The Lasting Impact of COVID-19 on Society, Faith, and Trust

So what, after five years, has changed? Much.

As an Opinion piece in the New York Times suggested:

Five years after the pandemic began, Donald Trump is president again, but he’s presiding over a very different country now. America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything—let alone the rest of the world. The ascendant right is junking our institutions, and liberals have grown skeptical of them, too, though we can’t agree about how exactly they failed us. A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death. And the greatest social and technological experiment of our time, artificial intelligence, promises a kind of exit from the realm of human flesh and microbes into one built by code.
 
 We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.

Yes, it did.

And here, drawing from multiple sources cited below, as well as my own observations, is how:

It turned us into hyperindividualists. Our daily lives were “reduced to the boundaries” of our nuclear unit and our “phones and televisions and computers.” Isolated, “we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real.” Soon “we began to worry less about how our actions affected others and more about how theirs affected us.”

It broke our faith in institutions. It began with losing our trust in public health, but it would only spread. Vaccines, “guidance on cloth masking and face covering for toddlers, debates about the relative strength of natural immunity or about the value of boosters,” dominated. But it wasn’t just reactions to changing guidelines as public health experts were trying to learn and react and offer counsel in real time. We lost trust in government, schools and religion.

It altered the trajectory of the Christian church in America. Across the denominational board, churches declined in attendance, and once restrictions were lifted, many have yet to recover. Many more shuttered their doors for good. Yes, during the COVID-19 years, the rise of the nones stalled, and the hemorrhaging of the decline in the number of Christians seemed to stop, but the larger truth is that we became a nation that is spiritual but not religious. Further, ideology now seems to trump theology in terms of associations and networks, fellowship, and mission.

It shattered our cities and disordered society. Homicides increased, homelessness surged, drinking disorders rose, drug overdoses shot up, and traffic accident deaths climbed.

It changed the geography of work. When compared with 2019, “five times as many Americans were working from home in 2021. Four times as many still do. “Many white-collar workers now routinely encounter colleagues only some days of the week,” reports the New York Times, “while mostly working as atomized nodes in a distended network.” And, of course, there was the “great resignation” that took place in 2022. 

It scarred children. While more than 1,600 American children have died of COVID-19 – nearly 80% of them after in-person learning resumed in the fall of 2021 – “we talk about their experience of Covid, now, primarily in terms of school closures and learning loss.” According to test scores, the pandemic damaged learning. Without a doubt, the “cultural effects, outside of school, appear generationally significant.”

It led to a massive splintering of the information environment. The COVID-19 pandemic “forced Americans to try to parse through information about a new topic that scientists were scrambling to fully understand—and that almost no one had heard of just a few months before.” Leading up to the pandemic, many Americans “had already lost trust in the information from national news organizations.”

It drove our country apart. Pew Research has found that nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults (72%) say the pandemic did more to drive the country apart than to bring it together. Fundamental differences arose between Americans over “what we expect from our government, how much tolerance we have for health risks, and which groups and sectors to prioritize in a pandemic. Many of these divides,” notes Pew, “continue to play out in the nation’s politics today.”

There is obviously much, much more that, five years after that fateful Wednesday in March 2020, has changed us. Yet if there is anything that most people agree on, it is that no one wants to talk about it.

But talk about it, we must.  

After all, it changed our world.

James Emery White

Sources
Greta Cross, “NBA Paused. Tom Hanks’ Diagnosis. A Trump Address. Here’s What Happened on March 11, 2020.” USA Today, March 11, 2025, read online.
David Wallace-Wells, “How Covid Remade America,” The New York Times, March 4, 2025, read online.
Alec Tyson, Michael Lipka and Claudia Deane, “5 Years Later: America Looks Back at the Impact of COVID-19,” Pew Research Center, February 12, 2025, read online.
Bill Chappell, “In Their Own Words: How COVID Changed America,” NPR, March 10, 2025, read online.
Aatish Bhatia and Irineo Cabreros, “30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything,” The New York Times, March 9, 2025, read online.

Photo Courtesy: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/SeventyFour
Published Date: March 20, 2025

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on X, Facebook, and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.