Religious objections to vaccines have a long history, but are being overused and abused

I understand and accept that some people have legitimate religious objections to the #COVID19 vaccine. It has been a longstanding principle of American civil law, most recently implemented with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, that when a person has sincere religious objections to participating in an activity, or sincere religious beliefs that require participating in an activity, government must tread VERY lightly.

That is why, for example, the United States, all the way back to its founding and even before its founding, has recognized the rights of conscientious objection by groups such as the Quakers to taking religious oaths or serving in the military. Recognizing religious objections is a principle that predates the United States as an organized nation.

Sincerity of belief, not agreement with the belief, is key. I can think of many religious beliefs with which I strongly disagree but regarding which I believe just as strongly that the government must not interfere.

The problem we have with COVID19 is that some people who are claiming religious objections don’t understand what it means to have a religious objection, or don’t understand the history of religious objections in America to vaccination and its predecessor, variolation.

Reading the attached article by The Brownstone Institute on the role of Cotton Mather — yes, the late New England Puritan, and a contemporary of Jonathan Edwards — in promoting an early version of smallpox vaccination may help in understanding the weaknesses of some of the religious arguments against vaccination.

Here’s the link to the article: https://brownstone.org/articles/rev-cotton-mather-and-the-18th-century-battle-over-smallpox-inoculation/

Contrary to what some people who don’t know New England history think, it was the clergy, not the medical doctors, who were defending early efforts toward vaccination.

The smallpox outbreak in colonial New England has many lessons for modern Americans, among them being that quarantines for legitimate public health reasons have a history dating back to the earliest days of America, even before the United States existed as a government.

Government really **DOES** have the power to quarantine people to protect the public health, although such powers need to be used very carefully and only when there is a clear and present danger to the public. A good case can be made that the current government response to #COVID19 is a gross overreach, and that “Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread” has stretched long past fifteen months, and far outlived any usefulness lockdowns may once have had.

However, the lessons also include some cautions to some of those who claim religious exemptions.

My personal view, for whatever it may be worth, is that while I don’t agree with the details of the arguments that people shouldn’t get the COVID19 vaccine because of the role of fetal stem cell lines derived from an abortion in the vaccine research, I understand those objections and respect them.

The more generic “anti-vax” arguments against vaccines in general are, I believe, simply wrong.

Vaccines are not immoral. Using vaccines does not deny the sovereignty of God, and anyone who makes that argument needs to take a long hard look at why the New England Puritans, who were Calvinists of the highest order, supported vaccination.

If people have a sincere religious objection against vaccination, American law says — and says correctly — that the religious objection must be accommodated if at all possible.

The key is sincerity. There are well-established legal tests to determine sincerity of belief, and they have been used for more than two and a half centuries in cases of conscientious objection to the military draft.

People who have a sincere religious objection to vaccines generally have spent many years or even decades defending those objections. They know what they believe, they know why they believe it, and they can and do defend their beliefs.

People who want to claim such objections today probably need to educate themselves on exactly what they believe, and why, or they are going to embarrass themselves if the government continues to press this issue. Claiming a religious exemption is not a “get out of jail free” card, and any Quaker, Mennonite, or other pacifist living during the draftee era of the 1960s and early 1970s knows that quite well. The same is true for an Orthodox Jew who objects to working on the Jewish Sabbath, or who objects to eating non-Kosher food.

Proof of sincerity can be required by government, and often has been in American history on questions of religious freedom.

The worst case scenario would be if the federal government, seizing upon people who cite religious exemptions with no history of doing so, tried to attack the very concept of a religious exemption. With the current makeup of the Supreme Court, that’s not going to end well for the government’s lawyers.

What concerns me is not today but tomorrow.

I am seriously concerned that many in America today do not understand religious exemptions or their history, and we could in just a few years, with just a few changes in the Supreme Court’s membership, end up in a place where some of the key court decisions on religious freedom get called into question by a bad court precedent coming out of the current COVID19 crisis.

That will end badly for all in America if we lose the concept that religious freedom is not something with which the government can or should interfere.