On March 31 we hosted this conversation about how religion has shaped responses to Covid-19 in the United States. It looked at the impact of the pandemic on religious communities, ideas of health and wellness, and the relationship between law and religious freedom over the past couple of years.
Transcript
Ronit Stahl:
Welcome, thanks to everyone who has joined us this afternoon, or evening if you're in another time zone. I'm Ronit Stahl, the Interim Administrative Chair of the Religious Diversity Cluster of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. And I'm delighted to introduce our lineup of fantastic guests for today's conversation about Rifts and Revelations: How Religion Has Shaped the Pandemic Response in the United States. With me today are three wonderful guests who have distinct and insignificant areas of expertise on religion and the pandemic in the United States.
Ronit Stahl:
So first we'll have Marla Frederick, who is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture at Emory University's Candler School of Theology. A leading ethnographer, she employs an interdisciplinary approach to examine the overlapping spheres of religion, race, gender, media, politics, and economics. Most recently, she coauthored Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment published by NYU Press. And she's also been the author of articles about religion and especially African American communities, religious communities during the pandemic.
Ronit Stahl:
Today, we also have with us Jim Oleske, who is Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School. Prior to joining Lewis & Clark in 2011, he served as Chief of Staff of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs during the first two years of the Obama administration. His research focuses on the intersection of religious liberty and other constitutional values, and he was a Fulbright Scholar based at Cardiff University's Center for Law and Religion in 2019. And for those of you who may follow him online, he is one of the leading experts on religion and the shadow docket of the Supreme Court, which I think we'll hear a little bit about.
Ronit Stahl:
And finally we have with us Munir Jiwa, who is the founding director of the Center for Islamic Studies and Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Anthropology at the Graduate Theological Union here in Berkeley. He holds a PhD and MPhil in Anthropology from Columbia University. And his research interests include Islam and Muslims in the West, Islamophobia studies, media, art and aesthetics, secularism, religious formation and leadership, religion in the public sphere, and theological and interreligious education. He is currently a visiting scholar in Global Studies at the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University, and is working on a project on Islamophobia and the politics of belonging from which I think we'll hear a bit today about his work on religion, wellness and health amongst Muslim communities during the pandemic.
Ronit Stahl:
So just to let everyone in the audience know the way we'll proceed, we'll have each of our speakers give about five minutes of background on the work they've done on the question of: How religion has shaped pandemic responses in the United States? From there, we'll move into a conversation among this group. And finally, we'll take Q&A from the audience. So if you do have questions, please feel free to put them in the comment box. And with that, I'll turn things over to Professor Marla Frederick.
Marla Frederick:
Thank you so much, Ronit. And thank you for the introduction. I think I'll just start with a bit of writing I've done on the topic just to introduce the audience to some of my thoughts around religion and COVID. In the midst of a country ravaged by the coronavirus and upended by protests for justice after the murder of George Floyd, the one loud, resonating cry heard throughout the summer of 2020 was the cry for freedom. From the White House to evangelical pulpits to grocery store aisles to the streets of St. Louis, the consistent invocation of freedom resounded. Strangely enough, the petitions fell largely along lines demarcated by decades-long culture wars informed by predominantly white cries for individual and religious freedom on one side and a growing multiracial alliance demanding justice and freedom for black people under the Black Lives Matter banner on the other. As the petitions grew, so did the acrimony.
Marla Frederick:
In the heat of these debates, then-president Donald Trump sent out three tweets on April 17th, 2020: "Liberate Minnesota!"; "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!"; and, "LIBERATE VIRGINIA," if you recall, "and save our great Second Amendment. It is under siege!" he opined. Upset by state and government officials who initiated restrictive measures to stem the tide of the coronavirus, Trump and his supporters call for "freedom" from what they viewed as the overzealous, business-killing restrictions of Democratic governors and elected officials. 13 days after Trump's tweet, in Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order extending their state of emergency that curtailed the opening of businesses and extended stay at home restrictions, armed militia showed up at the state capital demanding entrance to the door of the assembly as lawmakers debated the measures. The display of arms, captured in pictures by news media and made viral on social media, showed angry white men with military-style rifles facing off with capitol police.
Marla Frederick:
The demonstrations marked some of the most aggressive protests to date against the efforts of legislatures to institute measures to alter the course of the coronavirus. Yet none of these protests was more surprising to some than those issued by pastors, who declared the restrictions an infringement upon their religious liberty. In addition to closing businesses to prevent the spread of the virus, elected officials in states like California also issued ordinances mandating that churches close, pointing to instances of mass religious gatherings as super spreader events. In March of 2020, for example, 53 members of a choir were infected with the virus and two members died after attending choir rehearsal at a church in Mount Vernon, Washington. And from April 10th to May 10th, 12 Felician sisters at the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Livonia, Michigan died of coronavirus with a 13th sister dying in June. By April 3rd, seven leaders of the Church of God in Christ, bishops and superintendents of the Michigan district died of COVID-19 after attending an annual religious convocation in March.
Marla Frederick:
A viral social media post captioned "The Historic First Jurisdiction of Michigan Mourns the Loss of So Great a Cloud of Witnesses" showed pictures of the seven men who all died from coronavirus. By April 20th, the report had grown more ominous. A story posted in Charisma News led with a simple title: "Up to 30 COGIC Bishops, Leaders Die from Coronavirus." Death hovered over the church, a tragedy of epic proportions unfolded in one of the most storied black religious institutions in the country, the nation's first incorporated Pentecostal denomination. The March services were conducted before there was a universal consensus from the government or other agencies that sizeable gatherings, like church worship services, presented dangerous hotspots for the virus to spread. The national debate over church services, however, devolved almost immediately into a political battle over religious freedom, making the possibility of ordering the closure of churches even more complicated. Nevertheless, the passing of leaders like those in the Church of God in Christ, along with the death of pastors and worshipers from other religious communities, brought into sharp relief the need for immediate change in how religious communities gathered during COVID-19.
Marla Frederick:
While most churches subsequently canceled in-person events and went completely online, numerous evangelical churches continued to worship indoors, citing the president's injunction that churches are essential institutions and insisting that any mandate to close was just another example of government overreach. These debates have taken place within a larger US context wherein white evangelicals often see themselves as victims, losing ground as a cultural majority to a perceived non-Christian, multicultural mass of non-citizens and socialists. The pandemic's capacity to amplify these fears through necessary limitations on cross-border travel and public gatherings, including worship services, raises important questions about how religious freedom operates as a weapon in a larger historical culture war tool kit that is both raced and classed. How have evangelical leaders framed the debate around religious freedom in relationship to this global pandemic? And do black religionists feel their religious freedoms are equally under assault? In what ways might black religionists' attention to the disproportionate number of blacks dying from COVID-19 and extrajudicial violence resonate with historic interpretations around the freedoms most under threat from the government and in need of defending?
Marla Frederick:
Contemporary Christian arguments focused on religious freedom align with a long standing history of white Christian grievance politics that prioritize white grievance with government engagement in their affairs over concerns largely voiced by African American churches with basic survival and racial justice concerns. The long history of religious freedom arguments illustrates the protracted ways in which religious freedom debates obscure long-held quests for freedom sought by people of color in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the case for religious freedom has been more extraordinary, given the disproportionate rate at which black and brown Americans were affected by the virus and the ways in which white evangelicals castigated racial protest rallies as indicative of why the church should remain open. And I will stop there and we can open it up to questions. Thank you, Ronit.
Ronit Stahl:
Thank you. I suspect that may lead well into Professor Oleske's comment. So I'm going to turn it over to him.
Jim Oleske:
So it's wonderful to be with everyone today. And I am going to talk a little bit more in detail on the sort of legal battle over on one of the freedoms that Marla was speaking about, the freedom to exercise one's religion, and the impact of litigation during the pandemic on the Supreme Court's interpretation of the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment. But to do so, I just need to provide a little bit of background. So the long disputed question with respect to the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment is whether it only protects against government laws that target religious exercise for disfavored treatment, or whether it also protects religion against burdens imposed by generally applicable laws. And if it does that ladder thing, well then presumably there's some right to be religiously exempt from those laws.
Jim Oleske:
So the long running dispute is whether the Free Exercise Clause provides a right to religious exemptions. And I'll just give a simple example. I'm coming to you from Oregon. If Oregon passed a law that said Catholics can't use wine as a sacrament, well, that's a law targeted at free exercise of religion. Nine to zero, the Supreme Court would say that's unconstitutional. But what if Oregon, because of the health consequences of alcohol use and societal consequence just decides to become a dry state and bans all use, sale, distribution of alcohol, that's not targeted at free exercise of religion. Most people affected by it are not using alcohol for religious purposes, but the impact on Catholics is the same. They can't use wine as a sacrament unless they get an exemption from the legislature. And let's say they can't get an exemption from the legislature. Do they then have a right to go to court and say, "The First Amendment gives us a right to religious exemptions." And the court has taken different positions on this over the years.
Jim Oleske:
Initially in 1872 and again in 1940, the court said, no. No right to religious exemptions. That would allow people to become laws unto themselves. But then between 1963 and 1989, the court said, no, there is a right to religious exemptions, not an absolute right. The government can justify denying an exemption, but it has a really good reason. It has to meet what we call in the law strict scrutiny. So there was a strong presumptive right to religious exemptions between 1963 and 1989. Then in 1990, in a case from here in Oregon, the court flipped again and said no right to religious exemptions. So that was the state of the law as we were approaching the COVID crisis. One year before COVID hit, four justices on the Supreme Court wrote an opinion indicating they were interested in revisiting that 1990 decision saying, there's no right to religious exemptions. Then one month before COVID hit, the court granted review in a case called Fulton versus city of Philadelphia, case involving the clash between LGBTQ rights and religious liberty.
Jim Oleske:
And that was the case as of early 2020 everybody thought the court was going to revisit. If it was going to revisit, that was the case in which it was going to revisit it to exercise jurisprudence, but then COVID hit. And COVID is where we see the current court working through the Free Exercise Clause. First in the spring and summer of 2020, number of cases, two cases got up to the court involving the types of limits on gatherings that had been imposed by states and localities that Marla mentioned. So churches would challenge those limitations on the size of gatherings. Two cases got up to the Supreme Court on the emergency docket or the so-called shadow docket that Ronit mentioned earlier. And in those cases, five to four, the court rejected the church's challenges to the limits. Chief Justice Roberts joining the four liberals on the court.
Jim Oleske:
Justice Ginsburg passes. Justice Barrett joins the court. And in the fall of 2020 and in early 2021, five to four, the court starts coming out the other way in challenges to gathering limits, culminating in a case called Tandon versus Newsom out of California in which the court adopted what's known as the most favored nation theory of religious exemptions, which is okay, there's not a general right to religious exemptions. But if government makes an exemption for anyone else, they have to presumptively make an exemption for religion. This issue, this theory is going to be at play in cases currently percolating up to the court involving challenges to vaccine mandates. And the argument is made that, well, almost all vaccine mandates have medical exemptions. The inclusion of that medical exemption triggers a right to a religious exemption. There were two efforts to get to the court on the emergency docket in the fall that the court rejected, but there is a case, petition for certiorari, pending in one case out of New York.
Jim Oleske:
The response from New York is due tomorrow to the Supreme Court. So we could see the court take that case up, announced in the next couple months. They'll take that case up, in which case they would presumably hear it in the fall. So just an enormous amount has happened as a result of this emergency litigation during COVID. And the court has arguably from the perspective of some of us fundamentally moved back towards a position of pro-religious exemptions, even though it hasn't formally overruled yet that 1990 case, which said there was no right to religious exemptions. And I will leave it there for now.
Ronit Stahl:
All right. Thank you so much. Already so many questions and issues to discuss. I'm going to now turn it over to Professor Munir Jiwa, who's been thinking a lot about questions around communities and ideas of health and wellness, which I think intersect with the larger legal questions and communal structures that inform some of what we've just heard about.
Munir Jiwa:
Thank you. Greetings everyone. And it's just wonderful to be with you. And I just want to thank all the organizers also for making today's event possible and Dr. Ronit Stahl for your reaching out to us and inviting us and for us being together. So I want to thank you all, and all those behind the scenes doing things behind the scenes, kind of sounds almost normalized now when we're actually working on screens. So yeah, thank you. I want to approach this in a slightly different direction, but taking in some of the questions around the intersections of religion and law as well. And hopefully we can pick that up in the discussion and Q&A. But I've been thinking a lot about as we are just over the kind of two year mark of going into what we call lockdown, I've been reflecting on those early days of the pandemic and how we were reflecting on things to where we're at now around questions around the vaccine and mandates.
Munir Jiwa:
And then what does it mean now that we're thinking about the kind of opening up or coming out of sheltering in place or lockdown. So you'll see even some of the vocabulary that we used early on. It seems so long ago to the kind of vocabulary we're using now. So I want to begin by just reflecting on a piece I wrote two years ago, and it was just at the start of Ramadan and other sacred seasons. And right now we're also just entering the month of Ramadan, Easter, Passover. So lots to think about in terms of religious communities and how we're navigating what I want to call the kind of pandemic time that we're in, not just the particulars of how we think about the pandemic and attend to it, but the larger questions of every day, but the larger existential questions as well.
Munir Jiwa:
So this is a piece I wrote early on. And you'll probably see from the language how things have changed. And maybe we could take it up again in the discussion. In this time of heightened uncertainty, our precariousness and fragility can find comfort and hope in our interconnectedness and interdependency. As we begin the blessed month of Ramadan, it will be one... And this is again, two years ago, I was writing this. So how different it is now, it will be like: As we begin the blessed month of Ramadan, it will be one like no other in our time. Muslims, like many in other religious traditions, are finding new ways of remaining together apart, and online. The unprecedented and devastating spread of the deadly, what was then novel coronavirus, COVID-19 has created new ways of collective being, an altered sense of time, space and place, and different rhythms of life that beat back and forth, fast and slow, with different intensities and emotions.
Munir Jiwa:
Amid the myriad of rules and regulations to which we continue to adapt, we share new vocabularies, new bodily, social and spatial practices that are global, even as they are experienced in different ways locally. Our rituals of everyday life have changed. We shelter in place, stay at home, self-isolate, quarantine, practice social and physical distancing, in hopes of saving lives and flattening the curve. Again, you could see the vocabulary that's shifted. We realign and learn how to manage these new ways of being with ourselves, our families, our communities, our work, with other creatures, with the environment, online and in the world. We ask with more urgency and reflection about who matters, what matters, who is considered essential, what is considered essential. We are heartbroken to know about so many who have been hospitalized, who continue to be hospitalized, whose loved ones couldn't or still can't visit them, of the elderly, especially in care homes who might feel isolated, those who cannot bury their loved ones who have died.
Munir Jiwa:
We witness the heroes on the front lines who risk their lives from healthcare workers who attempt to save lives to countless others who make everyday life possible, who feed, house, and comfort others, who transport and deliver goods, and keep us safe. As many of the privileged experience vulnerabilities in new ways, they might experience their fears of ill-health or mortality by referring to this pandemic as the great equalizer or leveler. But the poor and vulnerable, often people of color, remind us that though we are equal before God, we are not always treated so by each other. Refugees, migrants, immigrants, victims of ongoing wars and violence, the displaced, the orphans, the undocumented, the homeless, the incarcerated, the unemployed, the hungry, the abused, these people tell very different stories often unheard. We have to contend with the urgency of our moment, the great loss of human life, and the pandemic politics and privilege, various media and online platforms, with the enduring questions of rights, responsibilities and justice.
Munir Jiwa:
While COVID-19 has our rare global attention, it also reminds us that it cares little about who is inflicted and affected. Yet, we also have a rare global life-affirming moment to think more about our shared humanity, the environment that begs us to change our destructive ways, and to address and heal the inequalities, inequities, and injustices that stare us in the face. And again, this was a couple of years ago, but as I reflect, as the month of Ramadan begins, and again at this time, so many of us had to reconcile back then and accept that we weren't able to physically attend the mosque during Ramadan standing shoulder to shoulder in prayer, or break fasts together, a time when many make extra efforts of coming to the mosque and to experience the love and beauty of this sacred time and community.
Munir Jiwa:
And so that has shifted somewhat. And we could discuss what the learning is in that. But I've been thinking about how people of faith, religious leaders and communities continue to serve their communities and to help bridge divides, attend to the vulnerable both spiritually and materially, for example, providing medical support and educational support early on. And in some other ways, the material support around PPE. Providing, of course, food and housing and the ongoing sort of mental health support, economic support and spiritual support. How religious communities, religious leaders have had to adapt to the time that we're in both in terms of spiritual needs of the community, but also in terms of material needs.
Munir Jiwa:
And increasingly to think about how we think about religious communities, not as just sites, or religious leaders and religious communities, not just as sites of where we discuss the divides between faith and science, but also as sites and as people who are actually bridging faith and science in ways that we haven't seen as well. So those are some opening reflections. I could talk more about some of the research I'm doing now as well, if time permits in the discussion. Thank you.
Ronit Stahl:
Well, thank you. And thanks to each of you for offering us these kind of starting points or launching pads for generative discussions. And I think one thing I heard from each of you in a slightly different way is really the role of religious leadership within communities. So some, of course, leading communities directly, some engaging in battle with public health officers through the courts with kind of law and social norms, and some thinking about new, or perhaps not new, but different ways to serve communities. And especially if we think past the two years is in many ways, both a short time and a long time, but the ways in which those early closures, again, kind of created some just new ways, how do we engage online or otherwise, but also then for some end, immediately turning to the courts.
Ronit Stahl:
And I'm curious then from each of your perspectives how to think about kind of the moves religious leaders made within their communities, but also outside of their communities over the past two years. And within that, what do you find, whether it's most interesting or perhaps most surprising about how we think about that relationship between religious leaders and communities over the past couple of years? Anyone who wants to begin is welcome to do so.
Marla Frederick:
Well, I mean, I had several thoughts when you were talking. White liberal Protestant churches really responded to the science that was coming out of the CDC and now the White... Not the White House. The CDC really encouraging people to mask. And this is before the vaccine, right? And to not congregate. But what we saw amongst white evangelical communities, rich large and not in total, but large was a kind of rejection of these measures. And you ask why the plea towards religious freedom like, so why does one body of Protestants turn towards this religious freedom argument and the other not so much, right? And part of that has to do with religions overlap with politics. And since that a number of white evangelical communities deeply align with Republican Party politics, and we saw this, the response to COVID falling largely along political lines.
Marla Frederick:
And so then you have a black community that is ravished by COVID and many pastors really trying to figure out a way to maintain their congregations online or requiring masks or worshiping outside and trying to do all of these measures to ameliorate the problem. But so much of this divides, not just around along religious lines, but racial religious lines and religious political lines. And oftentimes those racial political lines fall into two different camps. And I think we saw that unfortunately with the coronavirus response. And there's a long history also with white evangelicalism of an attention to a kind of individualism where there's a high emphasis on individual freedoms, individual rights. And that too aligns politically, and thus aligns in kind of the response to the coronavirus.
Jim Oleske:
I'd be interested in sort of following up on that a little bit with the religious political overlap. And one of the interesting things for me, not just thinking about religious leaders, but also leading religious advocacy groups in the legal realm is how much overlap there was between the arguments against COVID restrictions and the arguments that are already playing out in the litigation involving LGBTQ rights and the arguments that are being developed in both areas are mutually reinforcing. And what's really one of the many fascinating things in the area that I work in is that the positions have shifted, the political positions have shifted. Back at that 1990 case I mentioned where the Supreme Court decided there's no longer a right to religious exemptions, it was the Conservatives on the court. Justice Scalia wrote that decision. Chief Justice Rehnquist was in the majority.
Jim Oleske:
He for years had been challenging the court's pro-exemption jurisprudence. So it was Conservatives said, there's no right to religious exemptions. And it's the Liberals that were in dissent in that 1990 decision saying there is a right to religious exemptions. In recent years, basically ever since the litigation in the LGBTQ rights context and involving the Affordable Care Act that are known as Obamacare, those pressing hardest for religious exemption rights tended to now be on the conservative side of the spectrum. So we've seen a real shift. And I think that played out in the COVID context, not only because COVID itself was very politically polarizing, which it was, but also because it reinforced those arguments that were already going on in other sort of cultural war related litigation.
Munir Jiwa:
Yeah. Thank you. I've been thinking about this also from the perspective of how we think about, again, these two sort of, or several moments during this pandemic time, right? In the early moments where religious communities, religious leaders are just trying to attend to the immediate needs of community, providing care and figuring out how to do elder care and hospital care and burials, and how are people going to attend mosque, churches, synagogues, temples, what are rituals going to look like, how are we going to bring in people online for those who don't have access online. But they were sort of trying to get at all the sort of the immediate things that we were trying to deal with, but in the context of we're all in this together, right? That quickly shifted. Summer of 2020, we see the protests, we see the kind of an awareness of kind of consciousness raising around Black Lives Matter, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others.
Munir Jiwa:
And we see this kind of overlapping again of... And it could be a particularly American thing, but it has global effects of course. But how we thought about on the one hand, white evangelical responses to the pandemic to race and racism. And these overlaps, I would say. I need to... I don't have documentation, but we could say that they're not by accident. These are not things that just happen. We see them come together in ways that many of us have already known. We already see. So that's one line of thinking. The other is the need to think... What surprised me also is how so many of these, the generosity that we see in religious communities and the compassion and the giving and the care, you often will find people in those communities who are not necessarily anti-vaxxers, but are vaccine hesitant.
Munir Jiwa:
And there are a lot of reasons for that, that are not just about government overreach, or our bodies and not wanting to put foreign things into our bodies, or that it's theologically not permitted for those who might think it, for a variety of reasons, including vegetarians who might think the same, right? Or vegans who might think the same. But I think the distinction between those who we consider to be, who are considered anti-vaxxers, those who are vaccine hesitant, and we know the long history of black and brown and indigenous communities with medicine and the healthcare, public healthcare system, and the racism within those systems that have lost people's faith in those fields. So I think that it's an important... What surprised me is that on the one hand, we see the small minority, but very vocal during the Trump era, talking about being sort of against vaccine and citing sort of religious grounds.
Munir Jiwa:
And on the other hand, religious communities actually attending to the range of ways in which people in those communities were navigating, whether or not the... Again, from the early days when we're just thinking about the vaccine to the time when the vaccine was available, right? And the hesitancy around that, but also the access to it for those who did want to access it, right? The kind of vaccine nationalism we started seeing. So those are the sort of two things that one, not so surprising to see the overlap of religion, politics, Trumpism, white evangelicals, conservativism, republicanism, and racism coming together. And then how religious communities were trying to attend to the diversity of their communities in terms of thinking about the pandemic and thinking about whether or not the vaccine would be good for them or not, right? So the vaccine hesitancy is not the same as those who are against the vaccine.
Marla Frederick:
Yeah. What you said, Munir, it made me think about the convergence of religion and race in the summer of 2020. This is not a coincidence how people responded. They started these what they call worship protest in some white evangelical spaces. A big evangelical worship leader named Sean Feucht led these what he called worship protest. And in one of his blogs he was writing, he said, "Something is happening in America, and it should sound the alarm for every confessing Christian. Simply put, hostile efforts in many cities now threaten to suppress the First Amendment rights of all people to exercise our faith freely. In unprecedented acts of government-authorized injustice, Christians are being told they cannot gather for worship, they cannot sing songs of praise, they cannot observe church ordinances. While followers of Jesus are being told we cannot worship in public spaces, violent paid rioters are taking over our streets and are being given license to occupy and destroy entire sections of our cities. Churches are being covered in graffiti and even burned while civic leaders call for defunding the police." Right.
Marla Frederick:
So you immediately see in kind of his worship protest the ways in which he's demarcating this line between the Christians who are fighting for religious freedom and all these Black Lives Matter protesters who are ungodly in destroying our cities, right? And it was a very clear kind of demarcation in these Christian circles, which was deeply problematic, right? Deeply problematic, because it also leaves out this whole swath of black Christians, many of whom are in the streets protesting with Black Lives Matter movement people. So that line of demarcation is deeply disturbing.
Ronit Stahl:
That really reminds me about a year ago. I was talking on Zoom with a colleague in public health who asked me, why is all of the attention on white evangelical protests, whether it's around public health ordinances around gathering, but also as we start... It was a year ago, the vaccine access was ramping up, trying to get the word out, trying to get people to do it. And she was like: But African American churches are getting their members vaccinated. They're doing the work on the ground. And why is the sort of coverage tilted in one direction? Why are the politics presuming a certain split that's not accurate on the ground to the variety of religious traditions in the United States? Why is the focus on the kind of anti-vax litigation by some circles, but not the pro-vaccine work of other groups? And I'm curious what your takes on this. Is this simply about politics or is there more going on here?
Marla Frederick:
I'll just say this and let my other panelists response. White evangelicals have dominated the public sphere in part because they own religious media, right? They own publishing houses, television networks, Christian television networks, Christian radio programming. And so they have a very loud voice in the American public. And what then ends up happening is that their voice is heard. It reverberates. And it's easy to kind of pick up on what this televangelist said or what that radio host said or what this book has said. But I also know it's deeply problematic. Michael Lamb, who founded Daystar Television Network, which is this one, this huge evangelical Christian network was adamantly opposed to the vaccine and all of the mandates. And he and his wife would talk about that. They'd talk about all of the other alternatives to the vaccine that people should take. Hydroxychloroquine, all the things.
Marla Frederick:
And he ended up dying. He contracted coronavirus and he died. And what one would think would be like a wake up call was turned into more of argument around what the devil was trying to do in destroying his voice and quieting his voice as opposed to a reckoning with the science. And what then becomes disturbing for me as one who studied religious media and American religious media in particular, is that message not only reverberates in the United States, but they have huge networks outside of the United States where these messages are sent, whether in South America, Africa, Europe, wherever these same messages reverberate. And it would be interesting if someone could do a study to see what was the impact of that type of messaging in these other places beyond the United States and amongst white evangelical communities in the US because evangelicalism is growing worldwide. And it'd be interesting to see their impact in those spaces.
Munir Jiwa:
Yeah. Maybe I could just add to Dr. Marla's points about having the largest kind of public and online space with white Christian evangelicals. But what we've also learned is that a large number of even evangelicals, I think was either a Q study, or it was featured on CNN or PBS where they said that a large number would still get vaccinated. So it's really interesting to see, and we'd have to look at the statistics and the data on that, but to see why it is that it has such a large public voice. Now, again, the overlap between sort of Trump's kind of experiments in public as a president, thinking out loud, not having thought through with the science and saying these things caught on in communities.
Munir Jiwa:
And so people had some license to think outside the box, including, and I'd love to hear Jim's take on this as well, I haven't studied this enough, but how again, when we move to the time of getting the vaccine and around the vaccine hesitancy or the anti-vaxxers, the idea that exemptions were made, that they can only be made on religious grounds, where there is a sense that people are being sincere, sincerely held beliefs, I think is the term. There are also religious folks who try to make, to try to apply for exemptions based on science. So they were saying that we don't have enough data on the long term effects of the vaccine being put into our bodies. And so religious folks who are making scientific arguments to say, this is why we're not taking it.
Munir Jiwa:
And it's not unlike others who are not religious or not people of faith who are making similar arguments. So I don't know how to think about that, but that's an intersection in terms of kind of religion science and the law as well to think about. But by and large, I think to your first question, Dr. Ronit, was around the surprise and the ongoing work we see in these communities is that most of them are going with the science, are thinking about it, are trying to share this with their communities to help their communities make informed choices. And again, people have a range of reasons of why of the choices that they make, right? But Luce Foundation had given out these amazing grants. GTU was one of the recipients and be partnered with 18 faith-based organizations in the Bay Area. Not a single one of them. I mean, it's the Bay Area as well, but not a single one of them was...
Munir Jiwa:
They understood the nuances of what's going on in communities. And the hesitancy could be just a lack of information. And once there was enough information, people were able to make informed choices, but there's also, you're competing with misinformation, disinformation, the kind of infodemic at the same time. But what we noticed is that predominantly the Baptist and the Sunni Muslim communities that I worked with, that they were setting up mobile clinics. They were getting to people's homes where they could safely to make sure that people had access to healthcare and to vaccines for those who were willing to take them. So what we've seen mostly is that people have complied, people have actually taken huge risks themselves, these religious leaders and communities to provide for their communities often at a great cost.
Jim Oleske:
So I want to make one observation on that last point going back to how Ronit introduced this, asking why that's not getting attention, as opposed to why the objection. Conflict gets more intention. So doing the hard work of ensuring your congregation is safe by getting as many people vaccinated, that's not going to make headlines. But suing the government and going to the Supreme Court, challenging it and getting on talk radio and saying, "This is an outrage," that generates attention. And so part of it is just the lack of conflict doesn't generate as much attention.
Ronit Stahl:
Just to build on what's been said and one of the things that Munir brought up, which is that arguments in front of the court and the question of sort of sincerely held belief, one of the things I observed. I've done work in the religion and law domain so I'm fairly accustomed to hearing arguments about sincerely held belief and professions of sincerely held belief and thinking about the way the court tends to generally just accept them. That's not something the court likes to get into. But I think for a lot of people, this was the first encounter with the court sort of just accepting, you say it's religious, you say it's sincere, we'll accept it as such, but they're sort of deep intuition that it was political.
Ronit Stahl:
It was philosophical. It was anything but religious. And I'm curious if you've seen any, how to think through that, especially the way the public, not the court watchers, but the people who were sort of seeing these issues play out in their own communities. And they're sort of like aah reaction to sort of these claims for religious exemptions. Does it matter? Or is it just one of these, like as you said, there's conflict and people run with the conflict?
Jim Oleske:
Is that directed specifically at me?
Ronit Stahl:
I mean, anyone can answer it, but I am curious from your perspective, whether... As we've seen as you kind of show the sort of pendulum shift of the court, but one constant has been the acceptance of people's professed sincere religious beliefs as sincere religious beliefs regardless, as Munir was saying, of whether science or anything else or their patterns of beliefs or what they've done in the past might to someone else look a little less sincere or longstanding or any other adjective that one might expect would apply to claiming a religious exemption.
Jim Oleske:
Yeah. So prior to COVID I think the only context in which the courts regularly did work on sincerity was the prison context. There was a longstanding suspicion that there are people in prison who claim religious exemptions or accommodations who may lack sincerity. But outside of the prison context, the courts, as you pointed out, very rarely got into that. And this really with the possible exception of the objections to the Affordable Care Act mandates, this is really the first time we've seen sort of a widespread phenomenon where there is wide skepticism of the sincerity of many of the claims for religious exemptions being made. And I think you do have to wonder how that might impact the court. The court's not oblivious to that fact.
Jim Oleske:
And so earlier I mentioned that when the court had a regime of religious exemptions, it was a pretty robust right that you had, a pretty strong presumptive right you had. And now the question is, okay, if the court's going to move back to a religious exemption regime might in light of the experience that it's looking at now, if it's going to let everybody get past the threshold of sincerity pretty easily, is that make it more dangerous to have this very strict scrutiny test at the back end that the government can very rarely pass? Or should we have a more balancing test, intermediate test that the government can pass more often? Because it's going to need to pass it more often because we're letting everybody get past that threshold question of sincerity. Or the alternative to that is to start policing sincerity.
Jim Oleske:
But I think the appetite for the courts to do that is going to be low. Although, I will say this is my final point on this part, there are institutions doing that, whether they're government agencies or whether they're private healthcare providers that have mandates that are considering case by case claims, a lot of them are testing sincerity. And it'll be interesting to see as those case work their way into court, how the courts handle the fact that you have some government agencies, not all, but some government agencies and some private employers that have been willing to do some pretty rigorous sincerity inquiries.
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah, I... Go ahead.
Marla Frederick:
I don't even know how you measure sincerity, especially when it comes to these faith commitments. Are you thinking about individual? Will they make individual decisions or a church gets a religious exemption or individual gets a religious exemption?
Ronit Stahl:
I mean, the ones I know about I think related to what Jim is talking about is a friend of mine whose office has a vaccine mandate. And for people trying to claim a religious exemption, the HR folks were like: Well, do you have other vaccines? They were kind of doing other... They were kind of trying to come up with measures that I have no idea if they ran this by their lawyers first, but where? They were, I guess, more wary than the Supreme Court has been about just accepting that someone had a religious objection to a vaccine. So they were kind of trying to whether it was like: Well, if you had other vaccines, then-
Marla Frederick:
Right.
Ronit Stahl:
How deeper sincere is this?
Marla Frederick:
It just makes me think about faith and the traditions that are most opposed to the vaccine, like evangelical charismatic communities, Pentecostal communities. And sometimes in those spaces, there's a articulation of having a kind of radical faith. And the prosperity gospel movement took place in the '70s, '80s kind of really grew. And part of that was the health and wealth gospels. So that if you had this radical faith, you could give all your money to the church. You could tithe 10% and God would supernaturally bless you back. Or you didn't have to pay attention to what your cancer doctor said. You didn't have to take those medicines. You could go to this healing service, God could supernaturally heal you. And so the sense that people have that God will radically heal me if I get COVID or will radically protect me from COVID, it's something that's very real that some people really feel.
Marla Frederick:
And I saw, I took a picture of it. They had a COVID exemption card, like a Christian COVID exemption card. I don't need the vax. It's basically said something like, I don't need the vaccine. I've got Jesus, right? Jesus was going to protect against vaccine. So some people to the point of sincerity sincerely believe that the vaccine is harmful and they shouldn't have to take it because it infringes on their religious faith and that God will supernaturally protect them from COVID. I mean, it's a very real sentiment.
Ronit Stahl:
Yeah. And I think that gets at I think the real challenge legally, politically, communally in this case is because it's about public health, right? And because it's not simply... And it's about a contagious disease, not simply whether, or there are lots of other diseases or other things where like... Or even in the case of cancer, I often hear devastating stories about families upset with a family member who places their faith or faith healing, or whatever they've chosen. And they feel, they hate it, right? And they want to reject it, but it doesn't... So it affects others in the sense that it certainly affects family networks. It affects emotions, but it's not a contagious disease. And I think one thing we're seeing, vaccines or mask mandates, or even restrictions on community gatherings are not about the individual, even though one's religious views may well be said about individual faith, but do have implications for communities and for people just in the midst or in a workspace.
Marla Frederick:
Yeah.
Munir Jiwa:
Yeah. Can I just pick up on that, the individual community bit? I mean, it's remarkable because on the one hand, they are when there are these cases. And there are often HR departments in various institutions that have to figure out how to read through these exemption proposals, right? And so how people are figuring out whether something is sincerely held is one thing, but it is done on an individual basis. But then you also see, you look at precedent, you look at, have others applied in the same way and we've exempted them, and now too many people are catching on to saying, "Oh, we're going to use that." And now they are like: Well, what are we going to do? Are we going to exempt everyone? So I don't know if there's a... So that's something to consider. But in terms of religious life, on the one hand is as highly individual, as Dr. Marla has pointed out at the beginning.
Munir Jiwa:
And then on the other hand, some of the what's being brought forward is that we should have the right to worship in congregation as a community, right? That we should be able to do our rituals together in community. So on the one hand, this kind of individual community relationship is an interesting one because what we don't see amplified is, well, if God is going to protect and God is going to heal, what about your responsibility in this case to not just fellow congregants, but beyond your church as well? Just throughout everyday life, right? How are you going to... Do you not see yourself as an individual connected? And that could be a... It's interesting because that's very much a religious, it could be very much a religious argument as well, our interconnectedness.
Munir Jiwa:
And different faiths express this differently. But it strikes me as it almost works against the argument of our individual freedom, because so much of this is about community and about belonging and about being able to be out in community and to do so in a safe way. So, yeah. And a question I have, and I don't know enough about this, but maybe fellow panelists have studied this more is also the overlap between white evangelical communities and all sorts of other, I don't know what we want to call them. I don't want to use bizarre in a totally derogatory sense. But just all sorts of conspiracy theories. How do they fit in with religion? And if God is sort of the ultimate and this is all about God healing and protecting, how do all these other conspiracy theories come into these evangelical communities? It's something that's come up now in my study. So, yeah.
Marla Frederick:
Yeah. I've just read that a number of pastors, white evangelical pastors who were really trying to do something about the virus have felt so much pushback from some Congress that they have left the church. They're talking about the Exodus of some white evangelical pastors, just who cannot handle all of the coronavirus and the QAnon, the conspiracy theories. I have a grad student who was disinvited from a gathering with her cousins. A young white woman, she's from Eastern, Southeast. And they disinvited her from their gathering because she was vaccinated. And they fear, they wanted to have children. And they thought that being in the room with somebody who was vaccinated was going to cause them to be infertile. And I thought, really? She said, "Yeah, they disinvited me." So the conspiracy theories are very real and have been very potent throughout this. I'm glad you brought that up.
Ronit Stahl:
I think that some of this gets at... I know we have a lot of comments in the chat. If you have specific and short questions, that'll probably be easier to respond to. But one person did ask about, I think broadly, does it seem strange to say that the interest of the state are at odds with those who constitute the state, which is of course, sort of a political theory question, but also a community question and ethical question. And in some cases, a legal question in the sense of right decision making and who gets to decide what the interests of the state are, what the interests of a particular person or community is. And when we saw rifts over the past two years, it's often because there were officials of the state, sometimes public health officers, sometimes governors, sometimes other local agencies, a school district, but something that was a state entity making some type of rule or a mandate or restriction, and many people in those communities were absolutely willing to adhere to them, thought they were wise, thought they were addressing an important issue.
Ronit Stahl:
And at the same time, even in California, even in the Bay Area, some of the cases that came up about restrictions on gatherings were coming out of Bay Area churches. And so the question of kind of who constitutes and who decides what the right thing to do in many ways seems like one of the issues that became a challenge for religious communities, or as Munir was saying, sort of that potential tension between individual rights around religion, but also responsibilities or obligations to others. I realized that itself was not specifically a question, but you may have thoughts about that.
Jim Oleske:
It reminds me of the observation Munir made earlier about religious advocates making scientific arguments contrary to the state's argument. And so put aside for a moment the question of whether there's a religious liberty right guaranteed by the constitution that provides a right to exemptions, but just this larger question of more of a libertarian argument that the state doesn't have the authority to make these decisions if I disagree. And I've researched the science, and I think the public health officials have it wrong. And I shouldn't have to follow that guidance. I mean, that's a more profound challenge to the public structure. And I don't know that I have concrete philosophical thoughts about it, but I do think it's a broader idea than just the anti-majoritarian rights that we have written into the constitution that may give a right to be exempt from laws in a particular circumstance.
Munir Jiwa:
Also, maybe more of, I don't know philosophical question or just a question around how it is that we ourselves think about religious exemptions, the value or the judgment we put on that versus other kinds of exemptions people might be requesting based on medical exemptions and that. Is there a difference in how we generally think about the religious exemptions that people are asking for versus other those who are immunocompromised or those who can't take the vaccine for other reasons, or other populations who are again, vaccine hesitant that not necessarily anti-vaxxers, but who are vaccine hesitant based on historical exclusions, based on racism, based on all sorts of ways in which public health and medicine have, of course, marginalized communities? So it's just a question that to consider, as Dr. Ronit, you were asking us about, what this means in terms of the scholarly, in terms of our scholarly work as well. It's questions that have emerged around how do we think about religious and other communities who make different kinds of requests around exemptions.
Munir Jiwa:
And it could be other things as well. It could be, it doesn't have to be just around vaccines. It could be around masks or gatherings, or it could be around a host of different things. And then also the persistent question around, again, the individual rights and your community responsibilities and obligations. I mean, if you're thinking about in terms of political theory, thinking about what we owe each other and what we owe each other in terms of our responsibilities within a state. And it's hard to do that because it's so polarized as well. It's hard to get at some of those nuances because we do often collapses into right and left, or Republican and Democrat. We kind of look at this in political terms. And yet we know through the many communities we work with that this is so much more nuanced and complex in terms of how people are responding, including globally, right? Not just in the US, but globally.
Ronit Stahl:
All right. Since I don't see... There are quite a few comments that everyone can look at, but I don't see additional succinct questions and I want to respect everyone's time. So I want to thank our panelists for being here today for joining us in conversation. I'd also like to thank the Othering & Belonging Institute for sponsoring this event. And then the behind the scenes work of Marc Abizeid, Robin Pearce and Courtney Bither to get everything together for today. But again, most of all, I'd like to thank Marla, Jim and Munir for joining us today for offering their thoughts and insights based on their work. And each of them, of course, also publishes and writes. So if you're interested in their perspective, there's lots to look out for in the work they're doing. And there's always more to read. So with that, I'd like to, again, thank everyone for joining us today and wish everyone a wonderful evening, whether evening is just beginning or it's later in the day.
Jim Oleske:
Thank you.
Ronit Stahl:
So thank you.
Munir Jiwa:
Thank you.
Marla Frederick:
Thank you, Ronit.
