As COVID‐19 began to spread across Malaysia in early‐2020, Jesus began to materialize with increasing frequency on my Facebook feed. A familiar figure with light skin, beard, long hair, and flowing robes, He appeared in many classic poses: praying, healing the sick, carrying a cross, crucified. Overlaid onto these images, however, were references to a disease that we have only recently come to know: ‘COVID: Christ Over Infection, Virus and Death’; ‘JESUS is the best doctor and prayer is the best medicine’; ‘Harapan di Tengah Coronavirus! Tuhan Yesus Sayang Kita Semua’ (‘Hope in the midst of Coronavirus! Jesus loves us all’).

COVID‐19 related messages are part of a diverse assemblage of Christian posts that have been circulating on the Facebook networks of my fieldwork acquaintances: indigenous Bidayuhs in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, with whom I've worked since 2003. Many are second‐ or third‐generation Christians who live in villages and work or study in urban areas. Multilingual, mobile and tech‐savvy, they treat digital interaction as intrinsic to their religious lives—partly by following and sharing material from international Christian interest groups on Facebook, which is used by Bidayuhs of all ages.

When COVID‐19 first reached Malaysia, many Facebook exchanges sought to frame the virus through Christian terms and idioms. Although there were attempts to relate the pandemic to the Apocalypse, most of my acquaintances seemed more keen to work out COVID‐19's implications for their religious faith and praxis. The most popular posts combined biomedical tropes with those of ‘visual piety’ (Morgan 1999): a masked medical practitioner with a rosary (Fig. 1), Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane with a list of earlier pandemics and instructions for ‘turn[ing] viral fright into viral fight’ through prayers and hand‐washing, among other things (Fig. 2). Others embedded the pandemic and its effects in Christian stories and teleological frameworks. A post about how Noah and his family endured 40 days of isolation in their ark, for example, became especially popular when Malaysia imposed its own ‘lockdown’, aka the Movement Control Order (MCO), in late‐March. ‘Like Noah, let us also believe that these things shall pass,’ it concluded. ‘Stay in the ark, stay at home’.

As March segued into April, motivational messages gave way to pragmatic concerns about participation, particularly during Holy Week, which fell in mid‐April. For many of my acquaintances, being Bidayuh is synonymous with being Christian—an identity which, in a Malay‐Muslim majority country, is both politically and socially laden (Chua 2012). Like Christmas, Easter is a crucial time in the village calendar: when Bidayuhs return from town to be with friends and family, when village chapels and rural parish churches are packed with worshippers, and when everyone eats, drinks and celebrates together in an idealized affective, spiritual and physical state known as rami. In short, Easter is when Bidayuhs come together as Christians, and reaffirm their identities and place in a global Christian oecumene that transcends the confines of the Malaysian nation‐state (Fig. 3).

This year, however, there was none of that. ‘Stay at home’ became a mantra that my friends drearily repeated as they explained why they couldn't hold their usual prayer services and gatherings. In the run‐up to Easter, questions of how to be Christian and do Christian things while distanced from the sites, entities, and people that constitute Christian life took on increasing urgency. In this gloomy climate, churches—like their counterparts elsewhere (e.g. Dijkstra 2020; Sheklian 2020)—rallied, shifting their services online (Fig. 4). At first, they posted live or recorded footage of prayer services on YouTube or Facebook, but they soon began to make things more participatory. The Catholic parish church nearest my adoptive village, for example, posted on its Facebook page step‐by‐step instructions for following its services online—including a list of technical requirements, a guide to setting up a home altar, directives for how to dress and behave during the service, and advice on how to transfer one's weekly offertory money into the archdiocese's bank account. Later, it invited parishioners to add photos of their home altars to a dedicated album (Fig. 5) and submit prayer requests via private messaging.

Although rural access to these online initiatives varied greatly due to patchy internet coverage, these digital interactions worked as well as they could in the circumstances. As I followed live services from locked‐down England, my screen would be filled with dancing emojis and ‘Amens’ from my fellow viewers, some of them my village acquaintances. There was a certain ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim 1965) in these moments—one quite distinct yet palpably familiar, the text and icons replacing yet not displacing that affective surge of physical togetherness.

These forms of digital religious participation were in many ways new and makeshift, products of an extraordinary moment in which Christian life juddered to an upsetting halt. But in other ways, they were simply extensions of a quotidian set of religious practices that straddle the online/offline divide. Praxis and efficacy are key to the day‐to‐day workings of Bidayuh Christianity, which is viewed as something that needs to be ‘done’ (ndai) right (Chua 2012). When smartphones and Facebook became incorporated into everyday village life, my acquaintances extended their Christian praxis online, adapting quickly to the wider global Christian social media‐scape's prevailing terms and conventions. Today, with both churches and individual congregants active on Facebook, social media interactions form a ‘legitimized frame’ (Bielo 2018:371) of Christian interaction and experience for Bidayuhs—no less valid or meaningful than their fleshly equivalents.

Posts, comments, and shares on Facebook are often about making one's presence felt, publicly reaffirming one's faith and commitment, and caring for others. Posts about deaths, illnesses, birthdays, journeys and other events, for example, are often followed by formulaic strings of comments: ‘RIP’, ‘Tǎpa rǎbis sayang ayǔh’ (God loved them [the deceased] more), ‘MGBU’ (‘May God Bless You’), and most commonly, ‘Amen’. These threads are, in effect, manifestations of what Miller et al. call ‘scalable sociality’ (2016:109)—digital instantiations but also transformations of relations that criss‐cross and spill beyond village communities, coexisting alongside Facebook sociality. Just as some villagers sleep over at newly‐bereaved houses to keep the family company, guard their souls, and stop them feeling afraid (Chua 2011), these digital interjections are momentary enactments of presence: reassurances that we are here for you.

Such interactions often play on the viral affordances of social media (Coates 2017; Postill 2014). For example, the start of the pandemic saw a rush of people typing or copy‐and‐pasting the Lord's Prayer onto their timelines, together with injunctions such as ‘Copy to your profile, let's all pray together’. Some posted customized instructions for reciting the rosary during the pandemic—each decade punctuated by prayers for hope and healing. Meanwhile, several users changed their profile pictures to devotional images, notably a lit candle bearing the image of Christ healing the sick, for the duration of the MCO. Also circulating via private messaging were GIFs of candles, with the invitation to ‘pass this candle to heal with world from Coronavirus…keep the light burning’ (Fig. 6).

Typing out the Lord's Prayer, reciting the rosary, ‘passing on’ a candle: these are acts that demand more than a quick click on the ‘share’ button. It is in these acts of consciously, purposefully doing and sharing, I suggest, that my acquaintances locate themselves in a wider Christian world‐order—one in which God, Jesus, and other powerful personages are as active and agentive as the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus. Although social media interactions cannot replace the corporeal togetherness and spiritual efficacy of in‐person prayer attendance, they do work alongside them as small‐scale, quotidian means through which Christians sustain their relations with each other and the divine in an era of social distancing.

Anthropologists of religion will find many of these practices and tropes familiar—and for good reason. As mentioned earlier, my Bidayuh acquaintances use Facebook to participate in Christian interest groups and access posts from across the world, which they then disseminate and personalize via their own networks. Some are denomination‐specific, but many consciously transcend denominational differences, enabling Catholics, Anglicans, and evangelicals alike to engage in digital communion beyond their church circles and countries. This combination of circulation and participation, I suggest, entails a form of viral devotionality through which a digitally‐mediated mode of global Christian solidarity and spiritual unity can be enacted—individually and collectively.

Put differently, Facebook interactions haven't simply lent spiritual meaning to the pandemic, nor merely given Bidayuhs a practical means of sustaining Christian practice, sociality, and relations. Such interactions have also enabled Bidayuhs to insert themselves into a digital landscape of devotional acts and viral trails, as self‐consciously globalized Christians belonging to a larger oecumene that transcends the Malaysian nation‐state. Bidayuh Christians have long been conscious of their place in the worldwide Christian community: prayers for the Pope and for persecuted Christians elsewhere, for example, featured regularly in rural chapel services well before the arrival of mobile phone reception and internet access. But the COVID‐19 pandemic has both amplified this conviction and multiplied the opportunities for actualising it. For a marginalized indigenous community that routinely looks beyond national borders for social, moral, and cosmological support, these are not insignificant digital openings.

In contrast to the destructive virulence of SARS‐CoV‐2, then, my acquaintances' interactions with and through Christian/COVID‐19 Facebook posts entail an aspirational and generative virality—their digital exchanges serving as portals to larger spaces of Christian commonality, belonging, and divine power. Thinking through these engagements can prompt us to ask broader, comparative questions: What other kinds of virality are emerging or evolving in the present? What practices and imaginaries of connection, solidarity, and commons are they producing, and to what effect? How might anthropologists think with, but also beyond, extant analytics of virality in medical and digital anthropology (e.g. Benton 2017)? And, crucially, how can virality be understood as productive and creative rather than mainly destructive or something to be avoided?

These questions will arguably become more pressing as the world lurches towards various possible ‘post‐COVID’ futures. Anthropologists and other scholars have recently done a great deal to dismantle the banal, pervasive trope of COVID‐19 as the great leveller, showing how the global pandemic has played out in multiple, uneven ways, laying bare vast global and national inequalities in the process. Challenging hegemonic ‘commoning’ (Blaser and de la Cadena 2017) narratives and politics is, after all, our stock‐in‐trade. Yet amid all this, the intensification of my Bidayuh acquaintances' digital engagements with a global Christian commons reminds us not to lose sight of the small‐scale, quotidian projects of commonality, solidarity, affinity and uniformity that are also emerging in the pandemic: what they are, how they work, how they are socially, historically, and politically grounded, and perhaps most challengingly, what they might look like beyond the horizons of the immediate crisis. How do we make and sustain connections across closed‐off borders, quarantined spaces, social distances? How can we forge commonality and unity out, or in spite, of difference? And how can we ground or actualize such possibilities rather than simply theorize or speculate about them? As we come to terms with the need to live with, not just contain or eradicate, SARS‐CoV‐2, these are questions with which anthropologists are likely to grapple for a while.

随着2020年初COVID-19开始在马来西亚各地传播，耶稣开始在我的Facebook提要上出现的频率越来越高。他是一个熟悉的人物，有着浅色的皮肤，胡须，长长的头发和飘逸的长袍，以许多经典姿势出现：祈祷，治愈病人，背着十字架，被钉十字架。然而，覆盖在这些图像上的是对我们最近才知道的疾病的参考：“ COVID：克服感染，病毒和死亡的基督”；“耶稣是最好的医生，祷告是最好的药”；'Harapan di Tengah冠状病毒！Tuhan Yesus Sayang Kita Semua”（“希望在冠状病毒中！耶稣爱我们所有人”）。

与COVID-19相关的消息是各种各样的基督徒帖子的一部分，这些帖子已经在我的实地工作人员的Facebook网络上流传：马来西亚婆罗洲沙捞越州的土著Bidayuh，从2003年开始与我合作。许多是第二或第三名生活在乡村并在城市地区工作或学习的一代基督徒。他们会说多种语言，使用移动技术并且精通技术，因此将数字互动视为其宗教生活的内在手段–部分是通过在Facebook上关注和分享国际基督教利益团体的资料，各个年龄段的比达尤人都在使用该资料。

当COVID-19首次到达马来西亚时，许多Facebook交易所都试图通过基督教用语和习语来构造病毒。尽管曾尝试将大流行与世界末日联系起来，但我的大多数熟人似乎更想知道COVID-19对他们的宗教信仰和实践的影响。最受欢迎的帖子将生物医学的对等体与“视觉虔诚”相结合（Morgan 1999）：一位戴着面具的念珠医生（图1），耶稣在客西马尼园祈祷，列出了较早的大流行病以及通过祈祷和洗手“将病毒惊吓转变为病毒斗争”的指示其他事情（图2）。其他人则将大流行及其影响嵌入基督教的故事和目的论框架中。例如，当马来西亚在3月下旬实施自己的“封锁”（又称运动控制令）时，有关诺亚及其家人如何在方舟中忍受40天孤独的帖子变得特别受欢迎。它总结说：“像诺亚一样，让我们​​也相信这些事情将会过去。” “呆在方舟，呆在家里”。

随着三月进入四月，激励性信息逐渐被实用主义的参与所取代，特别是在四月中旬的圣周期间。在我的许多熟人中，比达尤（Bidayuh）是基督徒的代名词-在马来穆斯林占多数的国家中，这个身份在政治和社会上都负担重（Chua 2012）。像圣诞节一样，复活节是乡村日历中的关键时刻：当比达尤斯（Bidayuhs）从镇上回来与朋友和家人在一起时，当乡村教堂和乡村教区教堂里挤满信徒时，以及每个人在理想化的情感氛围中一起吃饭，喝酒和庆祝，精神和身体状态称为拉米。简而言之，复活节是比达友作为基督徒聚集在一起的时候，并重申他们的身份和地位，超越了马来西亚民族国家的界限（图3）。

但是，今年没有。“待在家里”成为我的朋友不断重复的口头禅，因为他们解释了为什么他们无法举行通常的祈祷仪式和聚会。在复活节前夕，与基督徒生活的场所，实体和人保持距离时，如何做基督徒和做基督徒事情的问题变得越来越紧迫。在这种阴暗的气候中，教堂像其他地方的教堂一样（例如Dijkstra 2020； Sheklian 2020）—团结起来，将其服务在线转移（图4）。最初，他们在YouTube或Facebook上发布了现场直播或录制的祷告服务录像，但很快他们开始使事情更具参与性。例如，离我收养村最近的天主教堂教堂在其Facebook页面上发布了有关在线服务的逐步说明，其中包括技术要求列表，设置家庭祭坛的指南，穿着方法的指南并在服役期间表现良好，并就如何将其每周要约钱转入大主教管区的银行帐户提供建议。后来，它邀请教区居民将其家祭坛的照片添加到专用相册中（图5），并通过私人消息提交祈祷请求。

尽管由于互联网覆盖范围不广，农村地区对这些在线计划的访问方式差异很大，但这些数字交互在情况下仍能尽其所能。当我跟踪来自锁定英格兰的现场服务时，我的屏幕上将充满同伴观众（其中一些是我的乡村熟人）跳舞的表情符号和“阿门”。在这些时刻中出现了某种“集体起泡”（Durkheim 1965）-一种非常独特但明显的熟悉感，文字和图标取代了但并没有取代那种身体上的团结感。

这些形式的数字宗教参与在许多方面都是新的和临时的，是不寻常时刻的产物，在这个时刻，基督徒的生活变得令人沮丧。但是在其他方面，它们只是跨越在线/离线鸿沟的一系列宗教习俗的延伸。实践和疗效的关键是比达友基督教，因为这被视为东西要“做”的需求（当天的日常运作ndai）右（蔡2012）。当智能手机和Facebook融入到乡村生活中时，我的熟人在网上扩展了他们的基督教实践，迅速适应了更广泛的全球基督教社交媒体环境中盛行的术语和惯例。如今，教堂和个人拥护者都活跃在Facebook上，社交媒体互动构成了比达尤斯基督徒互动和经验的“合法化框架”（Bielo 2018：371），其有效性或意义不亚于其肉体。

Facebook上的帖子，评论和分享通常是关于让人感觉到自己的存在，公开重申自己的信念和承诺并关心他人。例如，在有关死亡，疾病，生日，旅行和其他事件的帖子中，通常会出现一些公式化的注释：'RIP'，'Tǎparǎbissayangayǔh'（上帝更爱死者），'MGBU'（ “愿上帝保佑您”），最常见的是“阿们”。这些线索实际上是Miller等人的著作的体现。所谓的“可扩展社会性”（2016：109）—数字化实例化，也包括纵横交错，蔓延到村庄社区之外的关系转换，与Facebook社交性共存。就像一些村民在新安葬的房子里睡觉以保持家族企业，守护自己的灵魂，2011年），这些数字感叹词是存在感的短暂体现：请放心，我们在这里为您服务。

这种互动通常在社交媒体的病毒式传播中发挥作用（Coates，2017； Postill，2014）。例如，大流行开始时，人们急于在时间表上输入或复制和粘贴主祷文以及诸如“复制到您的个人资料，让我们一起祈祷”之类的禁令。一些人发布了定制的说明，以在大流行期间念诵念珠。每十年，祈祷和希望得到点滴。同时，一些用户在MCO期间将其个人资料图片更改为灵修图像，特别是点燃的蜡烛，上面印有基督医治病人的图像。也通过循环 私人消息是蜡烛的GIF，并邀请他们“传递此蜡烛以治疗冠状病毒带来的世界……保持燃烧的光”（图6）。

输入主祷文，背诵念珠，“传递”蜡烛：这些行为比快速单击“分享”按钮还需要更多。我建议，正是在这些有意识，有目的地做事和分享的行为中，我的相识者将自己置于更广阔的基督教世界秩序中，在其中，上帝，耶稣和其他有权势的人物像SARS-CoV一样活跃而富有魅力‐2病毒。尽管社交媒体的互动无法取代亲自参加祷告会所具有的物质上的团结和精神功效，但它们却像小规模的quotidian手段那样与他们并肩作战，在社会疏远的时代，基督徒通过这种方式维持彼此之间以及与神的关系。

宗教人类学家会发现，其中的许多习俗和比喻很熟悉，而且有充分的理由。如前所述，我的Bidayuh熟人使用Facebook参加基督教兴趣小组并访问来自世界各地的帖子，然后他们通过自己的网络进行传播和个性化。有些是特定于教派的，但是许多有意识地超越了教派的差异，使天主教徒，英国国教徒和福音派信徒都可以在其教会圈子和国家之外进行数字交流。我建议，这种流通与参与的结合需要一种病毒式的奉献精神，通过这种形式，可以个人和集体地建立一种以数字为媒介的全球基督徒团结和精神统一的模式。

换句话说，Facebook互动并不仅仅是为大流行提供精神意义，也不仅仅是给比达尤斯提供了一种维持基督教实践，社会关系和联系的实用手段。这种相互作用也能比达友人将自己插入的虔诚行为和病毒步道数字景观，如具有自我意识的全球化基督徒，他们属于超越马来西亚民族国家的更大的紫杉醇。比达尤（Bidayuh）基督徒早就意识到自己在全世界基督徒社区中的地位：例如，在移动电话接收和互联网普及之前，为教皇和其他地方受迫害的基督徒祈祷的活动经常在农村教堂举行。但是，COVID-19大流行既扩大了这种信念，又增加了实现这种信念的机会。对于一个边缘化的土著社区来说，他们通常会在国界之外寻求社会，道德和宇宙学的支持，但这些开放并不是微不足道的。

与SARS-CoV-2的毁灭性毒力相反，我的熟人与Christian / COVID-19的互动以及通过Christian / COVID-19的互动都产生了崇高的，产生性的病毒式传播-他们的数字化交流成为更大的基督教通用性空间的门户，以及神圣的力量。通过这些活动进行思考可以促使我们提出更广泛的比较性问题：当前还出现或正在发展其他哪种病毒？它们会产生什么样的联系，团结和共同之处的实践和想象，并产生什么效果？人类学家可能会在医学和数字人类学中对现存的病毒学分析进行思考，但除此之外，还会如何思考（例如Benton，2017年））？而且，至关重要的是，如何将病毒性理解为生产性和创造性，而不是主要具有破坏性或应避免的东西？

随着世界涌向各种可能的“后COVID”期货，这些问题无疑将变得更加紧迫。人类学家和其他学者最近做出了许多努力，以消除COVID-19的平庸，普遍的说法，成为伟大的调平者，展示了全球大流行如何以多种不平衡的方式发挥作用，在此过程中暴露出巨大的全球和国家不平等现象。毕竟，具有挑战性的霸权“共通”（Blaser和de la Cadena，2017年）的叙述和政治是我们的存货。然而，在所有这些之中，我的Bidayuh熟人与全球基督徒共同体之间的数字交流越来越强烈，这提醒我们不要忽视流行病中也正在出现的小规模，共同性，团结，亲和力和统一性的报价项目：它们是什么，它们如何工作，它们在社会，历史和政治上的基础，以及可能最具挑战性，它们在眼前危机的视野之外可能看起来像什么。我们如何跨封闭边界，隔离空间，社会距离建立和维持联系？我们如何才能形成共性和团结，尽管存在差异？以及我们如何能够根植或实现这种可能性，而不是简单地对它们进行理论或推测？当我们谈到需要与SARS-CoV-2一起生活，而不仅仅是遏制或根除SARS‐CoV‐2时，这些是人类学家可能会努力解决的问题。