DAVID MARCUS: 5 years after a dark COVID Easter, faith is flourishing

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White House Faith Office leaders outline Trump administration goals amid Holy Week events

White House Faith Office members Paula White and Jennifer Korn detailed to Fox News Digital the events taking place during Holy Week and shared the Trump administration's faith goals.

Five years ago, our country’s Christians experienced an Easter like none before it, and hopefully like none we will ever see again. It was a time of isolation, loneliness and anxiety, and yet today, we are learning that out of this darkness, the flame of our faith has only grown brighter.

Prior to the COVID pandemic, few Americans could have even imagined any day, let alone an Easter Sunday, upon which we could not go to church. This is, after all, a nation created by people who were seeking the freedom to worship however they pleased.

All throughout Lent in 2020, which eerily tracked with the emergence of the Chinese virus, I recall hearing the Brooklyn church bells peeling, piercing the strange silence of the empty urban landscape.

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But the church doors were locked tight on epidemiologists' orders.

The sound of the bells mingled consolation with mockery, a harsh reminder of the spiritual prohibition, but also ringing with the promise and the truth that this too would pass. 

At the time, separated from my family, I wrote in a column for the New York Post that "we have given up each other for Lent. But as we awake on Sunday to the surreal reality of current circumstance, there is hope we will see each other again."

As we celebrate the Lord’s resurrection this year, not only have the COVID lockdowns passed, not only are our churches open, but they are packed to the brim with flocks of the faithful, new and old, in what some have called another American religious revival.

At church, things can be beautiful and true and celebrated, unlike the snark-filled world of our screens that thrives on cruel jokes.