**5. Religious Leaders on the COVID-19 Vaccines and "Love thy Neighbor"**

This emerging hypothesis and claim that it is not religion itself which directly influences the opting out of public policy is given even more circumstantial credence by the support the majority of religious leaders have lent in their own voices to public and secular vaccine efforts. There is surprising and significant agreement among leaders of the world's major religious traditions that vaccines are not about oneself but the vulnerable "other", where great theological weight is placed on the preservation of a communal good in the form of the health and safety of a population. To the extent that there are deeply held cultural or individual justifications to be hesitant about vaccination mandates, these should be balanced against other reasons. Religious exemptions should not be regarded as a birthright, but something to be evaluated in a larger context, if only to ensure that religions and their leaders are not being exploited for ideological reasons. The analysis would be otherwise if religious leaders issued some statement about what is problematic about COVID-19 vaccines, as many did in the case of HPV vaccines for reasons relatable, if not convincing, to fellow religious insiders. But religious leaders have tended either to stay silent on COVID-19 vaccines or come out resoundingly in favor of them.

The PRRI-IFCY survey notes that one of the significant developments in the era of COVID-19 in religious communities in America has been the near consensus among religious leaders to lend support for vaccination efforts, support that is grounded in resources internal to their own traditions. Such arguments are both theological and ethical in nature, often referring to communal norms and shared understandings of scripture, in general featuring no standing objection to vaccines, with only occasional caveats to known dietary restrictions (Grabenstein 2013). With regard to COVID-19 specifically, the growing number of religious groups who have come out in favor of vaccination is impressive. For example, when the mRNA vaccines first became available, leaders in the Southern Baptist community comprising theologians and professors made the following public statement:

It is not possible to properly love a person and act so as to unnecessarily jeopardize their health. If by the minimal burden of wearing a mask, we can potentially protect others from grave illness, then it seems we have a moral obligation to wear a mask. The same can be said for COVID-19 vaccinations. If by being vaccinated we can protect others from illness, then we have a corresponding obligation, given our Lord's command to love neighbors, to be vaccinated. Vaccinations not only protect me, but also protect other vulnerable members of society. (Arbo et al. 2020)

In the same vein, tying the exhortation to get vaccinated to injunctions to cultivate compassion and keep in mind the vulnerable, the Pope instructs Catholics: "Thanks to God's grace and the work of many, we now have vaccines to protect us against COVID-19 ... Getting the vaccines that are authorized by the respective authorities is an act of love" (Juffras 2021). Likewise, the Islamic Society of America and the National Black Muslim COVID Coalition have determined that even in the event vaccines might contain non-Halal ingredients, necessity overrides prohibition. Of utmost importance is preventing the spread of a highly contagious and deadly disease that could wreak havoc in Muslim and human communities (Juffras). As for Jewish communities across all denominations, the overriding normative value of *pikuach nefesh* (the "saving of lives") takes precedence:

Jewish law is strongly and invariably supportive of vaccination, including mandatory vaccination with suspension of non-medical exemptions if the health of the surrounding community is at stake. *Halachic* views do not provide a deterrent for Jews to inoculate; rather, it would be "*halachically irresponsible*" to not vaccinate. (Muravsky et al. 2023)

The exhortation is again unequivocal and decisively rooted in communal care for the vulnerable neighbor. These examples, ecumenically reflected across traditions, are not meant to be exhaustive or not allowing for exceptions, but representative of attitudes among leaders in the Abrahamic faiths of the West. There are no specific disclaimers in any of these instances with regard to the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Even when usual concerns are reported, as in the case of dietary considerations in Muslim traditions, leaders have issued a specification that this consideration should not carry the day.

Importantly, faith leaders have proactively advised their congregants *not* to worry about usual sources of ambivalence when technology rubs up against science. For example, leaders of Christian and Catholic faiths go out of their way to make known that in contrast to prior vaccines, fetal cells are not used in the creation, development, and general production of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines (Juffras). With regard to the Abrahamic traditions, we can readily point to the injunction in Protestant and Catholic traditions from Luke 10 to "love one's neighbor as oneself", or Rabbi Hillel's inspirational instruction "if I am only for myself, what am I?" in the Jewish tradition, or the observation issued by the canonical and revered ninth century Muslim Persian theologian and scholar, Saheeh Al-Bukhari: "None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself". All three of these authoritative sentiments imply an obligation to participate in population protective action when the opportunity arises because, to reiterate what public health officials are often wont to say, "the vaccine is not about you".

The larger point here, however, is that when we pay attention to context and the larger picture, evidence of a misleading tactic among exempters under the banner of "religious freedom" begins to emerge. Not only are religious exemptions typically not "religious" in nature, but they are not representative of the religious traditions they invoke. More likely, their exemptions serve as a litmus test for political power in the public square and are not really about religion at all. The familiar mantra, "my body, my choice", a rallying cry against the intrusion of big government, is in this light more plausibly interpreted as an expression of political power than the advocacy of a religious norm. (Astor 2021).

Finally, such rhetoric raises critical questions about the deployment of the terms such as "liberty" or "autonomy" in the public square. The concept of liberty is taken to safeguard individual freedom, but in the context of a pandemic liberty, counterintuitively, becomes an expression of tyranny at the level of population. In keeping with the injunctions to "love the neighbor" we have seen featured in the Abrahamic traditions, the unchecked assertion of individual rights, given biological realities and the nature of herd immunity, becomes a kind of enslavement and imposition on those who are dependent on the actions of unknown others to assure their well-being. In such a context, the "medical liberty" of one becomes a medical oppression of many. It may be that liberty is emblematic of the "American way", a familiar and prized value for which there is historical precedent. However, *this* sort of invocation is not a justification for non-participation that we are likely to hear from our religious leaders, for whom by and large, and to their credit, the welfare of all everywhere is instead the driver of what is motivating their messaging on COVID-19.
