The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on religious leaders in Uganda

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating for all categories and communities of people the world over. Its impact on religious practice, religious congregants, and all mankind has been profound. Precursory studies have underscored the significant contribution of religious leaders in mitigating the pandemic. However, few studies exist on the impact of the pandemic upon clerics in their own right as individuals and frontline agents in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, religious leaders are not distinct from other categories of persons and are, therefore, not exonerated from the effects of the pandemic. It examines their contact with the disease, and how they were affected in carrying out COVID-19 mitigating measures. Using qualitative methods of enquiry, forty religious leaders from Christian denominations and the Islamic faith formed the study population. It was established that religious leaders experienced physical, psychological, and socio-economic hardships emanating from their personal experience of the disease on one hand and as societies’ frontline mitigating agents against the pandemic on the other. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic among clerics in Uganda varied according to religious affiliation, gender, and rural-urban divide. In attempts to provide auxiliary support to mitigate the pandemic and attend to their own struggles, clerics suffered a double tragedy of trauma. The pandemic experience also changed clerics’ opinions as they attempted to manage and adapt to the situation.