Redacted or Otherwise: Religious Exemptions to the COVID-19 Vaccine

The COVID-19 pandemic presented the most rapid development of vaccines of all time, and, in response, scientists introduced a new type of vaccine: one that uses mRNA. The novelty of the vaccine mechanism, the speed at which they were produced, and the involvement of fetal stem cell lines in growing viruses or testing efficacy resulted in an unprecedented number of people rejecting the vaccine on religious grounds. One major difficulty for the government in trying to control vaccination rates is the fact that there is no federal standard for evaluating exemption requests. As such, when certain states and private companies mandated the vaccine, there was no format for approval or denial, and the burden fell largely on Human Resources employees to make the call on whether a belief was sincerely held; the result was sweeping approvals, generally regardless of reasoning. This presentation examines over 1,100 letters submitted by American employees in public and private sectors requesting religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine, obtained through public records requests. 

Examination of these letters led to the following questions: what themes emerge from the content of the exemption letters? How are they applying scripture in new ways? What are the most common reasons cited in exemption letters? This paper systematically discusses the six most commonly cited reasons in exemption letters, organized into three categories: Conspiratorial, Transitional, and Conscience and Law. The first section encompasses in its analysis letters that invoke the Mark of the Beast and the Body as a Temple of the Holy Spirit, understanding them as conspiratorial inasmuch as they invoke vaccine safety and efficacy. The transitional section is meant to bridge esoteric conspiracy thinking with the final section, which uses rational logic. This second section contains the letters that discuss the proximity of the COVID-19 vaccines to abortion. The final section, Conscience and Law, interrogates the invocation of Christian conscience, divine law, and the freedom of religion under U.S. law as reasons to oppose the COVID-19 vaccine.

The paper differentiates those that were based on truly religious reasons (objections to fetal stem cell lines) from those that were not (e.g., fears over the chemical contents of the vaccine). It has been widely reported that Evangelical Christians are the group most likely to believe in conspiracy theories and reject the vaccine, so the question is: to what extent are the ideas surfacing in COVID-19 vaccine exemption request letters Evangelical? What evidence from the letter complicate this assumption? How are these ideas disseminated via the internet and social media? These findings will be used to inform a new framework for evaluating religious exemptions to civil law that is fair to those who have religious beliefs and also does not threaten public health and safety.

A thorough examination of these letters led to the conclusion that the primary concern with the COVID-19 vaccine across all religious petitioners was the safety of the vaccines, followed by secondary concerns with disinformation and political discourse, and the biblical argument was crafted as a tertiary concern in order to augment the former worries.

By analyzing religious ideas as secondary or tertiary to petitioners’ arguments, I complicate the idea of the sincerely held belief. I consider whether ideas that one cannot articulate themself can truly be sincere. I find contradictions in individuals’ own treatment of medications like Tylenol, which were developed using the same fetal stem cell lines as the COVID-19 vaccines. Finally, I ponder whether a belief can be consider sincerely held if it emerges in the penultimate sentence of a request letter, backing up the initial ideas regarding safety and disinformation.