Americans support high bar for vaccine exemptions

As we all are nervously watching the omicron variant of COVID-19 spread across the U.S., leaders of organizations and governments at every level are facing complex questions about vaccination requirements.

They know vaccine mandates do in fact increase the number of people who get the vaccine, a crucial step toward protecting the health and well-being of their constituents. But they have also heard the loud voices among some religious groups and leaders who claim getting vaccinated violates their religious beliefs.

This dilemma — protecting people’s health while supporting people’s religious liberty — is a balancing act, and one where the equilibrium point is elusive because the weight on each side seems unknowable. Absent concrete data, religious exemption claims are often treated as “all or nothing” assertions.

Conservatives, who are more likely to make such claims themselves, often see religious exemptions as a trump card protecting not only the religious liberty of faith-based institutions but religious individuals, even when those individuals are assuming professional roles in secular capacities. By this logic, asserting a religious exemption claim clears the ground and acts as a berm against all other appeals, including protecting other people’s health.

Liberals, who are more skeptical of such religious exemption claims, also tend to take an all or nothing approach, either moving to ban them altogether or shying away from engaging the issue out of a fear of being perceived as anti-religious. What both miss is a thoughtful, calibrated way of assessing such claims.

A recent nationally representative public opinion survey, conducted jointly by PRRI and IFYC, organizations led by each of us, provides hard data that helps us grasp both the size of the problem and which religious exemptions Americans believe are justified. These insights can help organizational and governmental leaders know where to place the fulcrum to appropriately balance competing claims.

First, the survey clarifies just how few Americans see a conflict between their religious beliefs and COVID-19 vaccinations. Only 1 in 10 (10 percent) Americans believe the teachings of their religion prohibit COVID-19 vaccinations.

Second, there is no straight line between these religious beliefs and actions. Even among this small minority of Americans who believe getting a

COVID-19 vaccination goes against the teachings of their religion, more than 4 in 10 report they have nonetheless gotten vaccinated (37 percent) or intend to do so as soon as possible (5 percent). So, for many, these perceived religious conflicts were ultimately not prohibitive.

Third, even among the approximately one-quarter of American adults who remain unvaccinated, only about 3 in 10 (31 percent) say they have asked for or plan to ask for a religious exemption.

Putting this all together, only 4 percent of American adults meet three criteria: 1) they remain unvaccinated; 2) they see a conflict between the teachings of their religion and COVID-19 vaccinations; and 3) they plan to ask for a religious exemption in response to a vaccine requirement.

This finding addresses one side of the equation. But what about the other side? What do Americans think about the legitimacy of religious claims about the incompatibility of their religious beliefs and COVID-19 vaccinations?

The survey has two helpful insights here, too. Six in 10 Americans (60 percent) — including majorities of every major religious group except white evangelical Protestants — believe there are no valid religious reasons to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine.