Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, I've been researching the way North Dakota experienced the Spanish flu. North Dakota History published an article that I wrote in 2021. This article looked at how North Dakota's newspapers provided coverage of the Spanish flu to residents of the state. At first, I thought an article would encapsulate basically everything I wanted to address, but there was way more information available the deeper I dug.
Therefore, I decided to keep digging and prepare a book manuscript (a draft of which is already completed and submitted to a potential publisher). One of the chapters deals with how religious groups in the state dealt with the flu. Laura Spinney's Pale Rider and a few other secondary sources have noted that many parts of the world took a religious approach to explain the appearance of the deadly contagion. One bishop in Spain asked for a series of prayers to appease the wrath of God. This impulse was not terribly different than the one that drove medieval flagellants to beat themselves in light of the Black Death. God is mad; we must appease him.
However, when looking at some of the major denomination in North Dakota, there was no real reflection, other than the people lost to the disease (some pastors were among this number) and the ways in which the flu kept the churches from carrying out their organizational plans for the year. There was no attempt to tie the Spanish flu to God's wrath, nor was there any question as to what God might be attempting to tell the world. I found this interesting, given the fact that the world was engaged in a war that was among the more senseless in world history.
Additionally, this varied from the response by Christians to more recent tragedies that have caused some ministers to claim that some natural or man-made calamity was the punishment of God against wayward people. For example, Pat Robertson claimed that Hurricane Katrina was the result of God's wrath, tying this to abortion and the appointment of John Roberts to the Supreme Court.
My primary question for the chapter revolved around the ways the churches reacted to the Spanish flu. The article noted above found that churches were a part of the ban on public meetings. Grand Forks was effectively closed for about seven weeks in the fall of 1918, and churches did not meet from early October to late November. Some churches in the town were actually concerned over the possibility of large meetings when the city's health officials decided to allow for public meetings to resume. Schools in the town did not reopen until January. This reaction to the flu in Grand Forks differed from the one evident in Fargo, where ministers petitioned the city to end the public meeting ban before it did in late October.
Needless to say, these findings were interesting, and they tended to provide some interesting historical context for the actions that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
