vaccines

Evangelicals Abusing Religious Exemptions to Avoid Getting Vaccinated

Many businesses have implemented vaccine mandates for their employees, but most add in language about a religious exemption to fend off lawsuits.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, has recommended that employers make reasonable efforts to accommodate employees with “sincerely held religious beliefs” to comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Evangelicals who’d rather please their false orange messiah than do the right thing and get vaccinated to protect themselves and their neighbors think the religious exemption is their “get out of jail free card.” There are downloadable forms Christians can use to claim religious exemptions.

“I am against vaccines on religious grounds” isn’t a magical legal phrase that will exempt you from vaccine mandates by employers or government entities. You have to demonstrate that your beliefs are sincere, and if you are granted a religious exemption your employer may force you to wear a mask, socially distant and take frequent invasive COVID tests. Jesus on a popsicle, just get the damn vaccine.

Why should religious beliefs be held in such high regard considering the world’s major religions accept the following patently ridiculous myths as the Gospel truth:

Sacred underwear protects believers from spiritual contamination and, according to some adherents, from fire and speeding bullets.

A talking donkey scolded a prophet.

Believers can drink poison or get bit by poisonous snakes without being harmed.

Waving a chicken over your head can take away your sins.

A race of giants once roamed the earth, the result of women and fallen angels interbreeding.

In the end times, God’s chosen people will be gathered together in Jackson County, Missouri.

Putting a dirty milk glass and a plate from a roast beef sandwich in the same dishwasher can contaminate your soul.

There will be an afterlife in which exactly 144,000 people get to live eternally in Paradise.

If you have a philosophical or scientific objection against vaccines, tough shit. But if you have a religious objection, you can refuse a vaccine and put your community at risk. Does that make any sense?

Evangelicals Are a Greater Threat to Democracy Than the Pandemic

Evangelicals have a tenuous relationship empirical facts, truth, science and reality itself. Anything that conflicts with their narrow interpretation of the Bible is anathema. Their motto is: the Bible says, I believe it, don’t confuse me with facts.

Evangelicals mistrust academia, science and any other institution that threatens their fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. It’s no surprise that most evangelicals don’t believe in climate change or the efficacy of vaccines.

Evangelical anti-vaxxers are militant, some would say evangelical, in their opposition to the COVID vaccines. They try to convert everyone to their Neanderthal views on vaccines in general, and the COVID vaccines in particular.

Now that the highly contagious delta variant has become the most common variant in the United States it’s imperative that the media, educators, medical professionals and social influencers emphasis the reality that the pandemic isn’t over and that the best way to defeat it by getting vaccinated.

Brian Kaylor argues that the delta variant should be dubbed the “evangelical variant” because of their penchant for refusing to be vaccinated.

I would argue that evangelicals are the disease that is infecting Christianity, the social order and democracy itself. Evangelicalism is as much an existential threat as the pandemic.

Fight stupidity, ignorance and the religious tomfoolery and the pandemic and get vaccinated.