“Brothers and sisters, this really is a love-your-neighbor moment. . . . When the data really was unblinded in early December, and the answer was 95% efficacy, with no evidence of a safety problem, I have to say I cried tears of joy. It was an answer, even beyond what I had almost dared to pray for.”
—Francis Collins, former Director of the National Institutes of Health
“Wearing a mask is the great commandment—love your neighbor as yourself. . . . Let me just say a word to the priests and pastors and rabbis and other faith leaders. This is our job, to deal with these conspiracy issues and things like that. . . . One of the responsibilities of faith leaders is to tell people to . . . trust the science. They’re not going to put out a vaccine that’s going to hurt people.”
–Rick Warren, former pastor of Saddleback Community Church
Throughout the past three years, excessive tactics adopted by government magistrates, especially their mandated disruptions of every aspect of life’s routines, exposed fractures among Evangelicals that persist. Among Evangelicals, responses diverged widely to governor-mandatory closures of churches and institutions, required face-masking, pushed COVID testing, and forced experimental injections with only Emergency Use Authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.[1] Many promptly complied with little investigation. Evangelical leaders of many churches and educational institutions also unquestioningly and dutifully accepted. But many other mindful Christians reasonably questioned the extreme measures mandated by government officials.
1. To this date of February 2023, the Food and Drug Administration has given four COVID-19 injections Emergency Use Authorization: AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer. “Under an EUA, the FDA may allow the use of unapproved medical products, or unapproved uses of approved medical products in an emergency to diagnose, treat, or prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions when certain statutory criteria have been met, including that there are no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” Two of the vaccines, Moderna, and Pfizer, have received full approval, despite significant health risks.
In a recent Christ Over All article, “The Hostility of Loving Your Neighbor,” Chase Davis accurately demonstrates that Jesus’s command to “love your neighbor” is now weaponized to constrain others to comply with unwise and binding edicts, much like “judge not” is exploited to hush anyone who would assess someone’s behavior as sin. This practice of turning “Love your neighbor” into a weapon is reprehensible—and it’s even worse when evangelical leaders do so. Yet this is exactly what many have done.
“Love Your Neighbor” Weaponized against Freedom of Conscience
Many Evangelicals with national platforms disdainfully judged the motives of fellow Christians and scolded them for being “unloving” toward their neighbors. In February 2021, Russell Moore (who was at that time Director of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention) argued, “We can express our love for neighbor—especially the sick and elderly—by reducing the chance that we might inadvertently pass along a virus that could kill them. . . . All we are asked to do is to get a shot.” David French, in an article entitled “The Spiritual Problem at the Heart of Christian Vaccine Refusal,” more stridently assessed, “When I’m standing next to an unmasked family in church, I’m not thinking they’re brave or bold. I’m seeing instead a tangible disregard for the health and safety of those around them.” During a virtual panel conversation with other evangelical leaders, government official and prominent Christian Francis Collins linked love-for-neighbor and the jab’s efficacy against virus transmission: “Brothers and sisters, this really is a love-your-neighbor moment.”[2] These words have not aged well.
2. Francis Collins was the Director of the National Institutes of Health from 2009–2021.
These prominent evangelical voices showed little patience with Christians who fill church pews and whose dollars fund the positions they occupy in churches, parachurch ministries, conferences, and government. That Francis Collins and his prominent evangelical allies showed little regard for thoughtful, prayerful, and wary resistance among America’s evangelical Christians is disconcerting. What did they fail to account for? In their public conversations and publications, these evangelical leaders failed to acknowledge that Christians can have holy and pure motives for resisting government policies that they deem excessive, unwarranted, and hostile to the freedom of conscience guaranteed by the Constitution and (more importantly) purchased for them by Christ Jesus. Collins, alone, dismissively alluded to freedom in a conversation with Russell Moore when he briefly donned a black facemask and greatly exaggerated its effectiveness: “This [mask] is not a political statement. . . . This is not an invasion of your personal freedom. . . . This is a life-saving medical device.” He cavalierly brushed Christian freedom aside without due consideration. Freedom of conscience is a holy and sacred responsibility the Lord God entrusts to his people. It is holy, right, good, and loving to guard one’s God-given free conscience. And one of the ways Christians do this is by not surrendering to those who demand dutiful compliance to mandates that add or take away from God’s commands. This article explains why guarding one’s conscience is righteous obedience to the Lord.
The Urgency of Upholding Love for Neighbor and a Free Conscience
Megan Basham rightly points out that Francis Collins formed an unholy alliance with a select few “renowned pastors and ministry leaders” who would lend their voices to appeal to gospel ministers “to act as the [Biden] administration’s go-between with their congregants.” On September 15, 2021, Collins recorded a public conversation with Ed Stetzer (Executive Director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College) in order to promote acceptance of COVID injections. Collins explains, “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work.” Collins successfully courted several prominent ministry leaders to promote acceptance of government mandates and to excoriate Christians who spoke against government overreach regarding closures, masking, and vaccine injections.
More than a year earlier, Collins participated in a conversation on “Science and Faith During COVID-19” co-hosted by BioLogos and Christianity Today (April 6, 2020). Unsurprisingly, a few months later, BioLogos, founded by Francis Collins in 2007, published “Love Your Neighbor, Get the Shot!: A Christian Statement on Science for Pandemic Times” (August 2020).
We, the undersigned, join together as Christians who uphold the authority of God’s Word and see science as a tool to understand God’s world. We call on all Christians to follow the advice of public health experts and support scientists doing crucial biomedical research on COVID-19.[3]
3. Canadian pastor Jacob Reaume addresses this statement in another Christ Over All concise essay entitled, “The BioLogos Statement vs. The Frankfurt Declaration: Two Opposite Evangelical Responses to the State’s Power.”
While claiming to be “deeply concerned about the polarization and politicization of science in the public square when so many lives are at stake,” the statement adopts the very tactics that polarize Christians. The BioLogos statement politicizes the virus and affixes the label “conspiracy theories” to the warranted questioning of the so-called “public health experts,” specifically Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins.[4] The BioLogos statement, with 8,505 signatories, appeals to Scripture to warrant its call for Christians to (1) wear masks and observe social distancing, (2) get vaccinated, (3) correct misinformation, and (4) work for justice.[5]
4. Anthony Fauci was the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022.
5. As a point of reference, The Great Barrington Declaration, another physician-led response that advocated against government mandated COVID lockdowns, garnered 936,000+ signatures.
Following a year of contradictory and conflicting orders, advice, and actions from the medical experts reputed to “follow the science,” many Evangelicals pushed back. These reasonable Christians, who seek to love their neighbors and uphold freedom of conscience, publicly expressed warranted distrust of assurances regarding vaccines released with Emergency Use Authorization—an authorization that streamlines the amount of testing required before a vaccine is offered to the public. Their distrust concerning the alleged test for efficacy has since been vindicated, as at least the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines gave no positive indication that they could stop person-to-person transmission of the virus. So much for “stop the spread.”[6]
6. Technically, Pfizer claimed that person-to-person transmission was not tested before the vaccine entered the market. For additional documentation on the Covid vaccines, see the important article by Stephen Wellum entitled, ”Thou Shalt Be Vaccinated: When “Love Thy Neighbor” Does Not Fulfill the Law.”
As necessary as it is to point out warranted concerns over the many government-imposed restrictions based on the dubious claims of reputed experts, this is not the focus of this article.[7] Instead, my principal concern is to assist Christians to gain or recover the biblically warranted principles of Christian love and freedom of conscience under Christ, especially when the latter was trampled underfoot from 2020–2022 by ministry leaders who gullibly accepted and promoted government propaganda.
7. I have previously discussed these issues in a five-part blog series at All Things Christian (March–April 2021).
Love for Neighbor Does Not Banish Freedom of Conscience
Every Christian is bound by the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to admonish others to love and to do good (Heb. 10:24) but also to honor the consciences of God’s people (1 Cor. 8:1–13). Love obligates ministers of the gospel and all Christians in leadership positions, whether in government or the church, to clearly articulate the sanctity and role of the conscience in every believer’s decision. This includes how we should respond to the conflicting demands of magistrates when called upon to inject a foreign substance into one’s body, especially an experimental substance that may bring about permanent negative side effects. In what follows I’ll give a brief primer on the conscience, and then in part two we will consider the apostle Paul’s directives concerning how to act with regard to disputable matters.
All Christians sin when they pressure fellow believers to accept an anti-virus injection into their bodies as their moral duty to love one’s neighbor. This sin is especially profound when committed by ministers of the gospel (Jas 3:1). Of all Christians, ministers are obligated to honor the freedom of their parishioners concerning things God has neither commanded nor forbidden. Concerning such things, disputable as they may be, the Apostle Paul admonishes us that knowledge and love must coincide to govern our behavior in the presence of others (1 Cor. 8:1–13). Knowledge informs Christians that evil does not reside in material substances, a false belief characterized by prohibitions like “Do not handle. Do not taste. Do not touch.” The Apostle Paul rightly rebukes such legalism (Col. 2:20–23). Christians with liberated consciences know they are free to receive or to reject duly tested anti-virus vaccines, a truth that few evangelical leaders acknowledged at the height of the Covid pandemic.
Scripture obligates us to ask, “Shall I or shall I not receive a COVID-19 vaccine?” This question is necessary because if I act contrary to my conscience, I sin. Again, the Apostle Paul explains, “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). The gospel beckons us to become “strong in faith,” an expression corresponding to “strong in conscience,” which we infer from Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 8:1–13. Christians who are “strong in faith” have a “conscience” free from imposed unbiblical constraints to act or not to act on matters of moral indifference—things that God does not forbid or command (Rom. 14; 1 Cor. 8–10). The Lordship of Christ obligates us to be fully convinced concerning matters that God neither commands nor forbids (Rom. 14:5). The apostle’s directives extend to such trivialities as ingesting substances into our bodies; we are obligated to “do everything for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).
But how does the conscience relate to the coronavirus? What would the Apostle Paul say about the various mandates imposed first “to flatten the curve” and then, for an extended time, allegedly to mitigate susceptibility to and transmission of COVID-19? Check back for part two as we see how God’s Word applies to government mandates.
