The Moral Bankruptcy of Anti-Mask, Anti-Vaccine Christians
People in front of Los Angeles’ City Hall protest the state’s COVID-19 stay at home orders in a “Fully Open California” protest. | Image by Matt Gush via Shutterstock.com
Since the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to save lives with mask mandates, bans on large indoor gatherings, and other restrictions have been met with fierce opposition from religious groups. Even reasonable restrictions, applied neutrally to all similar types of activities, were struck down by the Supreme Court. These restrictions were often put in place in the hardest-hit regions or were temporary measures triggered when specific areas saw out-of-control community spread of COVID-19.
In a concurring opinion to an unsigned 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in Brooklyn v. Cuomo, Justice Neil Gorsuch excoriated New York for “executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques” despite the obvious differences in what an average visit to these venues looks like and the accompanying risk.
To be sure, the stubborn insistence that sincerely held personal beliefs, no matter how ill-informed, should trump public health measures is nothing new. In 1902, Massachusetts pastor Henning Jacobson refused the smallpox vaccine despite the state’s compulsory vaccination laws. He was fined for it and subsequently sued the state. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme Court upheld the state’s compulsory vaccination laws. The Justices wrote that “[r]eal liberty for all could not exist [if] each individual person [can] use his own [liberty] … regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
This ruling was later upheld and expanded in the 1944 decision Prince v. Massachusetts, where the Court wrote, “The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill health or death.” The Prince and Jacobson decisions have been repeatedly cited by federal courts ever since.
Despite this 100+ year history, religious extremists and their political enablers have spent the past 18 months doing everything possible to undermine even the most basic and common-sense public health measures, securing unprecedented exemptions and special “accommodations” for their public meetings when no vaccine was available. And the Supreme Court’s majority has, since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sided with this upheaval of individual and religious rights.
Now pro-COVID evangelicals have moved on to scouring their Bibles—and the writings of anti-vax quacks and Facebook groups—for any passage or junk study or misinterpreted piece of data to justify their refusal and dress it up in the language of religious liberty. Some churches and advocacy organizations are now all but selling purported religious exemptions from vaccine mandates. Simply donate, and they’ll provide you with an exemption letter! And if that letter doesn’t work, they’re turning to the courts.
In New York, after the state announced a requirement that all healthcare providers be vaccinated—without religious exemptions—the Christian nationalist nonprofit law firm Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit on behalf of a handful of healthcare providers who claim to have a sincerely held religious objection to the vaccine. They say that all of the vaccines “employ fetal cell lines derived from procured abortion in testing, development, or production of the vaccines.”
The lawsuit points out that the HEK-293 cell line was “used in research related to the development of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.”
“Related to?”
These cell lines have been used to create and test vaccines for hepatitis A, mumps, measles, rubella, and rabies. As the Conway Regional Health System pointed out in an attestation form for employees seeking a religious exemption, Tylenol, aspirin, ibuprofen, Pepto Bismol, Tums, Benadryl, Sudafed, Claritin, and Zoloft were all tested using fetal cell lines. While it’s possible that these healthcare providers have similarly avoided the moral quandary of using Benadryl or almost every over-the-counter pain reliever imaginable, I doubt it.
That the objectors claim they do so because they are “pro-life” and don’t want to be complicit in the evil of abortion is deeply ironic. Since the widespread availability of the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the overwhelming majority of deaths caused by COVID-19 are in unvaccinated individuals. An analysis released earlier this year found that of the 18,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in May of this year, fully vaccinated people accounted for just 0.8% (150 people) of the total.
Rather than protecting the lives of their fellow Americans by preventing the continued deaths of tens of thousands of people, these extremists are looking for any sort of pretext to solidify the privileged position of evangelical, anti-abortion Christianity in the American legal system.
Put simply, it’s not about the vaccine. It’s not even really about abortion. And it most certainly isn’t about creating a “culture of life.” It’s about exercising raw political power and demanding that the government accommodate their incoherent and bad-faith arguments that run counter to their own previous behavior, common sense, and a century of legal precedent.
As we saw with Prince v. Massachusetts, there is no constitutional or statutory obligation to provide religious exemptions from a vaccine mandate that protects patients, the general public, and other employees from highly communicable diseases. Politicians and employers should stop their naïve attempts to engage in good faith with those who use religion as a fig leaf for their political agenda.
And at some point, the media, our political system, and our society writ large need to grapple with the fact that the people who hold themselves out as paragons of moral virtue—and who are elevated as such—consistently get the easiest moral questions wrong, time and time again.
