Religious Exceptions to COVID Vaccine Mandates

Doriane Lambelet Coleman is Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, and Associate of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine

Just as individual cells are permeable so that disease can move from cell to cell and spread within our bodies, so too our bodies are permeable so that disease can move from individual to individual and spread within our communities. Those who’ve recovered from infectious disease typically have some degree of immunity, which results from the antibodies we develop to fight the infection.  Like soldiers who’ve defeated the enemy and stand guard for a time to repel further invasions, antibodies linger in our cells, remembering the disease and how to fight it if it returns.  The immunity that comes from having survived disease may be incomplete or temporary, but so long as it resides within us, we’re unlikely to become ill again ourselves, and we’re also unlikely to contaminate others.

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Revival Statutes, Clergy Sexual Abuse, and COVID-19

Patrick Hornbeck is Chair and Professor of Theology at Fordham University

In the months before COVID-19 struck, Google news searches on the terms “religion” and “epidemic” returned two sets of stories the pandemic has largely eclipsed. One cluster of articles chronicled the opioid addictions sweeping U.S. communities, while the second reported on revelations about sexual abuse by clergy and other religious workers. The nation’s two largest religious groups, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, confronted patterns of abuse and concealment that victim-survivors and commentators in both traditions characterized as “epidemic” in proportion. Some state legislatures responded by extending statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse and other forms of sexual misconduct, by reviving expired civil claims up to a certain age, and/or by creating revival windows during which victims could pursue any claims against alleged abusers and the institutions that employed them.

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The COVID Crisis as a Crisis of Trust

Brett G. Scharffs is Rex E. Lee Chair and Professor of Law and Director of the Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School

Ask a family therapist what is most likely to destroy a marriage, or a business consultant what is most likely to damage a successful enterprise, or a political scientist what will sabotage a nation – and you are likely to get the same answer: Trust, or to put it negatively, the end of trust.

When we stop trusting each other, or the institutions we inhabit, it is difficult to imagine what else we might do right that will compensate for the harm done by the eradication of trust. Thus, it is through the “prism of trust” that I have been thinking about the coronavirus crisis and its effects on us as individuals, and upon our most important institutions, including for religious leaders and the institutions they steward.

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