Is it immoral to refuse the COVID-19 vaccine?

In the midst of the pandemic, a Christian minister outside of Boston named Rev. Cotton Mather told his congregants that to refuse an inoculation is to violate God’s commandment, “Thou shall not kill.” To discourage others from receiving inoculation, he reasoned, is to want the death of your neighbor, and thus Christians in his flock who discourage inoculations bear moral responsibility for the preventable deaths of their neighbors.

Christians should further remember, he extolled, that the disease and its cure came about due to God’s Providence, and to acknowledge the divine curse of the pandemic without embracing the divine gift of its cure was to reject the loving grace of the Creator. To discourage inoculation was thus an abomination toward God and an act of malice toward our neighbors.

While such a position sounds like it could come from certain pulpits last Sunday, Rev. Mather preached this sermon in 1721 and the pandemic was an outbreak of smallpox that had infected over half of Boston, and which was brought under control due to inoculation, a precursor to vaccination. It seems that religious Americans have a long history of debating pandemic relief.

While the past is often prologue, there seems to be a primary difference between the behavior that Mather was responding to and the current spate of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: The debate three centuries ago was waged primarily in moral terms — were you loving God and neighbor if you stopped the spread of disease? — while in today’s more secular society, the debate is largely carried on in legal terms — is it my right to refuse a vaccine? This shift in how we frame the questions of vaccines may be costing thousands of lives.

For broad swaths of America, the debates about COVID-19 vaccines have been framed as a question of individual freedoms versus collective responsibilities. From school boards to corporate boards, some individuals have loudly proclaimed their “right” to not get vaccinated or wear a mask. Within such framing, defensible arguments can be mustered for both sides regarding whether an individual has the right to refuse a vaccine. It is not surprising that many political commentators want to stand up for individual freedoms, even if those freedoms have repercussions for others.

But what if the current debate was shifted to moral terms? Instead of asking whether one has the right to reject vaccines, what if we asked whether one can refuse a vaccine and still be considered moral? Are we loving our neighbor and our creator if we refuse to get vaccinated?

While there is much to disagree with in Rev. Mather’s life — after all, he was a slave-owning minister behind the Salem witch trails, I appreciate that, in this case, he considered first the moral questions that arise in a pandemic. While many moral arguments can be offered in support of vaccines, the most compelling for me center on the love of one’s neighbors:

We know that while the consequences of COVID-19 are unpredictable, it generally is most serious for those with preexisting medical conditions, the elderly, and the economically disadvantaged. While universals are rare in religion, compassion toward the most vulnerable in our society seems to be central to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism alike. Thus, even if we personally do not feel threatened by the disease, knowing that our choice to get vaccinated betters the lives of the most vulnerable by reducing the chance they will contract COVID-19 seems like a clear moral commandment that most religions can support.

Of course, others will undoubtedly offer arguments against vaccines, and I expect some pushback for my position, but I think new perspectives come into focus when the debate is carried out within a moral framework rather than a legal one. When we think about how to love our neighbor and our creator, the results more often bend toward compassion than when we debate individual rights.

Back in 1721, Reverend Mather faced a violent reaction for his moral arguments for vaccination. Some of his fellow ministers declared that his stance was a “delusion of the devil.”

Mather wrote to a friend that his opposition carried forth “with a folly, and falsehood and malice hardly ever known to be paralleld’d [sic] on any occasion.”

Eventually, a firebomb was thrown into his house, but did not detonate. Yet in this case, Mather felt that God called on him to spread the message of loving one’s neighbor, even amidst a violent mob of detractors. I wonder if pastors, priests, rabbis and imams today have the same courage?

Contributing columnist Stephen Lloyd-Moffett is a professor of religious studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 9:02 AM.