**6. Religious Autonomy as a Blank Check, Christian Nationalism, and a Tension within the First Amendment**

The discussion to this point has not substantively engaged the juridical arguments for or against the permissibility of considering objections to public policy that are "religious" in nature as legitimate. I have not made a legal argument. Rather, I have focused on the shift in the way in which religious objections are *de facto* currently being deployed in contrast to the recent past. "Sincerely held beliefs" is no longer the standard for religious accommodation. Individual declaration, seemingly free of any reasonable constraint, is. My aim has been to look at the consequences of this shift. The issuance of a blank check based on personal liberty to public policy is the undermining of public policy itself, particularly during a public health crisis. Finally, the argument above has been intended as an examination of the nature of belief itself and what, technically, makes it "religious" to begin with. If religious *leaders* are themselves to serve as guides, we have grounds for concluding that exemptions claimed to necessary mandates in the name of religion during public health crises constitute not only a formidable obstacle to the state's efforts to keep people safe at the level of population, but also an abuse of religious rationale. To be sure, in terms of

bodily autonomy, whatever grounds for *it* can be located in the first amendment, they are not synonymous with "religious liberty".

Or, rather, the shift reflects the ascension of a particular understanding of religious belief as the template for all others, namely, one that puts the interpretative authority of scripture solely in the hands of the individual believer while preferencing a sense of belief that concentrates on the fate of that believer at the hands of an infinite and all-powerful redeemer. In such an account, there is little allowance for deference to "population-level" concerns; the will of the individual trumps objections that potentially arise even from the community or congregation. John Fea identifies this "blank check" as a kind of "cherrypicking" of notions such as "my body is my temple" roughly expressed in verses such as Luke 17: "Jesus touched the leper and healed him, so I don't need a vaccine to be healed". (Council on Foreign Relations) This logic is part of a self-protective strategy in which no mortal has the prerogative to contravene God's will:

The vaccine is a threat on my liberty and rights as an American, but my rights and liberties as an American come from God, right? So this is not just a constitutional or Declaration of Independence, right, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights kind of threat. This is also a threat to the kind of divine order, the kind of nation that the United States is supposed to be. And it's deeply embedded in these ideas of Christian nationalism, or the idea that America is somehow a Christian national, is a special nation, is blessed by God. And God has given us rights in an exceptional way no other nation has. (Council on Foreign Relations)

This interpretation of the explanation of the shift to individual authority in claims of religious exemption is a kind of exceptionalism that utilizes subjectivism for purposes of nationalistic preference. In this account, rules that come from the authority of the state, especially in heterogenous, pluralistic settings, take a back seat to the imperative of Christian, and "American", interest. According to Christian nationalism, no "outside" authority is empowered to supersede native representations of one's manifest density among God's favored. At once, a radically individualistic account of choice and freedom in society is also a tribalist one, bereft of concession and compromise.

This is the state of affairs in which the current Supreme Court is presently poised to deliberate on the issue of how to interpret claimed religious exemptions. How this issue has been decided in recent cases suggests the Court will support proponents of the strong individualist/nationalist view. With regard to mitigation efforts implemented at the state level early on in the pandemic, on November 2020, in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, the Court determined New York's order violated First Amendment free exercise principles despite clear demonstration of exigent public health circumstances justifying the order, while in February 2021, the Court deemed unconstitutional a similar ban on indoor religious gatherings in Southern Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (Hodge 2022). In April of the same year, the Court again restricted the state's right to impose mitigation efforts, granting an injunction in another key case against regulations limiting at-home Bible studies. What these recent cases suggest is that public health concerns, which are population-level considerations, shall not take precedence over individual religious prerogative.

While it remains to be seen what the Supreme Court ultimately does with regard to upholding mandates in the case of FDA approved vaccines shown to be highly effective against contagious and deadly diseases such as COVID-19, it should be noted that the deference in these recent cases given to unqualified assertion of individual religious belief signals a resolution to a tension manifest within the First Amendment. The "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment has long been interpreted to safeguard citizens' rights to practice their religion in their own way on the condition that such practicing is compliant with upholding compelling governmental interests (Religious Freedom Restoration Act 1993). This check on the basic liberty of religious freedom is no longer to be taken for granted. The "liberty" of the First Amendment is precisely that no one is to be subject

to tyranny: *neither* religious minorities seeking to practice their faith in a society where most practice the majority faith, *nor* third parties environmentally enslaved by the exercise of harmful religious prerogatives. It is a fallacy to think that "my body, my choice", implemented as an unchallenged right without this standard internal check on the "free exercise" clause, will never lead to more harm than good. The rare mandate to keep the public safe during a pandemic defined by a deadly and contagious virus is meant to ensure the liberty of all, not just some. An analogy can here be drawn to the Second Amendment. The "freedom" entailed in the right to bear arms can, under tragic circumstances, can come to entail the deprivation of the very notion of liberty it is meant to uphold. Just ask parents who trusted the safety of their children in public spaces only to be informed after the fact, helplessly, that they lost their children in a mass shooting. In a "free" society they have become the victims of the tyranny of an environment unsafe for their children which they were powerless to alter. Full, unrestrained freedom can be the undoing of freedom.
