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I’m a Christian who recently learned of Liberty Counsel’s lawsuit on behalf of the “religious freedom rights” of nine “religious” medical workers who didn’t want their resistance to mandated medical-worker vaccines made public. What’s missing in their stance is an embrace of scripture’s command to love one’s neighbor as one’s self.
Is killing others, even if indirectly, something condoned by God? God punished King David for orchestrating the indirect killing of a soldier so he could be free to marry the dead soldier’s wife. What will God do with “Christians” who interpret religious freedom as a right to put countless “neighbors” in a position to die? Aren’t such Christians potentially guilty of the murderous behavior they accuse abortionists of?
What’s curious is the reasoning behind Liberty Counsel’s advocacy on behalf of their nine “religious” plaintiffs. “Shielding plaintiffs’ identity from the public is necessary to protect their safety and the personal nature of their medical and religious decisions,” they wrote. Isn’t such reasoning (safety, its personal, and a medical matter) arguably similar to that used to defend abortion? If so, it reveals the way liberalism’s individual freedom ideal can be twisted to mean anything one wants, and the way the Christian right has uncritically embraced that “ideal” when it suits their ends.
Such Christianity has a long and mixed American history but its current moral shallowness and selfish corruption of freedom in Christ away from service to one’s neighbor is, as I see it, unworthy of praise.
Alan Toth
Rockland