**7. Do** *Religious Exemptions* **Lean Right or Left?**

A response that seems unlike the above and has caused consternation in the body politic is the request for religious exemptions from vaccinations and masks and prohibitions of public gatherings. The shepherd of the flock grants exemptions! To many, this seems more like resistance to the government, but it is a churchly response when the stakes are high, and there is considerable public pressure. Such exemptions on church letterhead are rarely offered by mainstream churches, nearly unanimous in support of vaccinations and masking, and willing to experiment with zoomed worship. Two-thirds of U.S. adults say that most people who claim religious objections to a COVID-19 vaccine are "just using religion as an excuse to avoid the vaccine" (Nortey 2022). Only 10% of the public seem to believe that pandemic policies conflict with their religious beliefs, but they manage to garner much attention. And yet requests to accommodate individual consciences are typically made and answered among conservative Christians.

Conservative clergy have offered exemption letters to those in their own flocks, often emphasizing freedom of conscience rather than specific dangers of the vaccine itself. In rural Hudson, Iowa, Sam Jones informed his small congregation at Faith Baptist Church that he is willing to provide them with a four-paragraph letter stating that "a Christian has no responsibility to obey any government outside of the scope that has been designated by God". Jones's stories are told on the website, *The Gatekeepers: Church, culture, politics*, available by googling. Online, a loose web of largely independent faith leaders has volunteered to provide exemption letters to those who request them. An independent evangelist in Texas is offering letters online in exchange for a donation. In California, a megachurch pastor is offering a letter to anyone who checks a box confirming the person is a "practicing Evangelical that adheres to the religious and moral principles outlined in the Holy Bible". The letters are not necessary, experts say, but they can help bolster claims that religious objections to the vaccine are sincere. Generally, such exemptions are not offered by Catholics or mainstream Protestants.

Of course, groups outside the churches can capitalize on what some churches do. Indeed, one of the most noticed phenomena in the US is with regard to Trump-voting Christians, who voted 80% for him in 2016, or neo-evangelicals and neo-conservatives looking roughly the same. Indeed, there is a debate about whether conservative Republicans have taken over evangelicalism or vice versa. It is true that religion-fueled action can turn into political movements or that conservative Republicans can capitalize on the religionbased pandemic backlash. And it may be that conservative Republicanism has capitalized on the pandemic backlash as a further argument for small government. If political backlash were to shift elections to conservatives, this could become the biggest theme in the social drama, not whether Christianity is "liberal" or "conservative".

But even as neo-conservative evangelicals may imagine they are a decisive religiouspolitical movement, partly as an after-effect of COVID-19, liberal Christians may dream that a global pandemic could become the call for a new holistic era of mutual cooperation and concern for a world family in which the wealthy and privileged—and effective government aid—must arise to sustain the needy. There is evidence from polls (Pew Research Center 2020) that spirituality can aid people with the everyday comfort of faith and mental relaxation in times of crisis and dangerous diseases. Religion can hold up images of the entire community, of society as a commonwealth, and seek the good of the whole. Religion can assist health professionals by urging and encouraging people to wear masks and get vaccinated. Religion has urged governments of wealthy countries to be generous with their COVID-19 aid to poor countries. One of the traditional roles of religious individuals and religious communities has been to serve a positive, integrative, charitable function in crisis situations.

At the same time, evangelical nationalism can be seen as its own kind of armed civil religion, the unquestioned assertion of America as God's favorite country. The use of force, with the AR-15 as its icon, is aimed at defending white supremacy and other values coming into vogue. Possibly the chief angle driving conservative evangelicals into anti-vax postures is that they want to be non-conforming nationalists with their own agenda, as we saw above in the stories of small churches chasing larger memberships. If they have also been pushed around by the state regarding when and how they can worship, that is an additional impetus. But mostly, they are out to build a national movement, and they can see the kinds of people already becoming activists in the anti-mask and ant-vax mode. They are likely to accept free market and free choice fundamentalism as an expression of God's right hand and connect without reservation conservative small government/unregulated capitalism/extreme caution about social constructions like "justice" or "firearms".

By contrast, a Christian social gospel would seem to imply that church and government achieve together a just society, building social programs for the unhoused, the hungry, the sick, the hungry, and the imprisoned—among whom Christians are to see Jesus, according to Jesus' last judgment story in Matthew 25 (Heinz 2022). In this move, however, conservative Christians see not a Christian ethic but a "cultural Marxism" buttressed by tired leftwing slogans. They might assert this as a way to protect the authenticity of their own understanding of religion, or they may resist a social gospel mentality in the name of their own libertarianism or in a political conservatism disguised as conservative religion. The social gospel, once regarded in the early 20th century as America's distinctive contribution to world Christianity in response to the late 19th century Gilded Age, has been derided by American fundamentalists and many evangelicals as a false delusion that leads Christians away from salvation in the hereafter that is their destiny and calling, relieving the expected behaviors of sanctified selves by displacing them onto the government. To such religious conservatives, Christianity is about individualist freedom and redemption. Any new deal is never to use the word *social,* especially if it is twinned with justice.

#### **8. Pastoral Action**

A less political label than left or right, conservative or liberal, is to conceive of religious leaders' responses as pastoral action, borrowing from the New Testament the concept of Jesus and Christian leaders as shepherds. *Pastoral* is a mellow word in Christianity, evoking a shepherd tending the flock, giving spiritual guidance to the community, or urging believers to stay the course.

"Intervention", that is, resistance in a social system, may be a religious concept, and it can certainly be of high value in Christianity. A pastoral approach, by slight contrast, is deeply caring but not always gentle. It could be coaching for resistance to government encroachment, as often in the New Testament. I see this in a story that unfolded in an evangelical Christian day school on the East Coast. Friends whose children attend that private Christian school asked me for advice as they faced a vaccination and mask dilemma. The "teaching pastor" at this large church issued a long and carefully argued

manifesto about why the school should not accept masking or vaccination mandates from the government. What struck me was his deliberate clarification that he was *not* objecting to the science or public health issues surrounding vaccinations and masks. As I studied the pastor's position statement, I came to see something I had not observed in discussions on this topic. I think it may be more common to evangelical resistance than most people thought.

This pastor saw the individualizing nuclear family as the first and last, and often only, carrier of Christian values in the public arena, the first and indispensable unit of resistance to society, culture, and government whose practices are often likely to run counter to Christian teaching and the practice of Christ himself. Government overreach is likely to impose, with sanctions, cultural values that concern the church. If Christian families (typically with the father as head) did not constantly exercise vigilance against external moral forces, if they did not hold the line, they might lose their well-practiced habit of principled resistance to contemporary (and often *au currant*) public values, including, without mentioning them, legal legitimation of gay marriage, LGBTQ, trans recognition, and abortion. A compliant church accustomed to an agreement with government and cultural trends might gradually lose its instincts for resistance, and indeed its right to resist under the freedom of religion clause of the Constitution, much fought before the Supreme Court in the last fifty years. If the science and medical authority of vaccinations and masks were not the problem, the outside force of the government's ability to bind the Christian conscience was. The government's recent and unexpected establishment of new sets of hitherto objectionable values had further delegitimized government, in the eyes of the church, as a force for the public good and rang the alarm bell calling for religious resistance. The teaching pastor saw it as his mission to train his congregation in the habit of instinctive resistance and protest to fortify the church against overpowering government and social institutions as carriers and champions of non-Christian values. Of course, the forced closing of churches or governmental directions regarding what could or could not be done when Christian communities gathered were often marked as particularly egregious.

I was not immediately prepared to interrogate these conservative oppositions to government further until I reflected on the unending calls for resistance and non-conformity in my own Christian leftism. In my book *After Trump: Achieving a New Social Gospel* (Heinz 2020), I call precisely for a social gospel that extends the church's reach, in part as a community of Christians lobbying the government into society on behalf of the poor. Indeed, I saw the social gospel as a form of resistance to and overcoming of Trumpism that dates back to Reagan's ideology of small government and almost complete neglect of those in need (imagine a government unwilling to offer vaccinations for COVID-19). I wanted Christian movements that opposed not only governmental policies of gross inequality but also invoked ambitious new government policies on behalf of the common good, especially pleading the cause of "the least of these". In my book *Matthew 25 Christianity: Redeeming Church and Society* (Heinz 2022), I call for a leftist Christianity that would regain the ability to see the presence of Jesus amidst the "least of these". A good deal of that book built on compelling observations and critiques of Max Weber more than a century earlier and was devoted to vigorous critiques of deregulated American capitalism as the government's default position and, in response, to vigorous opposition to the government (Weber 1905). The legacy of the Chicago School of economics had been responsibility only to *shareholders (economic stockholders)* but never to *stakeholders (citizens of the commons).* With great regret, I note that neo-conservative evangelicals are much more effective at saying "don't" than liberal Christians are at saying "do". Was I in the same boat as the conservative *resistance* to the government, but from the left, not the right? This raises the obvious issue that resistance to the government can come from the left as well as the right. Indeed, the phrase "non-conforming resistance movement" that periodically describes Christianity in different ages is more likely to derive from the left than the right.

A well-known test case occurs to me. It is not uncommon in Christian ethics classes to assign the book *Lest Innocent Blood be Shed* (Hallie 1984), which tells the story of how a historic Huguenot community in the French village of Le Chambon resisted the Nazi Vichy government and managed to save the lives of four to five thousand Jews who were hidden from deportation. How did this come about? The Huguenots were French Protestants following the 16th century Reformation, who had a long history of persecution and expulsion from Catholic France, but over time some were allowed to remain under a posture of separatism. Philip Hallie argues that these Protestants, over time, developed the posture of resistance as natural to their lives, to their moral fiber. If the government forbade the ringing of the church bell, they rang it. If the government said to raise the Nazi flag, they refused to run it up the pole. When Vichy ordered them to identify and turn over the Jews in hiding, they were fully prepared to bear real risks and resist.

The irony of these resistance comparisons is not lost on me. Comparing modern evangelicals with a Le Chambon persecuted community raises a new question: How would you decide Le Chambon as right and American conservative evangelicals as wrong? Granted, it must be the issues, not the practice of resistance itself, one might reply, but the formal comparison itself raises two questions: Does Le Chambon, in fact, appeal to a Biblical ethic, while American evangelicals, in fact, appeal to political conservatism (e.g., Reagan's notion that big government is always wrong)? And when liberal Christians oppose the government, is it because the government fails to produce justice across the land? Does the left, then, oppose the government in order to get the government to do good, to cooperate with the churches in practicing a social gospel, while evangelicals are determined to keep the government from doing bad?

But do not conservative Christians resist the government in order to avoid being forced by government to surrender *Christian* obedience to *political* obedience? Is the evangelical nuclear family not being called on to practice a steady line of defense and non-surrender that is, in many ways, admirable? We saw above that epidemics, natural disasters, and upheaval can become test cases of whether and when religious cooperation or resistance is called for. Pandemics such as the one through which we are currently living can reveal the emperor has no clothes. If these historical moments of crisis have historically brought about social change, or at least revealed cracks in the system, what role does the prevailing national culture, whether libertarian conservatism, deregulated capitalism, or a New Deallike social gospel, play in the probabilities of religious resistance to, or cooperation with, government?
