![]() A powerful minority of voices within Catholicism affirms the rightness of religious exemptions, whatever the consequences for the pandemic. is amid precisely such a crisis of self-understanding. ![]() I ask this question in particular of Catholicism because I work in the area of Catholic social ethics and because the Catholic Church in the U.S. And if others in the American political community can’t understand such sincere religious convictions, then that’s a problem for all those secularized others. In the face of such a challenge, religions should be allowed to be as religious as they want to be. Science is the tip and government is the spear of these secularizing forces. ![]() Behind this deference is an assumption that an aggressive secularism has taken aim at religions in America. The United States Supreme Court has been increasingly deferential to an understanding of religious freedom that exempts religions from broader social duties. Is the religious conscience simply a private, unimpeachable basis by which persons can claim the sincerity of their convictions to opt out of manifest and immediate social obligations? Of course, such a test would be legally and morally wrong.īut I mean a test in the sense of a defining moment for religion in the public square in the United States. I don’t mean any formal test by a government agency or private institution imposing a mandate. What if the possibility of a religious exemption to a COVID-19 vaccination mandate is a test for religions themselves? His forthcoming book is called Created Freedom Under the Sign of the Cross: A Catholic Public Theology of Freedom for the United States (Cascade 2022). DeCosse is the director of the Religious & Catholic Ethics and Campus Ethics programs at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
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