With the Windows Open – Christians and Covid Restrictions

ARGUMENT · CONSCIENCE AND AUTHORITY

What a Christian could rightly refuse in the Covid years

Grant the critics everything. Suppose the government funded the research that caused the pandemic, misrepresented the danger, and imposed rules that did not work and harmed children. This paper grants all of it and asks what a Christian could rightly refuse. The verdicts come out almost exactly as they would if the rulers had been honest, because Scripture’s test asks whether a command requires sin, not whether the ruler was right. Those years also exposed a contradiction the American order cannot resolve: a government that claims its authority from consent spent two years commanding people who had not consented.

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01

Grant the critics everything

Start with the case against the rulers, and grant it in full.

Some of it is documented. In May 2021 Anthony Fauci told the Senate that NIH had never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A senior NIH official, Lawrence Tabak, later told a House subcommittee that it had, through a grant to EcoHealth Alliance, and the Department of Health and Human Services debarred EcoHealth and its president. Fauci testified that the six-foot distancing rule “sort of just appeared” and was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.” The 2023 Cochrane review of randomized trials found that wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the incidence of influenza-like or COVID-like illness, though a large trial in Bangladesh found a modest benefit from surgical masks. The 2022 national assessment recorded the largest drop in nine-year-olds’ reading scores since 1990 and the first drop ever in mathematics. The rest of the case is disputed: that the funded research produced the virus, and that the measures did more harm than good.

We grant that too. Suppose the government caused the pandemic, misrepresented it, imposed rules without evidence, and harmed a generation of children in the process. Christians who lived through those years reached again and again for one verse: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). The verse is true, and it is narrow. It permits disobedience where a command requires sin, not where the ruler is dishonest or wrong. A lying ruler is still the power that is, and Paul wrote Romans 13 to a church its ruler would later put to death.

Scripture even records a plague brought on by the ruler himself. David numbered the people over his general’s protest and afterward confessed it as sin (2 Sam. 24:3, 10), and “there died of the people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men” (2 Sam. 24:15). The remedy was not a people refusing the king’s orders. It was a prophet, Gad, sent to the king, and a king who said, “Lo, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly: but these sheep, what have they done?” (2 Sam. 24:17). If the charges are true, the Christian’s duty is Gad’s: to tell the rulers what they have done.

In None Gives What He Has Not we argued that the Christian owes obedience, taxes, and honor to the powers that be, and declines only the acts whose meaning denies his confession. The Covid years were the hardest test of that position in living memory. In brief, the answer is this:

THE FOUR CASES IN BRIEF

02

The contradiction

Those years exposed something the critics rarely noticed. The American order does not claim the authority God gives. It claims the authority the people give: the Declaration derives the government’s just powers “from the consent of the governed.” Its philosophy is John Locke’s, and Locke began from the premise that “every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself” (Second Treatise §27).

A government built on that premise has a problem when it must command a body whose owner refuses. On its own theory it holds only the power its citizens gave it, and the man who will not mask, vaccinate, or close his shop has not given it. The government has two answers, and neither is his consent. The first is the majority. Locke held that whoever joins a society agrees “to submit to the determination of the majority” (§97), and when the Supreme Court upheld compulsory vaccination in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), against a Cambridge minister who had refused it, the Court appealed to the social compact in the words of the Massachusetts Constitution, which calls the body politic “a voluntary association of individuals” in which “the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people.” But the dissenter never volunteered, and a covenant he never made is not his consent. The second answer is tacit consent: by living in the country, a man agrees to its laws (§119). David Hume disposed of that in 1748. “We may as well assert,” he wrote, “that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.”

So when the consent state must govern the unwilling, it governs by something other than consent while still claiming consent as its only title. The citizen who answered a mask order with “my body, my choice,” the slogan the abortion movement made famous, was more faithful to the founding than the government that commanded him. Both argued from the same premise, and the premise is false: “Ye are not your own. For ye are bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). The Christian has no contradiction to manage. The magistrate’s authority never came from his consent (Rom. 13:1), so it does not lapse when he withholds it. It is bounded instead by the law of God, and that boundary is the test.

03

The test

Scripture gives one ground for disobeying a lawful authority: the command requires what God forbids, or forbids what God requires. The three Hebrews would not bow to the image (Dan. 3:18). The apostles would not stop preaching: “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye” (Acts 4:19). Daniel would not stop praying, and the way he refused is the pattern for every case that follows. “When Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime” (Dan. 6:10).

Daniel did not hide, lie, or fight. He did what he had always done, where the king’s men could see it, and he went to the lions for it. The older Protestant name for this is passive obedience: the subject obeys every lawful command, refuses an unlawful one openly, and submits to the penalty without resisting.

The test cuts in both directions. It forbids defiance on grounds of preference, and it forbids the opposite error, which Luther named in 1527 when plague reached Wittenberg. Christians who refused every precaution and called it faith, he wrote, were not trusting God: “This is not trusting God but tempting Him.” His own resolution was plain: “I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed.” He set the limit in the next breath: “If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely.”

04

Masks

A mask order commands nothing God forbids. Covering the face is not sin. Grant that the masks did nothing. A Christian was free to say so, petition against the order, and take his business elsewhere. He was not free to refuse, because a useless command is not a sinful one.

The Westminster Larger Catechism counts “a sober use of meat, drink, physic, sleep, labor, and recreations” among the duties of the Sixth Commandment (Q. 135), and it names “the neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life” among its sins (Q. 136). A Christian who judged the mask useless had no duty to believe in it. He had a duty to wear it when commanded, because the command asked nothing sinful of him.

Granting that masks harmed children changes the course, not the verdict. A parent could withdraw his child from a setting that required them, and that lawful exit came before defiance. Only an order that left him no lawful way to spare his child would require him to injure it, and that order he could refuse.

05

Vaccines

Here the test is met, if one argument holds, and this paper grants it.

The facts come first, because they were widely misstated. No Covid vaccine contained fetal cells. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines used a cell line called HEK-293 in laboratory testing during development, not in manufacture. HEK-293 was derived in the Netherlands around 1972 from the kidney of a fetus, generally reported as aborted, though the circumstances were never fully documented. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was manufactured in a line called PER.C6, derived from the retina of an eighteen-week-old child aborted in the Netherlands in 1985.

The argument holds that receiving a product made in, or tested on, a line taken from an aborted child is participation in the evil that produced it, however remote. Paul forbids that participation: “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness” (Eph. 5:11), and “neither be partaker of other men’s sins” (1 Tim. 5:22). David supplies the pattern. When three of his men broke through the Philistine lines to bring him water from the well at Bethlehem, he would not drink it. He “poured it out unto the LORD. And he said, Be it far from me, O LORD, that I should do this: is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?” (2 Sam. 23:16–17). The water was already drawn, and refusing it undid nothing. David refused anyway, because drinking it would make the blood the price of his comfort.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reached the opposite conclusion in December 2020, judging such cooperation remote and licit in the face of grave danger. We grant the stricter view. For a Christian whose conscience holds it, receiving the vaccine is sin, and he may not act against that conscience: “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23).

What follows is narrower than much of the refusal that took place. In the United States most vaccine requirements were conditions of employment or entry, not commands backed by criminal penalty, and a condition can be declined. The faithful course was Daniel’s in the first chapter of his book: he “requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself” (Dan. 1:8), and proposed an alternative. The Christian asked for a religious accommodation, and if it was refused, he gave up the job. That is not disobedience. It is the lawful refusal of an offer, and its cost is the cost of a clean conscience. Where the requirement was a direct order, as in the armed forces, refusal was true disobedience, and Daniel 6 applied: refuse openly, and accept the discharge.

Granting the argument binds the one who grants it in three ways.

Consistency. HEK-293 is among the most widely used cell lines in biomedical research. A conscience that refuses the vaccine must ask the same question of other products it knows were tested the same way. An objection raised only when it is convenient is a preference, and a preference presented as a religious conviction is a lie.

Honesty. A forged vaccine card, or an exemption request resting on a conviction the requester does not hold, fails the test outright. Daniel did not falsify the king’s records.

Neighbor. The one who refuses gives up one means of protecting others, so he owes more of the rest, not less. The Catechism’s Sixth Commandment duties still bind him. Even the Vatican’s note, which judged the refusal unnecessary, said that those who refuse for reasons of conscience “must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.” The Christian with the strongest case for refusing the vaccine had the weakest case for refusing the mask.

06

Churches

The church gathering is the case where Christians were most often right to disobey, and where the conditions matter most.

A short suspension of gatherings, applied to every kind of assembly alike, regulated a circumstance of worship, and Scripture has room for it. God set the leper outside the camp (Lev. 13:46). When men made unclean by contact with a dead body could not keep the Passover, God gave them a second one a month later (Num. 9:6–11). Hebrews forbids “forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is” (Heb. 10:25), which describes a habit, not a season. The churches that stopped meeting in March 2020 while they learned what they faced did nothing wrong.

The line is crossed when an order stops governing a circumstance of worship and begins to govern worship itself. That happened in three ways. Some orders banned assembly with no end in view. Some treated worship worse than comparable secular activity: California prohibited indoor worship across most of the state for months while permitting a range of secular businesses to operate indoors, and the Supreme Court enjoined the ban in February 2021, having already blocked New York’s ten- and twenty-five-person limits on houses of worship the previous November. And some orders reached into the content of worship. California also prohibited singing at indoor services, a restriction the Court left in place, though the church is commanded to teach and admonish one another “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord” (Col. 3:16).

The question underneath all three is jurisdiction. The Westminster Larger Catechism names the family, the church, and the commonwealth as distinct places of authority under the Fifth Commandment (Q. 124). The magistrate is a father in the commonwealth. In a plague he may regulate the conditions under which any assembly meets. He is not a father in the church, and when he decides whether the church may gather at all, or ranks its worship below commerce, he has reached into a household that is not his.

One case shows the shape of a legitimate refusal. The elders of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles complied with the county’s orders from mid-March until late July 2020. Then they published a statement titled “Christ, Not Caesar, Is Head of the Church,” resumed services openly, and were sued by the county. They defended themselves in court, and after the Supreme Court’s February 2021 ruling the state and county settled for $800,000. The church obeyed for a season, stated its grounds in public, met where anyone could see, and bore the legal consequence until the courts resolved it. Its windows were open.

Not every church that reopened met that test. A church that reopened because its members were tired of livestreams, or because its pastor judged the virus overblown, was acting on a prudential disagreement, which the test excludes. And a church that met in defiance of an unjust order still owed its sick and its elderly every precaution short of not meeting. Luther stayed in Wittenberg, and he took precautions.

07

Business closures

A closure order commands nothing God forbids. Keeping a shop shut is not sin, and the objection to closures was economic. The duty to provide, “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith” (1 Tim. 5:8), would have created a real conflict only if an order left a man no lawful way to feed his household. Short of that, the closure was a hardship, and hardship is not grounds.

The lawful remedy was the courts, and in Michigan it worked. On October 2, 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court held unanimously that the governor had no authority under the Emergency Management Act to issue pandemic orders after April 30, and held four to three that the 1945 emergency powers act she had relied on was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power. Many restrictions were then reissued by the state health department under other authority, and those orders bound as the earlier ones had.

The owner who reopened on his own reading of the law before the court ruled was doing something the test cannot accommodate. He judged the magistrate himself and acted on his own verdict. Even the Reformed resistance tradition would not license that. Calvin placed any restraint of rulers in the hands of lesser magistrates appointed for the purpose, and left private persons with a single duty, since they are those “to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer” (Institutes 4.20.31). The court was a magistrate. The shop owner was not.

08

Three objections

“The orders were unconstitutional, so they were not law.” Some were, and courts said so. But whether an order is unconstitutional is a judgment the constitution assigns to courts, not to each citizen. Before a court rules, the private man who acts on his own verdict has made himself the judge of the magistrate.

“Granting the fetal-cell argument proves too much.” It may. HEK-293 is everywhere in modern medicine, and the grant is not cheap. A Christian who holds the argument must hold it wherever he can see it, and some did, at real cost. If it cannot be held consistently, the honest course is to drop it, and then the vaccine becomes a condition like any other: declinable at a price, on prudential grounds, but no longer a matter of conscience.

“Obeying an order to close the church is obeying Caesar over Christ.” Not for a season, under an order that treated every assembly alike. God himself provided for postponed worship in Numbers 9. The objection becomes true when the order claims authority over whether the church gathers at all, and section 06 draws the line there.

09

Where the argument stops

It grants the fetal-cell argument and does not prove it. If the Vatican’s view is right, that the cooperation is remote and licit under grave danger, the vaccine case reduces to declining a condition, and the list of legitimate disobedience shrinks to one.

It does not settle the disputed charges. Section 01 grants them to show that they change nothing. Whether the funded research produced the virus is a question for evidence this paper does not weigh.

The church case turns on facts that varied by state and county: how long an order ran, whether worship was singled out, and what the order touched.

It addresses the American case, where most vaccine requirements were conditions. Under a general mandate backed by criminal penalty, the vaccine case would be true disobedience, and Daniel 6 would govern it.

SOURCES

Texts and records

SCRIPTURE

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611).

PRIMARY

Martin Luther, “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague” (1527), trans. Carl J. Schindler, Luther’s Works, vol. 43.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), 4.20.31, trans. Henry Beveridge.

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise §§27, 97, 119.

David Hume, “Of the Original Contract” (1748).

Declaration of Independence (1776). Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780), Preamble.

The Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Q. 124, 135, 136.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Note on the Morality of Using Some Anti-Covid-19 Vaccines (21 December 2020), §§2, 3, 5.

Elders of Grace Community Church, “Christ, Not Caesar, Is Head of the Church” (July 2020).

DECISIONS

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905).

Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, U.S. Supreme Court (25 November 2020).

South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, No. 20A136, U.S. Supreme Court (5 February 2021).

In re Certified Questions (Midwest Institute of Health, PLLC v. Governor of Michigan), No. 161492, Michigan Supreme Court (2 October 2020).

TESTIMONY AND STUDIES

Anthony Fauci, testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (11 May 2021); transcribed interview, House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (8–9 January 2024).

Lawrence Tabak, testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (2024).

Department of Health and Human Services, debarment of EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. and Peter Daszak (2025).

T. Jefferson et al., “Physical Interventions to Interrupt or Reduce the Spread of Respiratory Viruses,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2023).

J. Abaluck et al., “Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh,” Science (2022).

National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment, age 9 (2022).

REPORTING

National Geographic, “Here Are the Facts about Fetal Cell Lines and COVID-19 Vaccines.”

Nebraska Medicine, “Do the COVID-19 Vaccines Contain Aborted Fetal Cells?”

Christianity Today, “John MacArthur’s Church to Receive $800K COVID-19 Settlement” (1 September 2021).

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Luther follows the Schindler translation and Calvin the Beveridge translation. This paper grants, and does not argue, the premise that receiving a product made in or tested on an abortion-derived cell line is participation in abortion. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com