Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, has announced that he and his staff “are neither offering nor encouraging members to seek religious exemptions from the vaccine mandates.” At first blush, this would seem to be swimming against the tide of evangelical opinion that the COVID vaccine is a mortal sin because they say it contains fetal cells. So why has Jeffress taken the stand he has? First, a little background.
There are two kinds of conservative evangelical leaders. Those who have a deep and abiding faith in God and do their level best to lead lives that would make Jesus proud. And those who cynically use Christianity as a tool to amass power and wealth. The vast majority of American conservative evangelicals are the second kind. And Jeffress is among their number.
He is a long-time backer of Trump. Even after the January 6th Capitol insurrection, he was tweeting his support for the now ex-President. Jeffress is an advocate of Trump as a modern-day Cyrus — the Persian Emperor who, although not Jewish himself, freed the C.6th BCE Jews from their captivity in Babylon and allowed them to build a temple in Israel.
The point of Jeffress's argument is that, although Trump was personally a moral pig, he was enabling Jeffress to pursue his misogynistic, homophobic, anti-immigrant crusade. “An enemy of my enemy is my friend”, if you will. This enthusiasm for Trump was instrumental in whipping his congregation into ecstatic support for the serial failure. It was a scene repeated in megachurches from coast to coast. Which raises the question, why is Jeffress advocating for something so disturbing to his base?
The answer has nothing to do with moral clarity or doing the right thing. It comes from a sense that the right is losing control of the vaccine mandate. COVID is becoming a political millstone for them. And most importantly it is losing them the political support to enact their hateful agenda.
Story after story of anti-vaxxer preachers and pundits dying of COVID is taking the steam out of the anti-science movement. Many prominent Republican Governors have bet their political futures on being pro-freedom at the expense of COVID controls, and it is coming back to bite them in the ass. For example, polls make clear that DeSantis’s policies, while attractive to the lunatic fringe, are anathema to most Floridians, and he is losing support.
The message is getting out that it is the unvaccinated who are clogging up ICUs and dying. Added to that are government and employer mandates and financial incentives are pushing a pro-vax agenda. As is the CDC’s full approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.
The main objection among the self-declared religious is that the vaccine is the product of fetal tissue. It isn’t. It is tested using the descendent cells of fetal cells originally harvested decades ago. Pharmaceutical companies continue to use these lab-produced cells because of the consistency they provide. But they are not used in the production of the vaccine.
And as Jeffress himself points out the COVID vaccines are hardly the only drugs that have been tested with the same fetal cells, as he said in an email to the AP,
“Christians who are troubled by the use of a fetal cell line for the testing of the vaccines would also have to abstain from the use of Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, Ibuprofen, and other products that used the same cell line if they are sincere in their objection,”
And the pro-vaccine advocates are not alone. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America issued a statement on Thursday that
“the hierarchs unanimously affirmed that the Church not only permits vaccinations against diseases (e.g. polio, smallpox), but that She encourages Her Faithful, after medical tests and approbations, to be vaccinated with the approved vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).”
Adding, “there is no exemption in the Orthodox Church for Her faithful from any vaccination for religious reasons, including the coronavirus vaccine.”
Both the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have said Catholics can receive the vaccines in good conscience. Although some conservative Catholic groups are bucking the Vatican (Pope infallible? Apparently not.)
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America issued a recent statement encouraging vaccine use and saying that “there is no evident basis for religious exemption” in its own or the wider Lutheran tradition.
Other religious groups, such as the Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization for Orthodox Judaism, and the United Methodist Church, have encouraged people to get vaccines but have not issued policy statements on exemptions.
The Fiqh Council of North America, made up of Islamic scholars, has advised Muslims to receive the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and to debunk “baseless rumors and myths” about them.
It is clear, neither faith nor facts support calls for religious exemptions. It is just some bloody-minded, anti-social, selfish idiots making things up. And Jeffress is all too aware that he is running out of idiots.