The Wisdom of Rejecting Vaccine Passports

Many have taken it upon themselves to write soothing, gentle articles about Covid-19-related issues and the church. They try to find a “middle way” and appease both sides. I am going to do something very different. I am going to write a deliberately scathing article because there are some things that simply need to be said. Sometimes people take foolish positions and there is a time and a place to call them out without apology. Paul did it in Galatians 5: “I wish they would emasculate themselves!”. Jesus did it in Matthew 23: “woe to you blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!”
Lately it has become clear that evangelical thought leaders in Australia are completely dropping the ball on issues surrounding Covid-19. Martyn Iles of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) has posted on facebook to condemn lockdown protests and has called Christians not to participate in them. A piece appeared on Philip Jensen’s website with the provocative title Getting Vaccinated is Our Christian Duty. Megan Best has written a piece for The Gospel Coalition (TGC) arguing that churches should embrace the practice of requiring vaccine passports in order to attend church.
At one level, this is not a surprise. High-brow evangelicals have always had a soft underbelly, an achilles heel. They want to be seen as respectable by the powers that be. Even if they are thought of as “wrong”, “misguided” or even “religious”, they are still desperate to have some kind of standing among the cultural aristocracy. They seem to regard this as an “outreach” opportunity. Perhaps it is. But it is a mission field that comes rife with temptations to compromise, piece by piece, on everything that is not an absolutely central “gospel issue”. Just as it is not necessarily wise for an unmarried man to do outreach to the red-light district of Amsterdam, so not every Christian intellectual is ready for the temptations of trying to rub elbows with metropolitan cultural elites.
Understood through that lens, the rush of Christian intellectuals to side with the government, tech giants and corporate media is understandable. People have been arrested in this country simply for sharing facebook posts about protests. Many evangelical thought leaders would die a thousand deaths before suffering the indignity of being lumped in with those hillbillies who insist on taking Scripture literally. You know, the kind of people who believe in things like creationism or premillenialism. They are certainly not going to risk letting themselves be associated with something so deplorably common as being “anti-vax”.
And so, to preserve their estate, they have rolled up their sleeves and towed the party line with all their might. It falls now to those of us who have long since given up our dignity to reassure you of something: you are not crazy.
If you’re not sure that Covid-19, as a disease, deserves the hysteria that has grown around it, you are not crazy.
If you’re nervous about the police and the military being brought in to lock people in their homes who have committed no crime and are not sick, you are not crazy.
If you think something smells fishy about the way these vaccines are being pushed on us so intensely, you are not crazy.
And most important, if you think that Christian leaders are going too far when they tell you it’s a sin to resist any of this, then you are definitely not crazy.
There are many sub-issues that deserve to be dealt with amidst these global events. But for now we will deal with the issue of requiring vaccine passports to attend in-person church. We will start with this one because it’s so clear cut and so many Christians are getting it wrong. If we can’t get this one right, it’s like missing the big “E” on the eye chart.
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