Faith Communities as a Social Immune System: Recommendations for COVID-19 Response and Recovery

This article describes how faith communities often function like an organic social immune system during times of crisis, particularly our current COVID-19 pandemic. We share the strengths of faith communities pertaining to healthcare and public health, as well as name the religious health assets with which faith communities and other health partnerships have to work. These religious health assets have helped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Academies of Science (NAS), imagine substantive and sustained partnerships in diverse contexts across many presenting conditions. We share how COVID-19 has affected these faith assets and offer a case study in how the Leading Causes of Life (LCL) and Positive Deviance (PD) frameworks have been implemented in faith partnerships to impact health and racial disparities in the past and now, during the pandemic. We offer recommendations on how the CDC might frame a comprehensive recovery strategy, including faith-based assets in an appropriate and sustained manner to move us towards health and well-being, focusing on leadership capacity of both faith and health domains. Finally, we suggest what not to do as part of a COVID-19 response and recovery in these partnerships.