So a local church sent out letters to their parishioners about how to file for a religious exemption for vaccinations. This is the church that went to court (with other churches) to stop the government from applying health protocols to larger gatherings.
I can understand that some people might not want to get vaccinated for medical reasons. But there are zero reasons in the Christian religion to not do what’s necessary to love your neighbor. Vaccinations are a way for Christians to behave as servants of their neighbors. And in my mind, it’s reprehensible for churches to not just allow but to sponsor the movement to avoid vaccination. They are becoming plague hotspots.
This church already had COVID go through its congregation because it refuses reasonable sanitation methods. They are exposing the elderly and kids to the disease because in their theology it is better to trust God than to trust medicine. But God and medicine are not opposed. God and science are not opposed. God and reason are not opposed. The center of the Christian religion is that God became the Word—the incarnate Reason.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if this theological nonsense was confined to religious affairs that have little meaning in the world. But this nonsense spreads diseases, and what makes it far worse is that it paints the name of “Jesus” on these irrational behaviors.
If a religion advises its adherents to suffer from things that are fixable (such as abusive relationships) then the harm is somewhat confined to the willing participants, foolish and personally destructive as that behavior might be. But when a religion advises its followers that in order to show “faith” it is necessary to become sickened from a deadly disease that can also be passed along to the innocent, it’s time to call that religion a destructive cult.
It is yet another example of the insanity of the many people who have abandoned their senses and integrity in order to “prove a point” about their god, as if it is attractive to proclaim a message that says you must harm your neighbor to show your faith.
And what’s worse, the damage isn’t confined to these congregations but is spread to their neighbors, friends, and families. All because of an entirely imagined belief that their faith is under attack when it is not their faith, but their foolishness, that is called out.
For those of us who focus on the man and message and meaning of Jesus, this is hard to take. It is very hard to imagine Jesus calling us to do stupid & destructive things to show our faith. From my reading of the Christian scriptures (the New Testament), the Jesus who is represented there is someone who calls his followers to do the things that he did, and to do them more widely, & by doing so be part of his healing and restoration.
The kin-dom of Jesus is one of joy and mercy, of calling in and lifting up. I don’t see how trying to remain an infectious congregation demonstrates that calling.
It does, however, demonstrate something else entirely.
I can’t and won’t call behaviors I don’t like “unChristian,” as no one can define Christianity except by what they themselves think it means. Is it the words in your head that you think? Is it the actions that you take? Is it your character and motivations? But what I do try to do is read the text and form ideas about what the person in those texts says and demonstrates.
The Jesus of the texts doesn’t, in my mind, encourage harm for others. And so it is hard for me to confidently label the opponents of reasonable health protocols as behaving in the manner and with the methods demonstrated by the person described in the texts.
Anyone can claim to be a Christian and use anything they want as justification. That’s been true for 2000 years. White slavers called themselves Christians, and their beliefs and behaviors have not made them less authoritative in white American Christianity, for example.
So I don’t look to self-proclamation as any kind of proof. I look at the texts that describe a man in Palestine under the Roman occupation, enduring and living within an empire, as the exemplar of living out a life filled with the God of the universe.
Whether the story is true or not isn’t the point here. (And that’s a great conversation to have, but maybe later.) The point is that the texts we have that tell us the story don’t seem to tell a story of selfishness, of denying service to others, of spreading diseases.
So when we make the story about Jesus become something that justifies our adamant resistance to serving our neighbors by getting vaccinated, we have, in my view, lost the way of Jesus. I can’t make these beliefs stop, because (and thank God for this secular government) we cannot—and must not—have an official religion or an official person who decides upon what is an acceptable belief.
What I can do is point this out, using the tools that I have, so that people like me can think through what it is they believe and what it is they want to do about what they believe. I have to push back against harmful expressions of a faith that claims to represent the Jesus of the texts. Not because I can confidently say that those people are “not Christians.” None of us have that authority or insight. I can push back based upon what I read and reason, and point out that some things that seem very central to the message of Jesus appear to be missing from the religious expression. And then I have to leave it up to you to decide that if you would follow Jesus, how would you go about doing that.
My words are advice and guardrails. You get the option of how you follow.
Peace to all of you.