In the grab bag of reasons for vaccine resistance, the religious exemption claimed by evangelicals is perhaps the most perplexing. The default ethical stance of Christianity is the Golden Rule: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
The main resistance of evangelicals to public health measures does not concern abortion. Having embraced religious liberty as a defining cause, they are now deploying the language of that cause in opposition to jab and mask mandates.
Arguments crafted to defend institutional religious liberty have been adapted to oppose public coercion on covid. But they do not fit. More than that, the sanctification of anti-government populism is displacing or dethroning one of the most basic Christian distinctions.
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When Christians are asserting a right to resist basic public health measures, what is the actual content of their religious-liberty claim? The right to risk the lives of their neighbors in order to assert their autonomy? The right to endanger the community in the performative demonstration of their personal rights?
This is a vivid display of the cultural and ideological trends of a warped and wasted year. It just has nothing to do with real Christianity.
