It’s time to close the religious vaccine objection loophole

There’s something unquestionably alluring about claiming religious exemptions from government mandates and employer policies.

For one thing, religious beliefs are almost impossible to disprove. Courts have said that they don’t have to conform to the tenets of any particular religion. They can even contradict doctrinal statements by religious leaders, up to and including the Roman Catholic pope. For that matter, they don’t have to be related to any major religion.

Inquiring too deeply into the basis for an individual’s religious beliefs is frowned upon by judges and society at large.

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, federal law requires only that the beliefs cited to justify an exemption from an employer’s policies be “sincerely held,” which is almost a metaphysical judgment.

Federal courts have said, moreover, that sincerity should be “generally presumed.”

For all those reasons, religious exemptions have been experiencing a moment in the spotlight as a way of dodging vaccination mandates during this pandemic. Religious exemptions have emerged as a dangerous and easily exploited loophole in vaccination policy. It’s time to ban them.

There are no empirical statistics for how many vaccine objectors cite religion, or how many who do so actually believe their own claims. In a 2014 survey of statements published on anti-vaccine websites, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss of UC Hastings College of the Law found numerous examples in which objectors “openly state they lie about religion.”

Among them were comments expressing concerns about vaccine safety, “with the religious argument being used as a way to evade the obligation to vaccinate”; some that advocated claiming to follow a religion that was not their own, or even creating a fake religion; and some in which the writers openly admitted lying.

In the era of COVID, there’s a burgeoning market in religious exemptions. Sites sponsored by churches, religious groups and politicians have sprung up across the web advising followers how to apply.

Interest in the exemptions has increased as vaccination mandates get tighter, especially for healthcare workers, as escape clauses such as regular COVID testing are eliminated, and vaccine refusers are threatened with firings.

The Christian legal aid group Liberty Counsel offers a templates of letters to send to employers or others mandating vaccination to claim a religious exemption.

So does Tulsa evangelical pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, who has made the quest for religious exemptions a feature of his campaign for the GOP nomination in Oklahoma for a U.S. Senate seat. Forms care also being offered by 412 Murrieta, an evangelical church in Riverside County.

Megachurch pastor Greg Fairrington of Sacramento has also provided his followers with a letter attesting to their “sincere belief.” Fairrington told my colleague Robin Estrin that his church has received “thousands of phone calls from doctors, nurses, educators and first responders, in tears, fearing that their livelihoods hang in the balance because of their religious convictions.”

A church group in Washington state has been holding seminars around that state to help people seek religious accommodation. Rightwing Tennessee pastor Greg Locke told his congregation in May that if any of them were threatened with termination by an employer for refusing a vaccine, “I can write you a religious exemption and we will sue their stinkin’ pants off!” (Re