George Christensen (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

At a mass anti-lockdown rally in Sydney last month, one protester held up a sign declaring “The blood of Jesus is my vaccine”.

Such messages were condemned by mainstream religious leaders around the country, who are urging the faithful to get vaccinated and protect their communities. But on the conservative Christian fringe, the message about vaccination is — to put it most charitably — mixed. At both a state and federal level, politicians on the Coalition’s religious right have been the most adamantly opposed to “vaccine mandates” in any situation. 

It’s a line taken by conservative religious groups like the Australian Christian Lobby which continue to equivocate on the benefits of vaccines. And like so much of politics of Australia’s hard-right fringe, it takes its cues from a messy culture war in the United States, where white evangelical Christians are over-represented among the unvaccinated, who are in turn over-represented in ICUs around the country as the Delta strain surges. 

The politicians 

Minutes before question time yesterday, Coalition backbencher George Christensen went on a tear about lockdowns, vaccines and mask mandates. The trouble for the Coalition is what Christensen had to say about vaccine passports — that they are “a form of discrimination” — reflects a growing fissure within the party room.

Some of the loudest voices pushing back against any form of vaccine certificate — where the jabbed enjoy greater freedoms, and vaccination is compulsory in some industries — have come from conservative Christian MPs. Christensen is one of the strongest conduits between the ideas of the Christian right and federal Parliament. He’s regularly advocating ways to restrict reproductive rights (with tepid support). He recently urged Coalition colleagues to meet with the ACL over restarting the push for a religious discrimination bill. 

There’s Eric Abetz, the veteran voice of conservative Christians in the Senate, who today wrote an op-ed warning that vaccine incentives were a sign “our freedoms are under threat”. Rookie Liberal Senator Alex Antic, who recently tried to stack the party’s South Australian branch with Pentecostals, has also written about the need to fight vaccine passports. 

In NSW, the crusade is being led by Mulgoa MP Tanya Davies, who is trying to move a private member’s bill to ban companies mandating vaccines. “This is not about being an anti-vaxxer,” Davies said in a Facebook video. “This is simply about the government telling people in our community that you have to be vaccinated.” 

Davies’ last crusade was an attempt to roll NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian over a bill decriminalising abortion. She failed spectacularly. 

On the mandatory vaccine ban, her only supporter is Kevin Conolly, member for Riverstone in Sydney’s “Bible Belt”, who also threatened to cross the floor over abortion decriminalisation.

The ecosystem

None of these politicians have strayed into explicit anti-vaccination territory. But they’re part of a broad ecosystem sowing doubt about vaccination. Davies’ bill, for example, has been promoted by G&B Lawyers, a firm which has regularly pushed anti-vaccine messaging throughout the pandemic. 

The work of the ACL also highlights widespread concern about vaccinations among the religious right. The lobby’s boss, Martyn Iles, is an opinionated sort, influential among conservative Christians. He’s spoken about the pandemic and COVID-19 a fair bit, and has been very deliberate not to promote them, a bit of fence-sitting coded to reassure anti-vaxxers that God’s on their side.

On vaccines, Iles says it’s “not clear” whether people should have them. But he’s also ranted against “therapeutic totalitarianism” and raised concern the unvaccinated would be shamed and shunned. Ahead of planned anti-lockdown protests around the country, Iles came to a painful tortured conclusion that Christians should follow the law and not attend. 

“I do not like my own conclusions on this,” he wrote.

A dominant position of the religious right seems to be this: a very vocal and defiant opposition to any form of vaccine mandate, which has it straying dangerously close to arguments put forward by anti-vaxxers. 

But the United States shows how fuzzy the line between concern trolling about freedom and dangerous vaccine hesitancy can be in that community. There, white, conservative evangelicals are one of the groups least likely to get the vaccine. There’s a cocktail of factors driving that hesitancy — a belief God will provide protection, distrust of government, science and Democrats, exposure to conspiracy theories, the belief that vaccines were developed using aborted foetuses, and the lingering Trump effect. 

There many prominent evangelical leaders have tried to promote vaccination, but struggled to cut through to a divided, hesitant flock. 

Here in Australia, some survey data shows hesitancy is highest among the strongly religious. But some of the loudest conservative Christian voices have used their pulpits to rage about the spectre of lost freedom, instead of preaching about the benefits of our ticket to liberty.