belonging that they stake claims to. In Everyday Conversions, Attiya Ahmad examines how female South Asian domestic workers in Kuwait convert to Islam in a series of daily negotiations with their past and present lives, moving across the home-host divide as naram or “malleable” women.¹³ Ahmad teases out the agentic and processual ways in which her interlocutors “become” Muslim through naram forms of everyday religiosity both in and outside the Kuwaiti household. The household, for South Asian migrant women, thus becomes the site of religious and ethnonational belonging that conversions to Islam help forge in the diaspora. Drawing on Ahmad’s work in an entirely different religious landscape, Stanley J. Valayil C. John argues that the everyday workings of South Indian Pentecostal (Christian) churches in Kuwait are configured around the precarity of migrant life in the Gulf.¹⁴ At the same time, he shows how these Pentecostal migrants develop stronger affinities to their host state as they practice their faith within its religious migrant enclaves. John’s ethnography of South Indian Christians in Kuwait is one among a very few studies of non-citizen Christians in the Gulf, all of which focus almost exclusively on South Indians –– a populous and long-standing diasporic community.¹⁵

This article, however, seeks to broaden the empirical scope of research on the religious lives of non-citizens, particularly non-citizen Christians, in the Gulf today. It focuses on two Pentecostal-Charismatic churches, one I define as “migrant” and the other as “expat”, that represent two extremes of a broader migrant-expat divide in the city of Doha. Here, I define “migrant” churches as those churches whose members are primarily lower-income or blue-collar workers from East African, Southeast Asian, or South Asian countries along the Indian Ocean rim.¹⁶ “Expat” churches in Doha, on the other hand, host an ethnically diverse group of laity and clergy members who are predominantly, if not wholly, higher-income white-collar non-citizens. I follow Sandhya Rao Mehta and James Onley,¹⁷ among others,¹⁸ in recognizing and deploying the emic categories of “migrant” and “expat” for two purposes. Firstly, these categories bring to light the textured quality of religious life in both “types” of churches in Doha, Qatar during COVID-19; secondly, they convey a polyphony of voices within each. This paper thus studies diasporic Christianity, and cyber-Christianity more specifically, as it exists outside the confines of any specific ethnolinguistic group. In doing so, I am able to study broader themes that cut across the axis of ethnic difference and focus on disparities in class and socio-economic well-being between Doha’s “migrant” and “expat” populations. Moreover, by focusing on Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity –– what anthropologists have termed a “global Christianity”,¹⁹ this paper aims to provide a snapshot of Qatar’s cosmopolitan religious landscape that features lower- and higher-income non-citizens across ethnic lines, and their everyday theologies of COVID-19.

Through a paired comparison between a migrant and expat Pentecostal-Charismatic church, I desist from homogenizing migrant and expat religious life in Doha, Qatar. Instead, I treat the categories of “migrant” and “expat” as Weberian ideal types or idea-constructs that are necessarily abstract. However, I operationalize these types without losing sight of the empirical nuances and incongruities that emerge across the migrant-expat divide. With over a hundred diasporic Christian congregations housed across Qatar,²⁰ the categories of “migrant” and “expat” form a fluid continuum rather than a strictly defined binary. But the two churches I have chosen to study fall, I find, at wholly opposite ends of this continuum, thus serving as ideal “least-similar” case studies²¹ for the purposes of my comparative analysis. My focus on a select pair of migrant and expat churches thus serves as a microcosmic study of the effects of the virus on the politics of the city at large and the theologies that emerge thereof. Indeed, those outside this minority faith in Doha cannot but have witnessed this migrant-expat dichotomy in the everyday workings of the city in terms of its social and spatial segregation of lower- and higher-income non-citizens. Wealthier non-citizens in Doha, in particular, often distance themselves discursively as “expats” from lower-income or blue-collar “migrants”. The politics of the city does, I find, bleed into the religious lives of its non-citizens as well.

2 Methodology

This research is based on digital ethnographic and interview data I collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in Qatar between the months of March and September 2020. Much of the digital ethnography I weave together in this paper emerged from my semi-structured “conversational partnerships”²² with church leaders and members of the laity in the two churches I studied.²³ Using snowball sampling techniques that led me to additional participants organically, I interviewed fourteen interlocutors via video and phone calls. The two churches in Qatar that I identified as my “migrant” and “expat” case studies hosted services in Doha’s Mesaimeer and Al-Waab districts respectively before the onset of the pandemic in the early months of 2020. However, when the Qatari government issued moratoria on religious gatherings from March to August 2020 to curb the spread of the virus, all local church services moved online. This study is based solely on the digital forms of religious activity that church members engaged in when COVID-19 restrictions were strictly enforced and church communities met online. I interviewed members of the clergy and laity in both churches after I surveyed the digital content they posted online on a daily and weekly basis. The questions I asked my interlocutors included the effects of the pandemic on their work and family lives; their understanding of the role of the divine in the pandemic; the sermons preached online in their churches during the pandemic; their theological responses to the virus; the forms of sociality they engaged in online and offline; and their relationship to their host state amidst increasing socio-economic precarity and physical separation from family members overseas.

Of the fourteen non-citizen Christians I interviewed, seven belonged to the migrant church and seven to the expat church. In the migrant church, all my interlocutors were male and worked as either building cleaners or construction workers. Interviewed members of the laity were from East Africa with the exception of the senior pastor who hailed from Nigeria in West Africa. In the expat church, on the other hand, the majority of my interlocutors were female and only two (one a church leader and the other a member of the laity) were male. My interlocutors from the expat church hailed from the United Kingdom, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sweden, South Africa, and the United States, with both men and women occupying high-paying service sector jobs in journalism, pediatric therapy, accountancy, education, and hospitality management. My conversations with members of both churches were informed by my digital ethnography of their worship and preaching practices online. My ethnography was, in turn, guided by the various disparities –– both socio-economic and theological –– that my interlocutors brought to the fore during interviews.

3 A “man-made virus”: theologies of COVID-19 in a migrant church

In this section, I examine how and why members of a “migrant” church in Qatar theologized COVID-19 as a “man-made virus” that they believed was the product of human sin. Described as “a place of rescue and transformation” on its Facebook homepage, “M-Fellowship” (MF) serves as my case study of a church that, I find, falls at the “migrant” end of the migrant-expat continuum in Qatar. MF was inaugurated in the Anglican Centre in Mesaimeer, southwest of Doha, in 2017 to cater specifically to the spiritual needs of the lower-income East and West African population in Qatar. Senior pastor Nathan Okwy, a Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian who arrived in Doha with his wife in 2008, has led this church since its inception. The large majority of the laity are, as my interlocutors conveyed, blue-collar, lower-income workers for whom the prospect of working from home during the pandemic proved to be wholly unviable. Working from home ran the risk of being made redundant and forced into penury, particularly since blue-collar occupations in Qatar are predicated on manual labor in situ in construction sites, for instance. As such, this section shows how inextricably tied the theologies of COVID-19 in MF are to its members’ work lives, the precariousness of which COVID-19 exaggerated gravely.

With the arrival of the virus in Qatar in late February, the threat of contagion and financial precarity surged hand-in-hand with spiritual fervor and earnestness among the laity and clergy of MF. By the first week of June, the virus had throttled the more densely populated, working-class neighborhoods of the capital city of Doha where the majority of MF congregants resided. In response, MF senior pastor Nathan Okwy preached on the theme of “Divine Mercy and Help” throughout the month of June, encouraging his congregation to “trust God” and “decree miracles” as they tuned in to his services livestreamed every Friday at 8:30 AM on Facebook. But during one particular service in early June that my interlocutors seemed to recall vividly, Pastor Nathan belted out a plea for “supernatural intervention”, with tears welling in his eyes. He invoked God to relieve his church, the State of Qatar, and the world at large from material exhaustion and emotional distress:

God, have mercy upon the land of Qatar! We need your supernatural intervention. We’re exhausted, Lord, we just need your help. All our resources, everything we have is exhausted, so come heal our land, our people, even in Africa and Asia, Europe and America, in the name of Jesus.

Those gathered in Pastor Nathan’s apartment (the livestreaming site for weekly services since churches closed across Doha to mitigate the spread of the virus) vociferated their “amen”s and “hallelujah”-s in agreement, albeit as indistinguishable voices in the background.

At the same time, Pastor Nathan’s two hundred-odd livestreaming congregants posted comments on Facebook in rapid succession and fervor:

“I will eat the labor of my hands amen.”

“We are winning coronavirus in Jesus name.”

“Shout for the Lord has given you this city !!”

“WORRY, WORRY, keep away from my abode. I dwell in Christ Jesus.”

“I decree a sudden, immediate miracle for me and my entire family. I am coming out of all challenges victoriously in Jesus name—Amen.”

The comments that members of the laity posted on Facebook during livestreamed services reveal far more than what meets the eye. They do not simply agree with Pastor Nathan’s sermons and prayers. Instead, they engage in what Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians term “the spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit” or, more specifically, prophecy and prophetic intercession. MF congregants hijack the spontaneity that live Facebook services offer them to personalize the prophecies released by Pastor Nathan as he preaches on-screen, turning these services into a forum for prophetic exchange.²⁴ In doing so, lay congregants online turn from being passive sermon-hearers into intercessors and mediators in the workings of God (and purportedly even the virus) in their personal lives (“WORRY, WORRY, keep away from my abode”; “I decree a sudden, immediate miracle for me and my entire family”). Cyberspace and these new “cyber-rituals” ²⁵ of intercessory practice allow MF believers to intensify their agency in the workings of the non-human in ways that in-church forms of piety would not accommodate or allow for. For instance, an outburst of intercession by members of the laity in the middle of an in-person church service would be seen as disruptive, unspiritual, and deeply irreverent, regardless of how well-intentioned one might be. But on Facebook, an active (and “loud”) online presence during live services is sacralised in the name of effervescent intercession and engagement among the laity.²⁶

Pastor Nathan’s prayer for “supernatural intervention” had pummeled right through the heart of the anxieties and frustrations of his congregants watching, listening, and praying online from their shared accommodations in Qatar. However, though still politically disenfranchised as non-citizens and now verging on the cusp of destitution, the migrants of MF steeped in spiritual intercession belie mainstream representations of lower-income migrants in the Gulf as helpless workers forced into “modern-day slavery”.²⁷ Not only do MF congregants stake claims to the city of Doha (“Shout for the Lord has given us this city !!”), but they also exercise spiritual command over both the virus and their livelihoods (“We are winning coronavirus in Jesus name”; “I will eat the labor of my hands amen”). Neither do they see themselves merely as victims of a virus that has, nonetheless, wreaked havoc disproportionately across their working-class neighborhoods in Qatar. Instead, both Pastor Nathan and the laity mobilize their spiritual and collective effervescence online in using the Internet as a “sacred space”²⁸ to turn their frustrations and anxieties into prophecies and blessings over their host society. Pastor Nathan’s prayer for “supernatural intervention” and the comments posted by the laity in response, therefore, reveal a collective longing among MF Christians for a swift recovery to a post-pandemic Qatar.

Additionally, the shift to cyberspace has, for the congregants of MF in Doha, made intercession a more egalitarian and shared ritual process. Such an egalitarian politics of intercession contrasts starkly with top-down forms of in-person intercession that lay believers usually engage in under the religious directives of their church leader(s).²⁹ But in cyberspace, intercession among the lay believers of MF is devoid of mediation, interruption, or direction by church authority, producing a new kind of spiritual “communitas”³⁰ online. As Robbins highlights, “[Pentecostal-Charismatic] sociality is rooted in the … belief that everyone, regardless of training or church office, can initiate and participate in ritual. This means that whenever any two or more [believers] are co-present, they have everything they need to engage in ritual together.”³¹ But online, the egalitarianism of ritual life among Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians is, as in MF, amplified, with prophetic exchange made possible between the clergy on-screen and laity in the comments.

To understand the hermeneutics of these intercessory practices among the congregants of MF, how the virus is theologized in this church must be made clear. From my interviews with Pastor Nathan and the resident co-pastor Patrick, it is clear that the virus is believed by members of MF to be neither an agent of God’s wrath nor an adequately alarming sign of the end-times. In an interview with Pastor Nathan regarding the response of MF to the virus in Doha, he said:

We have nothing to fear about COVID-19. It is not from God, it is not His judgement. This is a completely man-made virus. God gave me a revelation about this in March. After I kept asking Him for an answer about what this virus means for the church, He took me to Wuhan in a vision one day, straight into a hospital ward in Wuhan where I heard doctors and nurses whispering, ‘No one should know about this disease. We will not tell anyone.’ This is why the virus became what it is, it is a man-made pandemic, it is because of lies and deception … . And because this is a man-made virus, we will come out victorious and the virus will go away, it will not stay for long. This is why the theme for our church during this season is, ‘In everything we hear, see, or touch, we are exempted.’ The virus will not touch us … .

Pastor Nathan’s “revelation” about the “man-made virus” makes clear that he believes “lies and deception” or human sin to have made way for the virus worldwide. Sin thus forms the premise of his theology of the virus that his church now imbibes as well. Having disclosed his “revelation” to the church during one of his first live-streamed services earlier in 2020, Pastor Nathan now premises his weekly sermons on the theme of “exemption” from the virus and the threat of contagion (“In all that I hear, see, or touch, I am exempted”). Ever since, “I have nothing to fear” has featured as one of the most popular comments that MF congregants post on the Facebook church page as well. But to understand why the theme of “I am exempted from the virus” has emerged among the laity following Pastor Nathan’s “revelation”, the general response of Christians to human sin must first be briefly laid out.

The relationship of Christianity to human sin is one that is fraught with tension and unease. For Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians, the Holy Spirit is often called upon in religious practice to help the believer “overcome” one’s own impulses to sin.³² The Urapmin of Papua New Guinea, for instance, engaged regularly in “Spirit-filled rituals” to exorcise themselves of sin that weighed down on their conscience and ideas of morality.³³ For others, baptisms serve as sin-ridding rituals and a means for sinners “outside” the Christian fold or “of this world” to become “saints” who “reject the world” and are redeemed from sin by Christ.³⁴ Confessing one’s sins to those divinely ordained as ministers is also deemed a satisfactory route to salvation from sin.³⁵ Additionally, the giving of alms has, throughout the history of Christianity, served various theological aims, including the expiation of personal sin through the giving away of one’s wealth to those in need and the accumulation of cosmic merit in the form of “treasures in heaven” awaiting pious alms-givers in the afterlife.³⁶ Nonetheless, overcoming sin and gaining salvation in its stead have formed the central tenets of everyday Christian life, regardless of denominational affiliation. However, the Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian perceives himself to be in ceaseless combat with sin which is, nevertheless, believed to be overcome through one’s “conviction of human sinfulness”, followed by “conversion” and “repentance” wherein “the Holy Spirit [helps] converts to address their sinful nature … ”.³⁷ It is, subsequently, from the vantage point of “victory” over sin and thereby the virus, with the putative source of its spread from Wuhan, that both Pastor Nathan and his congregants at MF grapple with the theological implications of COVID-19, or what they call a “man-made virus”. The need to perform one’s fearlessness online vis-a-vis the virus is thus a corollary of the Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian’s expected response to sin which is, with the help of the Holy Spirit, believed to be overcome.

Moreover, for the members of MF, the doctrinal centrality of sin has always, since the inception of the church, been an ongoing theme in the sermons preached by Pastor Nathan. With single male migrants forming the majority of the MF laity, sin, in all its forms, is believed to be of threatening significance for unsuspecting Christian migrants who find themselves alienated from the city of Doha yet allured by its fleeting pleasures. “Stay[ing] alert to the devices of the devil” has, as a result, featured prominently in Pastor Nathan’s sermons. As a married and financially secure migrant-turned-expat in Doha, Pastor Nathan assumes both spiritual and paternal authority vis-a-vis a laity of primarily male, lower-income East African migrants who listen to the moral and spiritual guidance he offers in the sermons he preaches each week.³⁸ At the same time, Pastor Nathan has, in his sermons that often air on African diasporic TV channels as well, branded Qatar as the blooming “desert of the Lord” and MF as a “seed in the desert”. In doing so, he assures his viewers across Africa and the Gulf that Qatar is not the repressive Muslim country that they might imagine it to be. This branding exercise is another means by which he and his church, MF, stake claims to their host country as one that allows for various religious freedoms “unmatched in the region”. Therefore, accompanying Pastor Nathan’s wariness of migrants falling into sin is his endorsement of Qatar as the “desert of the Lord” where MF and its tightly knit community of migrant Christians plant themselves as a well-nourished “seed in the desert”.

Although a “victory over sin” and “victory over the virus” ethos defines, as I have shown, the theological response of MF to the “man-made virus”, the blue-collar migrant Christians of MF straddle the “material” or the worldly and the “supernatural” or the transcendent both at once in their intercessory practices online. Since the arrival of the virus, MF congregants have posted various iterations of “I am expecting a miracle breakthrough in my job now” and “I will not be empty handed in Jesus name, come save us God.” Not only do these comments appear to demand a certain immediacy in financial relief from God, but they also exude a great deal of confidence in the power of the divine to subdue the ill-effects of what MF congregants believe to be a sin-caused and man-made virus. Moreover, in a service live-streamed in late-March as COVID-19 cases burgeoned across Qatar, Pastor Nathan from MF said:

You are exempted, you will come out negative. No one in the kingdom of God will come out positive –– no matter what you do or where you have to go, you are exempted, and you are redeemed. I declare a wall of protection around you in the name of Jesus –– the plague will not touch you –– you are exempted. Let not your heart be troubled –– we have overcome. The plague will not touch you.

With a congregation of primarily lower-income, blue-collar migrants from East and West Africa, Pastor Nathan has, in almost every service since the onset of the virus in late February, preached sermons with encouragement and prophetic words of protection at their core. While most high-skilled, white-collar workers (expats) turned to cyberspace and worked from home as offices shut down across Qatar, much of the migrant labor force continued to work at construction and other sites across the country, with social-distancing norms unregulated in both their living accommodations and work sites. As such, in his online sermons, Pastor Nathan routinely declared prophetic words of protection over those who could not afford to socially distance or quit their jobs amidst great financial precarity and fears of job losses. In doing so, Pastor Nathan remained politically compliant with the State of Qatar and its labor laws, encouraging his congregants to continue working by assuring them that they are “exempted” from the “plague” and that “no one in the kingdom of God will come out positive [if tested for the virus]”. To be “victorious over the virus” was to demonstrate one’s confidence in the power of the divine to subdue human sin and the virus by remaining compliant with the demands of one’s employer, working in often crowded work sites despite the risks of contagion, and earning enough for oneself amidst financial precarity.

4 A “Kairos moment”: theologies of COVID-19 in an expat church

I will now turn to my expat church case study, “E-Fellowship” (EF), and its theologies of the virus that characterize the pandemic as “a kairos [opportune] moment” for higher-income expat Christians in Qatar. EF is a Pentecostal-Charismatic church in Doha led by a group of expat church leaders (“elders”) who hail from across the globe, most notably the United Kingdom, the Philippines, South Africa, Australia, India, and the United States. It has, over the past twenty years, met in a villa-turned-church in Al-Waab, a residential and commercial district in Qatar. But with the arrival of the virus, EF turned to pre-recorded weekend sermons and mid-week worship sessions that are streamed online asynchronously on Vimeo and shared on the church website. Unlike the live broadcasts of MF and its members’ active social media presence during live services, the absence of both an official social media page for EF and a “comments” section under the videos posted on the website rendered the EF sermons wholly unilateral in delivery. Cyberspace has not provided a radical disjuncture from the “normalcy” of pre-pandemic preaching and sermon-hearing practices in EF. It has instead allowed for a certain liturgical continuity online wherein the distinction between clergy and laity, between preacher and listener, is both maintained and reinforced. In this section, I show that how EF congregants understand the virus theologically is tied to their new forms of spiritual communitas in their online faith communities and the measures they each take to move towards “spiritual perfection” during the pandemic –– their “kairos moment” of opportunity and growth in Qatar.

I will now examine how these higher-income Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians at EF create new, community-driven forms of belonging and systems of spiritual and emotional support online during the pandemic in Qatar. In response to my questions about the impact of COVID-19 on their religious lives and faith in Doha, my interlocutors seemed to echo each other in describing the past few months as “a time of uncertainty and fear”. Some found themselves torn between leaving Doha and quitting their jobs to visit their families living in highly infected areas in the US and Europe. Others grappled with anxieties over their personal spiritual relapse ever since churches shut down across Qatar in mid-March and congregations moved online. To a large extent, the sermons preached by the elders of EF online do, indeed, reflect the protean nature of the believer’s understanding of the virus, the role of God and divine will during the pandemic, and the anxieties that accompany this period of time. In a Zoom interview with Millie, a member of the choir and leadership team at EF, she said, with eyebrows furrowed as she flipped through her thickly spiraled sermon “note-taking” book to illustrate to me the thematic ebb and flow of the sermons preached online at EF since mid-March:

Here are my notes, notes from every week … . First it was “cast all your cares on Jesus”, then about “being perfected in times of trial”, then “God will fight for me, with me, and He will give me victory”, “mercy triumphs about judgement”, “God quiets storms and brings peace”, “the battle is the Lord’s”. Now I’m trying to see where the shift occurred to broader themes … . Here it is. The shift began in mid-June, so over the past 6-8 weeks, and now it’s shifted to “the true vine” and “about who God is”. So, it was a good solid couple of months before the preachers made this shift … I think it’s because we’re only as strong as our weakest link, and so because we’re all so different in our faith levels, some people might have needed that gracious extension of preaching on overcoming the spiritual hurdles that the virus brought about, and for the others, well, maybe we needed to hear it more too.

Therefore, while unilateral in delivery and devoid of any live medium for clergy-laity or laity-laity interaction, the sermons do, ultimately, cater to the spiritual needs and concerns of the lay congregants. In fact, weekly meetings or “open house meets” on Zoom serve as regular feedback loops for church leaders present in these meetings to understand where congregants are struggling in their spiritual lives during the pandemic and what needs to be addressed in the upcoming sermons.

“Open house meets” have, over the past several years, brought together small groups of EF members from across the city at specific meeting locations to reinforce a “sense of community and belonging in EF”, and, by extension, belonging in Qatar. In an “open house” WhatsApp group that a leader of the church added me to,³⁹ its title “West Bay [Building name] 3402” referred to Millie’s apartment where meetings in West Bay used to take place before the virus struck. These meetings have now moved online to Zoom where EF members alternate, on a weekly basis, between virtual “game nights” and Bible studies on specific portions of scripture intended to “remind believers that they are not alone, and that God is with us … . [as we] stand on God’s promises during this time”. In a cyber-ritual denoting an impending closure to the meeting at hand, the facilitator invites attendees to share both prayer requests and testimonies of any “miracles” in one’s personal life that may have transpired over the week, particularly in the context of COVID-19 and its effects. Thus, akin to the kinds of prophetic exchange that the migrants of MF engage in online, EF congregants in “open house” meetings narrate stories of spiritual victory or “miracles” (“my RP was renewed by [my boss] this morning with no queries. With man this is impossible but with God all things are possible”) in exchange for the burdens of others (“Lord, we bring Maria’s situation before you now. Like you did it for Odu, would you do it for Maria too”).⁴⁰ The exchange of burdens for testimonies of miracles and vice-versa is intended to lighten the burdens of the lay people through a kind of burden-sharing mechanism online, helping fellow believers to cope with the virus and its effects in Qatar.

In “Cyberspace as Sacred Space”, O’Leary concluded from his digital ethnography on neo-pagans in electronic conference rooms (akin to those on Zoom conferencing meetings) that “people … actually engaged in collective devotion, much as they would at church”.⁴¹ He then added, “Rather than assuming preemptively that the loss of physical presence produces a ritual that is unreal or “empty”, we might ask what ritual gains in the virtual environment and what meanings the participants are able to derive from these practices, such that they will gather again and again to perform cyber-rituals together … ”.⁴² Drawing on O’Leary’s work, we can see how the small groups of EF congregants who meet online, with their video cameras turned on, read scripture and build a “sense of community and belonging” in a way that mirrors a pre-pandemic, in-person form of religious sociality. That they “gather again and again” reveals their need for an interactive forum through which they grapple with the theological conundrums brought about by COVID-19 in their sharing of exegetical insights from the Bible, testimonies, and prayer requests with one another online.

The virus itself is generally theologized in two ways among EF congregants, though there appear to be divergent responses to the virus among my sample of EF interlocutors. This divergence is noteworthy since, unlike the migrant church led primarily by a single pastor, EF is led by a group of leaders from a wide range of backgrounds who take turns preaching each week. The plurality of voices and forms of theological discourse among the church clergy thus trickle down to and encourage among the EF laity varied yet scripturally justified responses to the virus. Considering such a polyphony of perspectives in EF among both clergy and laity, I provide only a snapshot of the kinds of theological reasoning that members of the EF clergy and laity engage in. Firstly, the virus is, in general, not believed to act as a “judgement from God” but rather as a “divinely appointed time of preparation” for the believer as the Second Coming of Christ is said to draw near. The virus is a “reset button” and a “disciplinary measure” for the believer to now refrain from going astray and “playing games with God”. Secondly, my interlocutors echoed the belief that, based on both personal conviction and the sermons preached in EF, God has allowed the virus to spread across the globe. Though perceived as a “work of the Devil” and part of the “plans of Satan”, the virus has spread and ravaged the world not without the knowledge of God who will, nonetheless, “turn all things for good”.⁴³ Here, an eschatology devoid of divine judgement yet driven by a feeling of guilt about one’s moral and spiritual failings forms the premise of EF Pentecostal-Charismatic theology. Millie described the virus and its God-sent message to the believer in the following terms:

We all know that the virus is going to stay with us for a long time. It is not something that will just go away like that. And the virus might not get any better and we have to learn how to live with it as believers. We are literally seeing the Bible unfold before our eyes. We are seeing and witnessing the trajectory towards the Second Coming of Christ becoming clearer, and we shouldn’t think that the virus is going to get any better … . God is calling believers to stand up and speak His name, that is, to be firm and resolute in our beliefs and not waver … so people can see where I stand and why. But this is not a time just for unbelievers to get saved. It is, first and foremost, for believers who are going astray all over the world, playing games with God and not taking Him and His Word seriously. While this is not God sending down judgement, He is calling His children to be humbled and come back to Him.

Certain themes that emerge from Millie’s comments above are also echoed in the responses of my other interlocutors, as well as in the sermons that EF leaders preach online. Most striking is the theme “this is a time … for believers who are going astray”. A member of the EF laity, Noju, termed the pandemic as a “reset button” for the believer to “get back on track by using the extra time at home to read more of the Bible and to pray”. Feelings of spiritual inadequacy and anxieties over constantly needing to become a “better” believer before it gets too late⁴⁴ thus appear to ground them in their belief that the “virus is going to stay with us for a long time.” For if the virus fizzles out and a pre-pandemic sense of normalcy resumes in everyday life just yet, the journey of the believer towards spiritual perfection is cut short. The sermons preached online at EF also reveal the nature of this predicament:

This is our time of kairos [in Greek: a time of grace and opportunity amidst a crisis]. This is a kairos moment when our time gets mixed with God’s time and becomes the ‘right time’ in the economy of God –– new opportunities and possibilities for advancement and betterment are breaking into our lives.

Therefore, while judgement through other means might be reserved for the unbeliever, the believer is saved by “grace” in this “time of kairos” marked by “opportunities and possibilities for advancement and betterment”. How a believer at EF can experience kairos is even tied to one’s digital footprint on social media: “What are we posting on our social media accounts during this time? Are we living our lives in ways that are pleasing to God? Can others see that we have been spending time with Jesus in what we say and post online?”

There is, therefore, a certain kind of “performativity”⁴⁵ associated with how one is to “please” God on social media –– by posting material that extends one’s private devotional life (“spending time with Jesus … ”) to the public sphere online (“ … in what we post online”). However, what makes kairos an attractive theological proposition for EF expats in Doha is the financial security they enjoy during the pandemic. Unlike the migrant believers of MF whose theologies of the virus hinge assuredly on the near-end of the pandemic and an accelerated return to a less-precarious “normal”, the Christian expats of EF experience the pandemic as a period of spiritual rejuvenation, reflection, and growth, the attainment of which theologically necessitates the virus to stay.

Having highlighted the two theologies of the virus that EF expats engage in, it is important to note how the second theology extends and draws on the first. The second theology of the virus legitimizes COVID-19 as a divinely authorized tool to “discipline” the believer and draw him closer to God. Yet at the same time, the virus is, for my interlocutors, believed to represent the “plans of Satan” that the Christian believer is required to resist and push back against. However, according to my interlocutors, the virus is divinely ordained to wreak havoc on everyday life precisely because modern-day Christians have become “too lax in their faith and ways of life”, failing to resist other demonic “plans” in the past. Millie, for example, expressed her anxieties and guilt over “not always being spiritually diligent”, even in pre-virus times. But now with the virus and social-distancing measures in place, Millie has found herself unable to remain accountable to others in the church who would have otherwise helped keep her spiritually “on track” through in-person forms of religious sociality. The need to attain spiritual perfection and become “better” in one’s faith is thus a prominent feature shared by the theologies that expat Christians in EF create and engage in vis-a-vis the virus and its effects on everyday religiosity in Qatar.

In addition, the theologies of the virus among EF congregants are central to how they both perceive themselves and work towards being “of use” to God to alleviate the suffering of others in Qatar and become “better” Christians during the pandemic. In a sermon video-recorded in his apartment in Doha, senior “elder” or ordained church leader of EF, Matt, read out the below lines from a piece of paper he held in his hand as he faced the camera:

I often stop to pause and pray, “God, would You come and undo the injustice in this world, and would You help me and people like me and this church to be of use in Your hands to ease the suffering of injustice”. It’s our duty now as ministers of reconciliation to bring hope and to bring love and to help a poor and marginalized society wherever we are and bring the living gospel of peace beyond us to them. This is the Great Commission where we show love, where we show compassion, love to our neighbor, worship to our God, mourning with those who mourn, praying with them … .

Matt’s reflections on the “duty” of EF believers to serve as “ministers of reconciliation” suggest that the Christian expats of EF have an ethical and religious obligation to “be of use in Your [God’s] hands to ease the suffering of injustice”. “To be of use” to God even harks back to the Calvinists of sixteenth-century Europe who saw saints as “divine instruments” for whom “every obstacle [was] another example of the devil’s resourcefulness and they summoned all their energy, imagination, and craft to overcome it”.⁴⁶ For the expats of EF, however, to be used by God as divine instruments during the pandemic is to trespass the social and spatial divides of Doha, bringing “hope and love to help a poor and marginalized society”, namely, migrants at the margins of society. With the pandemic believed to be a “time of grace” marked by “opportunity and possibilities for advancement and betterment” for EF Christians, the forms of giving that they participate in constitute one such “opportunity” to help those affected disproportionately by the virus in Doha.

In an interview with Noju, a British-Nigerian financial accountant in Doha and a relatively new member of EF, he informed me of a “Take Them A Meal” charity drive that EF had initiated in the month of March in response to the pandemic. Forty-four volunteers based in Doha from EF form the bedrock of this charity drive. On a WhatsApp group organized by the elders of the church for these volunteers, a weekly call for seven volunteers is sent out on a first-come, first-served basis. Those who sign up quickly enough and make it to the list of seven volunteers for the week are then required to, at their own expense, make grocery trips and deliver the purchased goods to poor Christian migrants in need, particularly in districts such as the Industrial Area, Najma, and Al-Wakrah at the outskirts of Doha. Noju expressed his chagrin over never quite making it to the list of the first seven volunteers to sign up, calling the process a weekly “race”, with “delivery slots gone in seconds”. After pausing for a few seconds, he then added with a laugh, “Not to disparage anyone’s Christian virtues, but I think everyone in this group just wants the opportunity to get out of their apartments and do something worthwhile.” The forms of giving and care that EF Christians engage in during the pandemic dovetail with their theologies of the virus as a “time of opportunity” and “betterment” for the believer. How they mobilize their theological understandings of the virus to effect change in Qatar –– their site of spiritual activity and moral “progress” towards divine perfection during the pandemic –– thus forms the groundwork for their personal and spiritually-charged forms of belonging in their host society and online church community.

5 Conclusion

Through the ethnographic evidence presented in this paper, I have examined how migrant and expat Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians in Qatar responded to COVID-19 theologically. Their theologies, I have shown, grew to define the ways in which they experienced the rapidly changing socio-economic landscape of Qatar and grappled with the effects of the virus on their social, financial, and religious lives. By putting various fields of study in conversation with each other, this paper has tried to put forward a fresh set of insights into the lived realities of Gulf non-citizens in a time of pandemic. As their socioeconomic precarity and transience writ large during the summer months of 2020, migrant and expat Christians in Qatar did not grow estranged from their host state. Instead, they forged new affinities to Qatar through their collective cyber-religious practices online and emergent theologies of COVID-19.

Although divergent along migrant-expat lines, these theologies overlap in an important way: both migrant and expat theologies were grounded in collective longings for a return not to their homelands, but to a recovered and improved post-pandemic Qatar as well as a theologically rejuvenated sense of self. Even as members of their own church communities found themselves made redundant or their salaries delayed and slashed, these migrants and expats crafted new theological lifeworlds and digital selves online to help them cope with fears of sudden loss and their socioeconomic uncertainty. Reflective of their lived realities during an unprecedented crisis, their theological responses to COVID-19 were mediated online as well as embedded in and conditioned by their diasporic contexts. Therefore, the temporal framework of the COVID-19 pandemic, experienced by my interlocutors as a liminal time of uncertainty but also of earnest spiritual activity online, allows us to capture what may have otherwise remained in the shadows of the oil-migration complex: namely, their resilience amidst precarity and its theological underpinnings. In this way, their theologies speak to but also question what the anthropologist Neha Vora termed the “permanent temporariness”⁴⁷ of non-citizens in the Gulf. Indeed, the religious lives that lower- and higher-income non-citizens craft vis-a-vis uncertainty and loss serve as an invaluable prism through which we can better appreciate the nuanced complexities of their everyday lives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irene Ann Promodh

Irene Ann Promodh is a BSFS graduate of Georgetown University in Qatar, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, [email protected]

Notes

1 Rashad and Barbuscia, “Saudi Triples VAT Rate in Austerity Push to Counter Oil Slump, Virus”, Reuters, 11 May 2020.

2 Yee, “Virus Forces Persian Gulf States to Reckon With Migrant Labor”, The New York Times, 9 May 2020.

3 Hubbard, “Coronavirus Fears Terrify and Impoverish Migrants in the Persian Gulf”, The New York Times, 13 April 2020.

4 See Ziegler, The Black Death (1969); Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017); Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (2017).

5 John, Transnational Religious Organization and Practice: A Contextual Analysis of Kerala Pentecostal Churches in Kuwait (2018). Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, with its roots in the 18^th century Anglo-American Protestant revival movement known as the “Great Awakening”, can be defined as a form of Christianity in which believers premise their beliefs on the literal reading of the biblical canon and “receive the [spiritual] gifts of the Holy Spirit” via prophecies, miracles, and healing [Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity”, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004), p. 119].

6 For more on the pre-colonial history of Christianity in the Persian Gulf, see: Carter, “Christianity in the Gulf During the First Centuries of Islam”, Arabian Archeology and Epigraphy 19.1 (2008), pp. 71–108; Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia — and How It Died (2009). For a thorough account of colonial-era missionary activity in the Persian Gulf, see Jerzy Zdanowski’s writings on American missionary efforts: Zdanowski, Saving Sinners, Even Moslems: The Arabian Mission (1889–1973) and Its Intellectual Roots (2018); Zdanowski, “In Search of the Supracultural: American Missionaries in the Gulf in 1920s–1930s”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 30.3 (2019), pp. 383–399.

7 Brasher, Give Me That Online Religion (2004); O’Leary, “Cyberspace as Sacred Space: Communicating Religion on Computer Networks”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64.4 (1996); George, Religion and Technology in the 21^st Century: Faith in the E-World (2006); Campbell, Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (2013); Chiluwa, “Online Religion in Nigeria: The Internet Church and Cyber Miracles”, Journal of Asian and African Studies 47.6 (2012), pp. 734–749; Campbell, “Spiritualising the Internet: Uncovering Discourses and Narratives of Religious Internet Use”, Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religion on the Internet 1.1 (2005), pp. 23–42.

8 George, Religion and Technology in the 21^st Century, p. 156.

9 Campbell, “Who’s Got the Power? Religious Authority and the Internet”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12.3 (2007), pp. 1043–1062.

10 Campbell and Rule, “The Practice of Digital Religion”, in Friese et al. (eds), Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten (2016).

11 Hilton and Khalid, “Qatar Closes Mosques, Suspends Prayers due to Coronavirus”, Al Arabiya English, 17 March 2020.

12 John, Transnational Religious Organization and Practice (2018); George (ed.), Desi Diaspora: Ministry Among Scattered Global Indian Christians (2019); Mehta and Onley, “The Hindu Community in Muscat: Creating Homes in the Diaspora”, Journal of Arabian Studies 5.2 (2015), pp. 156–183; Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (2017); Jaffrelot and Louer (eds), Pan-Islamic Connections: Transnational Networks Between South Asia and the Gulf (2017); Osella and Osella, “Muslim Entrepreneurs in Public Life Between India and the Gulf: Making Good and Doing Good”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15.s1 (2009), pp. S202–S221.

13 Ahmad, Everyday Conversions.

14 John, Transnational Religious Organization and Practice.

15 Oommen, “Transnational Religious Dynamics of Syrian Christians from Kerala in Kuwait: Blurring the Boundaries of Belief”, South Asia Research 35.1 (February 2015), pp. 1–20; George, Diaspora Christianities: Global Scattering and Gathering of South Asian Christians (2018); George (ed.), Desi Diaspora.

16 These sending countries tend to rely heavily on migrant remittance flows from the Gulf. See, for example, Gardner et al., “A Portrait of Low-Income Migrants in Contemporary Qatar”, Journal of Arabian Studies 3.1 (2013), pp. 1–17; Gardner, “Why Do They Keep Coming? Labor Migrants in the Gulf States”, in Kamrava and Babar (eds), Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf (2012).

17 Mehta and Onley, “The Hindu Community in Muscat”, pp. 156–183.

18 Chandra and Promodh, “A Divided City in a Time of Pandemic: Dispatches from Doha”, City and Society 32.2 (2020); Sarmadi, “‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai”, Journal of Arabian Studies 3.2 (2013), pp. 196–214.

19 Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity”.

20 The Anglican Centre in Mesaimeer, Qatar houses approximately 85 congregations in its premises on a weekly basis. The Interdenominational Christian Church (IDCC) religious complex adjacent to the Anglican Centre hosts 25 church groups (under the banner of 11 member churches) on a weekly basis. In addition, a number of villa-turned-churches host Christian believers independently across Qatar. Based on estimates by the religious compound administrators, approximately 70,000 Christian non-citizens attend services across Qatar each week.

21 Eckstein, “Case Studies and Theory in Political Science”, in Greenstein and Polsby (eds), Handbook of Political Science 7 (1975), pp. 79–138.

22 Rubin and Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data (2012), pp. 71­–93.

23 All interlocutors, churches, and other identifiers are represented by pseudonyms for reasons of confidentiality.

24 By “prophetic exchange”, I refer to the bilateral exchange of prophecies and prayers between Pastor Nathan on-screen and the laity in the comments. What Pastor Nathan prophesies on-screen is both echoed by and built upon in personalized ways by the laity who comment live during MF church services, sending their prophetic messages back and forth to one another and to the pastor in the “comments” section on Facebook.

25 O’Leary, “Cyberspace as Sacred Space: Communicating Religion on Computer Networks”.

26 My research suggests that members of the MF laity engage in “loud” intercession (in the Facebook comments section) during livestreamed services for two reasons: firstly, to counterpoise the lack of pre-pandemic in-person and kinesthetic forms of worship that believers know to generate “emotional energy” [Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (1967)] and a Durkheimian collective effervescence among them in a physical church building; secondly, since most members of the MF laity reside in shared living spaces in the labor camps of Doha where up to 8 male workers share a single room, my interlocutors conveyed that they often felt inhibited and awkward when praying or worshipping in their rooms with their roommates watching them. Due to the pandemic, my interlocutors in these shared rooms found themselves confined in their living spaces for most of the day. Stepping out of their rooms would cut them off from their room-bound internet connections as well. As such, my interlocutors chose to channel their spiritual energies into their intercessory practices online in the form of prophetic comments posted in rapid succession on Facebook. Bodily manifestations of their spiritual fervor were mediatized and transposed online.

27 The Guardian, “Modern-Day Slavery in Focus + Middle East and North Africa” (October 2018); Gulf Business, “The Ugly Face of Modern Day Slavery”, 23 December 2014.

28 Campbell, “Spiritualising the Internet: Uncovering Discourses and Narratives of Religious Internet Use”.

29 Haynes, Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (2017), p. 82.

30 Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969).

31 Robbins, “Pentecostal Networks and the Spirit of Globalization: On the Social Productivity of Ritual Forms”, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 53.1 (2009), p. 60.

32 Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity”, p. 120.

33 Ibid., p. 32; Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (2008).

34 Lawless, “Brothers and Sisters: Pentecostals as a Religious Folk Group”, in Oring (ed.) Folk Groups And Folklore Genres Reader: A Reader (1989), p. 100; Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity”.

35 Lawless, “Brothers and Sisters: Pentecostals as a Religious Folk Group”, p. 110.

36 Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (2012), p. 86.

37 Robbins, “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity”, p. 254.

38 The titles of sermons (preached between August 2019 and June 2020) that specifically provided moral guidance to a largely unmarried and male church laity include: “Supernatural Marital Connections: How to Meet the Spouse God Has for You”; “Stepping into a Season of Divine Encounter”; “Do Not Be Carnally Minded: Resist the Devices of the Devil”; “Living Without Grumbling and Faultfinding: Importance of Gratitude in Christian Walk”; “Serve Wherever You Are”.

39 Upon contacting the church administrator, a leader of the church and coordinator of the “open house meets” replied and conveyed her willingness to assist me in my digital ethnography. She added me to one of the more active open house WhatsApp groups that its members have used to schedule meetings and share personal testimonies or prayer-requests with one another during the pandemic.

40 Quotations from prayers exchanged during an “open house” meeting I attended on a Zoom video call.

41 O’Leary, “Cyberspace as Sacred Space: Communicating Religion on Computer Networks”, pp. 794–800.

42 Ibid.

43 In explaining this specific form of theological reasoning during my interviews with EF members, they drew on the biblical story of Job and the harsh trials he is believed to have endured at the hands of Satan who was “allowed” by God to inflict loss, pain, and disease on Job to test his faith. Within this scriptural context, the EF believer, like Job, strives to persevere in one’s faith amidst the crises brought about by the virus.

44 Stevenson, Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in Twenty-First-Century America (2013), pp. 42–48.

45 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988), pp. 519–531.

46 Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (1965), p. 3.

47 Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (2013).