**7. Conclusion: Fractured Community, The Rise of Individualism, and the New Meaning of "Liberty" in Contemporary Society**

In *Age of Fracture*, Daniel Rodgers argues that in the last three decades of the twentieth century the US experienced a key cultural paradigm shift during which we began to think less about populations and communal values and instead emphasized individual liberties. (Rodgers 2011) Classical liberal notions of "social justice" and "fairness" gave way to the prizing of the principle of autonomy and free choice, understood on the left to be a flexibility with which one could define one's own identity, and on the right to indicate a new preoccupation with unregulated markets, the promise of upward mobility, and the prioritization of the downsizing of the role of oversight in government. For the last half century, the ground has been made fertile for a broad and sweeping undermining of state-issued powers, even when exercised for the good of the people, for example, in the form of preventive, health-protective policy-making. It is in this context that the assertion of "religious rights" has come to be reinterpreted as an extension of this presumptive prerogative of autonomy and, correspondingly, as a challenge to a history of precedentsetting Supreme Court decisions over the previous century that had previously imposed checks and balances on the expression of religiosity and the importance of individual belief within the larger society. This development is not so much an overcoming of the "separation of church and state" as it is a holding at bay church *and* state in deference to the ideology of individualism and the unfettered expression of belief.

This historical context perhaps explains why there is no coherent basis, particularly in the Abrahamic traditions on display in the present examination, to reject policies in which COVID-19 vaccines come to be mandated. For, in such a social environment there *need* be no coherent basis. The first order assertion of one's claim to individual expression of belief is all one needs. The current pandemic, during which, for a time, in certain environments (e.g., health care settings in this country), mandates became a crucial part of the toolkit in the "mitigation effort", is just one case study. However, the thought experiment in which we consider how things might play out over the next pandemic, likely not another hundred years away this time around, is illuminating. Without a system of checks and balances where the assertion of exemption on the basis of individual belief is all one needs to opt out, no pandemic can be deemed to be too severe, nor the consequences of not contributing to herd immunity considered to be too grave, to deprive one of the autonomous right to assert dominion over one's body. This development would represent a total triumph of the ethos Rodgers describes emerging over the last twentieth century. If it lasts, it signals the death of communal action, shared values, civic policy-making, and ultimately public health itself.

In such a future, actions of "liberty" collectively risk being repurposed for an enduring state of tyranny, especially for the most vulnerable among us who depend on the taking of health-protective action among, and on behalf of, strangers. Such an attitude could not have helped us to overcome the spread of cholera in the 19th century when, with the revelation of the contaminated Broad Street water pump in London, it was quickly understood that clean water is something in which we all have a common interest (Smith 2002). The brainchild of dot maps, because of which the contaminated pump could in the first place be located, is itself an innovation of collective action. The basic tools of public health, not just vaccines or compulsory policies, depend on a notion of the individual that is reliant on, and to an extent deferential to, the society of which it is a part.

I have also tried to argue, however, that it is not just policymaking and the concerted efforts of public health leaders that are weakened by the unnuanced and ultimately poorly understood interpretation of the unchecked right to religious expression as reflected in the First Amendment. Religion itself, and in particular the significance of the longevity and congregation-forming aspects of religious community, also hang in the balance. When religious leaders go out of their way to endorse the COVID-19 vaccines as safe and effective instruments against a plague, they do so not merely out of love of their flock, but also from a position of authority as ambassadors of their respective traditions. Among other things, *as* religious leaders, they are presumably depending on the good historical influence that religion has many times over had on the secular affairs in the society where that tradition is prevalent. In other words, their authority is legitimate because, again to return to a notion popularized by William James, of the fruits (they are in the best position to show) their religion has borne over time (James 1985, p. 19). Religion and religious expression are meant to work with the world, not apart from, and certainly not against, it. All the more reason the standard criterion of "sincerely held beliefs" makes sense. The alternative, ideological assertion, is a shortcut as well as a failure to embrace the authority of religious communities and the legal conventions of the nation.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
