The COVID Effect
Jonathon Cherne July/August 2025A religious liberty attorney asks, “Did religious objections to vaccine mandates have a positive or negative impact on religious freedom in America?”
The COVID-19 pandemic was not only a global health crisis but also a profound test of the principles that undergird American constitutional freedoms. Among the most contentious issues was the intersection of public health mandates and religious liberty, especially in the context of vaccine mandates. Now that we are several years removed, it is imperative to assess how religious freedom fared. Did religious objections to vaccine mandates weaken or strengthen religious liberty?
Abuse or Awakening?
The debate around religious liberty exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates was starkly polarized. On one side there was the belief that religious liberty claims made by some individuals were disingenuous, politically motivated, or insincere. They argued that the widespread invocation of religion to evade mandates trivialized authentic religious objections and undermined long-standing legal norms and public trust in religious exemptions.
On the other side were those who felt deeply betrayed by the swift sidelining of religious objections to the vaccines. They argued that religious liberty was being treated as a disposable right by employers in the face of political urgency and public health. They felt that if we did not stand up for religious liberty now, our religious rights would only further erode.
Looking back, I believe the concerns of erosion to religious liberty were unfounded. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that religious liberty was strengthened by those willing to follow their religious convictions at the peril of their livelihood. There is a quote I believe rings true: “Every effort to restrict liberty of conscience is God’s means of awakening minds that otherwise might slumber.”1 The COVID pandemic restricted liberty, whether it was mandatory lockdowns or mandatory vaccinations. Because of these restrictions we saw an awakening of individuals, employers, and the courts as to the meaning of religious liberty.
A Catalyst
Times of crisis often turn individuals back to religion. We see this in the numerous crises God’s people experienced in the Bible and also in modern history. After September 11, churches overflowed. When the Notre-Dame cathedral caught fire, the crisis renewed religious interest in Europe.
Looking at the COVID-19 pandemic, we should not be surprised, then, that many people had a renewed interest in God and reevaluated what it meant to be faithful to Him with their bodies in terms of vaccine mandates. Furthermore, many individuals had likely never dealt with the religious issues that arose from the vaccine mandates, such as use of aborted fetal tissue in the manufacturing or testing of medications, or mRNA in drugs. The widespread publicity of these facts caused many individuals who had not previously had a problem with vaccines to evaluate these issues for the first time, possibly at the same time they were renewing their interest in religion because of the COVID crisis. This helped fuel a surge in religious exemption requests to the vaccine mandates.
One of these individuals was my client Katherine Katz. She has a sincere religious belief against abortion and in 2021 heard, for the first time, about some medications that were connected to aborted fetal tissue. Because of this, she requested an exemption from her employer, the County of Los Angeles. The county denied her religious exemption, claiming Katz was not sincere, because she had taken the flu shot in prior years. After a five-day trial, the court ruled Katz did in fact have a sincere religious belief, and that there was no evidence she knew about the fetal tissue issue at the time she received the flu vaccines. The county was required to pay $911,000 in damages and reinstate her.
Other cases have also fared well. A San Franscico jury decided that Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) must pay $7.8 million to six employees who were fired after their religious exemptions to the vaccine were denied. A Louisiana jury found that Terminix Pest Control must pay $785,000 to two employees it fired when it denied their religious accommodation to the vaccine mandate. In Michigan a jury awarded a single remote employee $12 million because Blue Cross fired her for not getting vaccinated. Blue Cross had already been required to pay $700,000 in a Tennessee trial for firing a research scientist who would not get vaccinated.
These trial wins, from jurors in red and blue states, have also helped to strengthen religious liberty. They required Americans, jurors, and those following these cases to grapple with religious liberty issues. These trials demonstrated to Americans that their fellow citizens (jurors) could recognize that these individuals held sincere religious beliefs that should be accommodated. They also put employers on notice that dismissing their employees’ religious rights could have expensive consequences.
A Learning Curve for Employers
Putting the trial wins aside, requests for religious accommodations to the vaccines also strengthened religious liberty because they required employers to deal with something most had not dealt with before—religious accommodation law. The surge of claims for religious accommodation posed an unfamiliar legal challenge to many employers. Prior to the pandemic, the vast majority of companies probably had little or no exposure to religious accommodation requirements. Suddenly HR departments were flooded with religious exemption requests that forced them to confront not only legal compliance but also deeper questions about how to respectfully engage with employees’ religious beliefs.
To properly handle the influx of religious accommodation requests, employers were required to gain a newfound appreciation for religious liberty and its requirements. The experience prompted religious accommodation training, internal policy revisions, and a broader recognition that religious freedom is not just a theoretical right but a lived reality that even secular workplaces must respect. Failure to take these crucial steps, as was seen with the trial wins listed above, saw the employer learning the hard way.
Religious accommodation claims to the vaccine mandates also helped educate employers as to what true religious freedom is in America. What we found during the COVID vaccine mandates was that many employers held an errant view that religious beliefs were protected only if they were institutional beliefs. Thus, if an employee’s church, mosque, or synagogue did not have an official religious teaching against the COVID vaccines, then the errant employer believed the employee could not have a valid religious objection to the COVID vaccines. These employers required letters from religious leaders before they would grant accommodations. They refused to take their employees at their word, never mind that such employees had never been known to be dishonest or untruthful in the past.
But the key legal question is not whether the employee’s religious denomination has an objection. “The question,” according to a 1984 Second Circuit decision in Patrick v. LeFevre, “is whether the beliefs professed are, in the employee’s own scheme of things, religious.” In other words, the laws protecting religious freedom do not look to a church doctrine or creed, but to the motive of the individual claiming the religious belief. The law asks instead whether the individual’s belief is motivated by a religious reason (for example, prayer, divine inspiration, religious text) or a secular one (such as science or politics). Through COVID religious exemption requests, employers learned this important lesson—either through education or litigation—and this has served to further strengthen religious liberty in America.
However, courts grappling with COVID religious exemptions have gone even further in upholding religious freedom. Legal challenges brought by employees who had both religious and secular reasons for not getting vaccinated have forced the courts to confront the issue of whether religious beliefs that are mixed with nonreligious beliefs are still protected. And the circuit courts have given a resounding yes! For example, in Ringhofer v. Mayo Clinic (2024) the Eighth Circuit found that “overlap between a religious and political view does not place it outside the scope of Title VII’s religious protections.” In Passarella v. Aspirus Health (2024) the Seventh Circuit held that a belief is protected so long as some aspect of the request is based on the employee’s religious observance, practice, or belief. This makes sense because religious beliefs do not always fit in their own neat little box, but often overlap with other areas of one’s life, such as science, health, or politics. For example, if one believes in a literal seven-day creation based on scientific evidence as well as biblical texts, this belief should not be deemed nonreligious because it is partly rooted in science.
Scrutiny, Sincerity, and Questions of Abuse
A considerable tension during the COVID vaccine mandate era was whether individuals were using religious exemptions as an excuse to get out of vaccination. When large numbers of employees requested religious accommodations, when many religious leaders were publicly offering to write anyone a letter of exemption, and when form letters were circulating the internet, employers were concerned about the risk of abuse and a lack of sincerity. Instead of trusting the employee, employers transformed human resource departments into theological review boards, trying to determine whether an objection was truly religious or a proxy for political or personal opposition. For a while it appeared that religious liberty was losing ground.
While the risk of abuse was real, I do not believe it was as widespread as people might have believed, especially given the way courts and juries are now deciding these cases. Regardless, the solution was never to scrutinize every employee’s religious belief. Instead, absent clear evidence that an employee was insincere, employers should give employees the benefit of the doubt. If accommodations can be made without undue hardship on the business, it would be far better to accommodate all requests, at the risk of an insincere person being accommodated, than to scrutinize every accommodation request, at the risk of denying an accommodation to a truly sincere individual.
Just as the justice system errs on the side of protecting the innocent—even at the cost of letting the guilty go free—employment law is set up to err on the side of respecting stated religious beliefs by assuming the sincerity of employees’ religious beliefs when they request accommodations. American jurisprudence has long cautioned against delving into the theology of a claim. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance states that “the employer should ordinarily assume that an employee’s request for religious accommodation is based on a sincerely held religious belief.” The Ninth Circuit held that “we may not question the legitimacy of [an individual’s] religious beliefs regarding COVID-19 vaccinations.”
In both the criminal law context and religious liberty context, the underlying principle is the same: when fundamental rights are at stake—whether it’s liberty of the person or liberty of religious expression—the system is designed to minimize the risk of violating those rights, even if it means accepting some imperfection or allowing potential abuse. In the context of religious accommodations, this means that employers should not scrutinize the legitimacy of a person’s beliefs unless the employer already has an objective basis for questioning the religious nature or sincerity of the particular belief. This deference protects individuals from intrusive and arbitrary judgments about their faith, just as the presumption of innocence protects people from wrongful punishment. Both frameworks reflect a deep commitment to individual dignity and the idea that certain rights deserve heightened protection, even if doing so carries some risk of abuse. As the legal maxim goes: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” In the context of religious freedom, absent an undue hardship, “it is better that ten insincere people are accommodated than one sincerely religious person be denied.”
Following this understanding of the law helps maintain public confidence in our basic human rights. On the other hand, if the system frequently denies the truly religious adherent, the law will lose its legitimacy and respect.
In claiming religious exemptions to COVID mandates, some individuals were wrongly assumed to be insincere merely because they could not clearly explain their religious beliefs that prevented them from receiving a COVID vaccine. They either wrote an incoherent statement or copied something from the internet. Does that mean they were insincere or abusing religious freedoms? Because of their claims, courts got a chance to set the record straight, with the Seventh Circuit stating that “judges are not to undertake to dissect religious beliefs . . . because [they] are not articulated with the clarity and precision that a more sophisticated person might employ” (Passarella v. Aspirus Health). The First Circuit held that finding statements on the internet that coincide with one’s “professed religious beliefs does not establish that [such] beliefs are insincere” (Bazinet v. Beth Israel Lahey Health, Inc., 2024).
These cases were immensely helpful. They show that you need not have a theology degree or even a high school diploma to be able to practice your religious beliefs. Religious liberty is not only for the educated or well-spoken.
Last, society was reminded not to scrutinize alleged religious beliefs because individuals are not always firmly grounded or consistent in every religious belief they might espouse. Oftentimes individuals struggle with their religious beliefs, failing to understand fully why they believe the way they do. And sometimes they fail to meet the standards of their convictions or follow through on them perfectly. Indeed, if everyone had perfect compliance with their religious convictions, there would be no need for the spiritual principle of repentance. The courts have reminded us, in the way they have handled objections to vaccine mandates, that religious freedom also protects religious adherents who are “struggling” with their position.
A Clarifying Crisis
The COVID-19 vaccine mandates forced both individuals and institutions to understand the scope and seriousness of legal protections for religious convictions. While the initial response to religious objections was dismissive or even punitive, the legal pushback that followed ultimately reaffirmed and even strengthened key principles of religious freedom. Courts have reinforced that sincerely held beliefs do not require theological sophistication, denominational endorsement, or perfect consistency to merit protection. Juries—in red and blue state alike—stood with employees who risked everything to remain true to their conscience. And employers, once unfamiliar with religious accommodation laws, were compelled to learn, adapt, and—when necessary—pay a price for failing to comply.
Religious liberty was not eroded—it was exercised, tested, and, in many respects, strengthened. Those who stood firm in their beliefs reminded the nation that liberty, once awakened and defended, can emerge from crisis, not diminished, but refined.
1 Ellen G. White, Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing (Mountain View, Calif.: Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1956), p. 33.
Article Author: Jonathon Cherne
Jonathon Cherne is a religious liberty and estate planning attorney who practices in California and Tennessee. He serves as “Of Counsel” to the Church State Council, representing workers who have suffered religious discrimination in the workplace. He also serves as associate director of American Christian Ministries, formerly known as American Cassette Ministries.