Guest Blog: Biden Administration Making Lists of Religious Vaccine Objectors – And So It Begins

According to Aaron M. Renn’s analysis of contemporary evangelicalism as he reported in “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” there have been three distinct stages in the secularization of American culture.  Views on Christianity and, I believe, religion in general have followed the culture.

•       Positive World View of devout religionists (Pre-1994): Society at large retained a mostly positive view of Christianity.  Publicly being a Christian was a status-enhancer both for business and political aspirations.  Christian moral norms were the basic moral norms of society and violating them resulted in negative consequences.
•       Neutral World View (1994–2014): In the late 1990s, society began to take a neutral stance toward Christianity.  Being a good, church-going person no longer held privileged status, but it was not particularly disfavored.  Being known as a Christian had neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social or political status.  Christian moral norms retained some residual effect, but were considered along side of other moral norms for other religions and atheists.
•       Negative World View (2014–Present): However, by 2014 American society developed a negative view of Christianity.  Being known as a Christian has now become a social negative across large swaths of the country, particularly in the elite domains of ­society.  Christian morality is expressly repudiated in main stream media, in universities and across almost all grades of education.  A Christian is seen as bigoted, closed-minded and a threat to the public good and the new public moral order.  Subscribing to Christian moral views or repudiating the secular moral order can have significant negative consequences, from job loss, dis-invitation to speaking venues, failure to get elected or even subjected to vandalism or attack without consequences for the perpetrator, similar to what happened to Jews in Germany just prior to WW2.

So now we are on the cusp of such severe negative views of Christianity that it is being targeted by government agencies for identification as to who claims exemption from government mandates based on religious convictions.  While this discrimination may apply to many religious views, Christianity is being carved out as a special case of resistance to ‘normal moral orders.’
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And So It Begins:  Guest blog by Sarah Parshall Perry  & GianCarlo Canaparo
@SarahPPerry / @GCanaparo / January 11, 2022

The Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia announced a new records system that will store the names and “personal religious information” of all employees who make “religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement.”

A tiny administrative agency in the District of Columbia announced a new policy Tuesday that will likely serve as a model for a whole-of-government push to assemble lists of Americans who object on religious grounds to a Covid-19 vaccine.

The Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia — a federal independent entity that assists officers in the District of Columbia courts in formulating release recommendations and providing supervision and services to defendants awaiting trial — announced a new records system that will store the names and “personal religious information” of all employees who make “religious accommodation requests for religious exception from the federally mandated vaccination requirement.”

The announcement does not explain why the agency needs to create this list except to say that it will “assist the Agency in the collecting, storing, dissemination, and disposal of employee religious exemption request information collected and maintained by the Agency.” In other words, the list will help the agency make a list.

The announcement also does not say what the agency will do with this information after it has decided an employee’s religious accommodation request. And neither does the announcement explain why the Biden administration chose to test this policy in an agency with a majority-black staff, who are both more religious and less vaccinated than other groups. So much for the president’s commitment to “racial equity.”

We are starting to suspect that President Joe Biden is not keeping his promise to have the most transparent administration in history.

What is really going on with this announcement at this tiny agency? Likely, the Biden administration is using it to stealth test a policy it intends to roll out across the whole government. Almost nobody has ever heard of the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia, and very few people pay close attention to it or are covered by its policies. Indeed, at of the time of publication of this article, the announcement has been viewed only 16 times.

However, had Biden announced, for example, that the Department of Labor intended to adopt this policy, it would be big news. The Federal Register where announcements like this are made would be flooded with comments that the department would have to address. That would, of course, delay the policy’s rollout. With the Pretrial Services Agency, Biden likely expected that the policy would land quickly and without a splash. As it is, the notice of a new announcement provides less than 30 days for public comment. Biden may not be winning points for transparency, but he is doing his best to win first place in subjecting Americans with sincerely held religious beliefs to differential treatment.

Take the Department of Defense, for example — which has failed to grant a single religious exemption on behalf of any service members requesting one for the federal vaccine mandate. A group of Navy SEALS was recently successful in its federal lawsuit against the Biden administration on claims that its conscience rights under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act were violated.

From the outset of his administration, Biden voiced support for passage of the patently faith-hostile Equality Act — a bill that would gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act entirely when it intersects with LGBTQ+ protections and entitlements in public accommodations.

The president also swiftly revoked the Mexico City policy that had been reinstated by former President Donald Trump, thereby ensuring that religious Americans would be forced to fund abortions overseas by way of their tax dollars, despite their religious objections to the act.

While employers, employment agencies, or unions with 100 employees or more are prohibited under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from engaging in disparate treatment and from maintaining policies or practices that result in unjustified disparate impact based on religion, this administration does not seem to have received the memo.

That, at the bottom, is what this policy is about.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

Sarah Parshall Perry and GianCarlo Canaparo are legal fellows in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

An update on January 15 revealed that 18 other agencies in the US government are also tracking people who maintain religious objections to covid vaccinations.  These include the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of the Treasury, to name only a few.

Intermezzo: Guest Blog by Jarrett Stepman

We Must Heed Lincoln’s Warning About Mob Rule

by Jarrett Stepman @JarrettStepman / January 06, 2021 /
Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. Send an email to Jarrett. He is also the author of the new book, “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.”

Abraham Lincoln warned us: Mob rule begets mob rule.
On Wednesday, as Congress convened to certify an Electoral College vote of the 2020 presidential election, a mass of people broke into the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.  They climbed the building, smashed windows, entered offices, and even entered the House and Senate chambers.  It was a bizarre scene, to say the least.



Taking selfies and engaging in photo ops from the House speaker’s chair certainly puts a modern twist on this 21st-century reenactment of the Vandals’ sack of Rome in 455 A.D.  But it wasn’t just window-smashing and photo ops.  The intrusion also turned deadly.  A woman was shot and killed.

There will also be questions as to how a group of people, no matter how large, was able to push their way inside the Capitol and stay inside for several hours.  So, what’s to be made of all this?



The right to peacefully assemble and protest is an essential one guaranteed by the Constitution.  Breaking into and vandalizing federal property — for whatever cause — is not.  Regardless of the original message of the protests, those who orchestrated the break-in to federal property deserve condemnation.  It’s a violation of the rule of law, not to mention a federal crime.

Certainly, many on both the left and right came out quickly to condemn the violence.  It would, however, be a mistake to see what happened in isolation.






Let’s not forget that Washington, D.C. — as with many other cities across the country — had already been beset last year by mobs and waves of violent riots.  When rioters lit fires, smashed windows, toppled statues, and physically and verbally assaulted political opponents in the name of Black Lives Matter this summer, the result was that a street was named for the movement in front of the White House.



The violence wasn’t limited to just Washington.  Around the country, large swaths of cities were set ablaze as police departments became overwhelmed, and politicians did little to stop it.  A lawless “autonomous” zone was created in the middle of downtown Seattle, which led to widespread property damage and several deaths.  Many hopped aboard calls to defund the police, rather than defending the police while they were besieged.  And more than a few turned down federal aid when it was clear that things had spun out of control.



Portland, Oregon, had the highest spike of violent crime in the entire country — impressive given the nearly unprecedented national surge in violent crime.  That is the consequence of rampant lawlessness.

When Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., dared to suggest in an op-ed in the pages of The New York Times that overwhelmed police departments should have the ability to request aid from the military, the Times newsroom rebelled, and he was called an authoritarian.  Yet, Cotton aptly called the lawless riots what they were: mob rule.

Mob rule, whether conducted by members of Black Lives Matter or people wearing MAGA hats, is a threat to law and order.  Not only that, it’s a threat to liberty, too.  It violates the very essence of the Constitution, of the belief that the people ultimately rule.  And as Abraham Lincoln warned in his famed 1838 Lyceum Address, mob law when left unchecked begets more mob law.  When portions of the population think that violence is the path to victory, where the rules of the system don’t have to be followed, it is only natural for others to think that mob law is the law.  Under mobocracy, even those inclined to follow the law may eventually lose faith in the government.

Lincoln warned:
Good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed.

Even if we believe that our system has become corrupted, that injustice rather than justice has prevailed, it is still the wiser course to appeal to ballots, protest, and petition rather than violence.  The American Revolution, which ultimately ended in war and the overthrow of British rule, was for the most part an orderly affair.  Even within a system that did not provide representative government, the Founders appealed to law and negotiation first, second, and third before resorting to violence.  And once committed to revolution, they knew there was no going back.

We shouldn’t forget that the storming of the Bastille, as grave as the depredations of the French monarchy had sometimes been, led to mass violence and tyranny, not ordered liberty.

Most Americans understand this.  But make no mistake, unlike this summer’s riots — which countless media outlets distorted and misrepresented to excuse and minimize — there will absolutely be efforts to portray every Trump supporter as a violent insurrectionist.  And politicians will use that to justify curtailing the God-given rights of citizens who disagree with them.

Many have condemned the intrusion and vandalizing of the Capitol Building, as they should, but we should also not forget the fact that mob rule and lawlessness have destroyed the lives of countless Americans over the past year and has eroded our country’s attachment to the rule of law.  This should have always been unacceptable.

Lincoln’s warning in 1838 was ignored, and a generation of Americans paid a terrible price in blood for it. Let us learn from the past instead of tearing it down.  Regardless of the corruption of our institutions, the better path forward is to support the rule of law, reform old institutions or build new ones, and plan for the long term of sustaining this federal republic that we would surely like to keep.