Religion is a touchy subject here. We respect freedom of religion, but some Kogs simply cannot fathom how a rational person belongs to any religion at all. That stems from a misunderstanding of the diversity of modern religion, confusing different strands of religion.
Religious belief today can generally be divided into three main categories. I am approaching this from a Jewish perspective, where I am more familiar with the details, but it seems to work pretty similarly in other religious traditions as well. The three categories are, roughly, secular, non-orthodox, and fundamentalist.
Among us Jews, secular may well be the largest group. These are people who identify as ethnic and culturally Jewish, but who do not belong to any religious organization, and do not observe any religious traditions. They might get buried in a Jewish cemetery and give Chanuka presents instead of Christmas, but they also eat ham and cheese sandwiches without guilt. Even on bagels. Similarly outside of our tribe, these are the atheists and the “nones”, becoming the largest religious group in the US, mainly descendants of Christians who have abandoned religion.
The non-orthodox category of Jews includes the members of various groups, including Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative/Masorti (“traditional”), and arguably Humanist (explicitly atheist). One might even fit Modern Orthodoxy into this category because it fits the same essential characteristic: We do not believe in an anthropomorphic, intercessional diety. We are fully rational. I took a course from a rabbi who (I think he had a book on the topic) explained how over Jewish history, there are at least nine different, identifiable concepts of the diety (Adonai). The oldest is the rather fearsome, vengeful sort found in some Bible stories. But the unifying trait is the one-ness. Just what that means is a topic in and of itself.
In the non-orthodox (and I’m using lower case because I am not referring to the specific denominations who use the word in their name) world, then, the diety is not a hairy thunderer who will strike you down if you disobey what your clergyman says God says to do or not do. He may not even be a thing in the physical sense at all. I think of God as real, but as a real paradigm, real the way “intellectual property” is real but not something you can hide in your pocket. More of a meme-plex. The paradigm of God is that we non-Orthodox act as if He were real, and gave us some guidance to live by. But it’s really more of a unifying concept. God created man who created God. Such a God, then, does not punish, but teaches. Worship is an act of community unity, not a way to ensure that the sun rises tomorrow.
The fundamentalist world is something else again. They believe that their diety is a living, thinking, thing who is watching their every act. In Judaism, these are the “ultra-Orthodox”, better called haredi, which translates to “quaker” or “trembler”, as they “tremble before The Lord”. These are often tribal people (the largest populations are around New York and Jerusalem, mostly led by a hereditary rebbe) who live apart from the secular world. Christian fundamentalism is the dominant religious belief in much of the southern US, and they're pretty foreign to us too.
Fundamentalists are the ones who believe in an intercessional diety, one who directly acts on the physical world. If they disobey, they will be punished. And if they pray or act the right way, they will be rewarded. This belief is a prerequisite to falling for the scam that is doing so much to hurt the US, prosperity gospel, wherein people think that giving money to a preacher makes God happy and who will reward them with riches, and where being rich is a sign of being favored by God. Government programs that help the poor, it follows, are thus unnecessary and perhaps ungodly. Prosperity gospel was kind of funny when Reverend Ike was performing it and selling $20 prayer shawls (and unlike most later ones, he was not a biblical literalist). It isn’t funny when it gives us Donald Trump (they think he’s actually rich).
I’ve been enjoying Markos’ postings about antivaxxers who caught Covid. It’s guilt-ridden schadenfreude, to be sure; we don’t actually want people to die before their time. And the “sorryantivaxxer” site has more of it. But reading through the stories, one thing stands out. Virtually all of them believe in an intercessional diety. They think that they can keep disease away, or cure it, via prayer. They all think that enough prayer, from enough people, can convince their diety to save them. A corollary of this, though, is that they don’t really see a need for vaccine, as that suggests a lack of faith. And in much of Christianity, not just prosperity gospel, salvation by faith is critical — you get to go to heaven when you die if you had enough faith, otherwise a worse fate awaits you, and the primary purpose of life is to earn a good afterlife. (This is very different from Judaism, where we do not think about an afterlife; the Law is guidance for this life. But there is still vaccine resistance among some haredim, even though the rabbinate supports vaccination.)
No actual major religious denomination, including the fundamentalist ones in the southern US, is opposed to vaccination. There is few “legitimate” religious objections. There is however personal religious belief that vaccination is unnecessary or possibly harmful to their status with their diety, especially when they think his prophet is named Donald. That makes religious objections very tricky — it is not actual religion that leads them to object, just personal religiosity, often rooted in folk beliefs or pay-to-pray charlatans.
I don’t have a good suggestion for how we can convince fundamentalists that taking vaccine is a sign of faith too, but that seems to be the key. Time and again they get sick and die and their families think that they somehow must have displeased their intercessional God or Jesus. It is sad to watch, and it helps keep the pandemic from ending.