**4. From Religion to Ideology**

It bears reminding that I have not suggested that the *category* of religious exemptions should be eliminated or is not legitimate. Rather, I have called into question the manner in which exemptions are being invoked with unprecedented frequency in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. I now, perhaps controversially, want to suggest that religious exemptions, insofar as they have been applied to vaccine mandates for COVID-19, are not even "religious", but ideological. To be sure, I want to argue that the debate about whether vaccine mandates should be enforced under exigent health emergencies is not being driven by religious considerations so much as by the realities of a highly polarized political environment fueled by the suspicion of governmental intrusion into the private sphere.

Shortly after COVID-19 vaccines became available to the public, a survey conducted in successive waves from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Interfaith Youth Core (IFCY), the largest conducted to date on the issue of the influence of religion on views of vaccination, revealed that over half of Americans who reported attending religious services regularly found their encouragement to get vaccinated in the faith-based approach to which they were exposed at those services (PRRI-IFYC November 2021). This survey affirmed that in the case of African-Americans, an initially vaccine-hesitant group, attending services had a resoundingly net-positive effect in encouraging participation (PRRI-IFYC April 2021). In terms of perceived compatibility with the ethos of one's religious teachings in America, exhortations considered in religious settings were found to be consistent with vaccine acceptance, particularly when injunctions to "love the neighbor", a cross-cultural value affirmed across traditions, was invoked. As the survey reports:

A majority of Americans (53%) agree with the statement "Because getting vaccinated against COVID-19 helps protect everyone, it is a way to live out the religious principle of loving my neighbors", while 44% disagree with the statement. ... With the notable exceptions of white evangelical Protestants (46%) and Hispanic Protestants (49%), majorities of all major religious groups agree that getting vaccinated is a way to live out the religious principle of loving their neighbors. More than six in ten Jewish Americans (69%), Mormons (66%), non-Christian religious Americans (64%), and other Christians (61%) agree with the statement. Majorities of other Protestants of color (58%), white Catholics (57%), Hispanic Catholics (55%), white mainline Protestants (55%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (53%), and Black Protestants (52%) agree. (PRRI-IFYC April 2021)

The survey supplied compelling evidence that religious leaders are regarded as sources of authority in providing sanction for taking a vaccine, and the majority of those polled (71%) reflected confidence that the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine took into account the needs of religious people, including one in five (20%) who were *very* confident that the needs of religious people were being taken into account (PRRI-IFYC April 2021). Significantly, across nearly every major group, fewer than two in ten people rejected the idea that the teachings of their religion prohibited vaccinations for childhood diseases, while even fewer reported that the COVID-19 vaccine stood in conflict with their personal religious beliefs (13%), or that the teachings of their religion prohibited them from getting vaccinated for COVID-19 (10%). The survey concluded that Americans by and large believe too many people use religion as an excuse to sidestep COVID-19 vaccine requirements, with 45% going so far as to assert that in general no one should be allowed to use religion as a basis for an anti-mandate platform (PRRI-IFYC November 2021).

What, then, accounts for the uptick in the percentage of people claiming "religious freedom" as the grounds for exemption status, if, when polled, religious insiders tend not to identify their religions as a source of hesitancy or refusal? The PRRI-IFYC survey was illuminating here as well: "Beyond Fox News, the rise of far-right media outlets dramatically affect vaccine hesitancy among Republicans", with Republicans (45%) less likely than independents (58%) and Democrats (73%) to be vaccine accepters. The survey reports that attitudes towards vaccination are strongly influenced by television news consumption, the highest rates of resistance occurring among Republicans who trust farright news sources the most (42%) (PRRI-IFYC April 2021). It turns out that even the majority of Republicans who indicated that they trusted mainstream news sources (58%) or Fox News (54%) accept vaccines. By contrast, only about three in ten Republicans who reported trusting only far-right news (32%) or no television news (30%) do so (PRRI-IFYC November 2021). These findings suggest that while religion might serve as the *claimed* reason for vaccine hesitancy and refusal, politically biased media outlets were the real reason.

Notably, Title VII, under which religious exemptions are claimed, is not invoked in the comparable case of disabled individuals who are entitled to the same accommodations as refusers considered under religious grounds. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 specifies that employers should offer the same "reasonable" accommodation to disabled Americans as they do for religious Americans, yet there is no evidence that this community is availing itself of the right to this accommodation with anywhere near the same frequency as individuals who claim religious exemption status. If anything, the opposite is so: Those with disabilities report difficulty obtaining vaccines relative to the general population to the vaccines they *do* want. In one prominent study, an analysis of the National Immunization Survey Adult COVID Module (NIS-ACM), researchers concluded that in comparison to adults without a disability, those with a disability were less likely to have received a vaccination, but not for want of trying but because of comparatively restricted access. (Ryerson et al. 2021).

This contrast between religious and disabled communities becomes even more conspicuous in light of new research that establishes the correlation between political orientation, susceptibility to conspiracy theorizing, and vaccine resistance, finding that conservative worldviews that uphold vaccine resistance do so as a symbol of the exercising of freedom in society overrun by big government (Albrecht 2022). In a well-publicized recent study, Don Albrecht found that counties across the US with a high proportion of Trump voters had more per capita cases and deaths from COVID-19 than those with fewer Trump voters (Albrecht 2021). This suggests that the discussion about vaccine refusal based on resistance emanating from religious doctrine or worldview would be different in an alternative political environment. That the sincerity of held religious beliefs is no longer required might account for the conflation between exemption status *claimed* on behalf of one's religion and that actually *based* on one's religious belief, a distinction that may have not been as relevant in a previous epoch of adjudication.
