Pastafarians Can Now Get a Religious Exemption Form to Avoid Unvaxxed Co-Workers

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has joined forces with televangelist Jim Bakker for a 3-day telethon filled with election conspiracy theories and pleas for pillow purchases.

The telethon kickoff was aired Tuesday on KOZL, a station in Spingfield, Missouri.

"Mike is going to be with us for three days," Bakker announced. "It's a very unusual event to have a telethon."

The televangelist complained that "the enemy" had seized his bank accounts. He said that he needed the public to buy Lindell's Bible-themed pillows "just to stay alive." (...)

When Crisann Holmes’s employer announced last month that it would require all employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by Nov. 1, she knew she had to find a way out.

She signed a petition to ask the company to relax its mandate. She joined an informal protest, skipping work with other dissenting employees at the mental health care system where she has worked for two years. And she attempted a solution that many across the country are now exploring: a religious exemption.

“My freedom and my children’s freedom and children’s children’s freedom are at stake,” said Ms. Holmes, who lives in Indiana. In August, she submitted an exemption request she wrote herself, bolstered by her own Bible study and language from sources online. Some vaccines were developed using fetal cell lines from aborted fetuses, she wrote, citing a remote connection to a practice she finds abhorrent. She quoted a passage from the New Testament: “Let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit.” (...)

For many skeptics, resistance tends to be based not on formal teachings from an established faith leader, but an ad hoc blend of online conspiracies and misinformation, conservative media and conversations with like-minded friends and family members.

“People who have already made up their minds are now looking for ways to continue to exempt themselves from the Covid vaccine,” said Joshua Williams, a pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado. (...)

Radical right-wing pastor Shane Vaughn used his livestream broadcast Monday night to falsely declare that COVID-19 vaccines are not working because, he claimed, the United States is under God’s judgment for tolerating reproductive freedom and LGBTQ rights.

“I’m going to tell you what God told me to tell you,” Vaughn said. “They’ve got variants coming that ain’t no vaccine going to work for. This nation is under the judgment of God. And I want to tell you something right now: They’re already admitting that the vaccine is alarmingly not working. Alarmingly! They’re alarmed at what they’re seeing. Do you know why? Because America, you’re making a huge mistake.”

Vaughn then read from Isaiah 31, in which God told the Israelites not to look to Egypt for help but rather to rely on God. Vaughn said the same principle must apply today.

“Woe unto them that go down to Egypt—which is the enemies of God—for help; to their pharmacia doctors and the ones that don’t even believe in our God,” Vaughn bellowed. “You’re running, where’s the next vaccine? Can I get another one? Can I get that second shot? The third one? Does anybody got the fourth? I need a fifth one, please.”

“Why would you go begging them for their help?” he continued. “They have nothing that’s gonna help my judgment that is coming upon this nation. The only help for the child of God in this hour is the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, Yeshua the Messiah. You better learn that—and you better learn it fast—or you’re gonna chase vaccines until there ain’t no vaccines left. I don’t care if you got one. Go for it. God bless you if that’s your choice. But I’m telling you if that’s where your faith is, you’re going to be in for a big disappointment. God is going to force you to look to him. These vaccines are gonna quit working on every corner until this nation falls to her knees and repents for dead babies and repents for the sodomy of this nation!”

Since 1988, the General Social Survey has been asking Americans of different ages what they believe about God. For decades, the answer did not change much. Around 70 percent of members of the Silent Generation said that they “know God really exists” and “have no doubts about it.” That same sentiment was shared by about 63 percent of baby boomers and Generation Xers.

But in 2018, millennials expressed a lot less certainty. Only 44 percent had no doubts about the existence of God. Even more doubtful were members of Generation Z — just one-third claimed certain belief in God.

Today, scholars are finding that by almost any metric they use to measure religiosity, younger generations are much more secular than their parents or grandparents. In responses to survey questions, over 40 percent of the youngest Americans claim no religious affiliation, and just a quarter say they attend religious services weekly or more.

(...)

In 2021, when about 26 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation, just 0.2 percent of members of Congress identify as a None. Given the rapid secularization of the United States, it’s clear that the political establishment does not represent what is a seismic shift in American society. Both parties will need to evolve to meet this challenge, but neither Republicans nor Democrats have an easy path.

Eric Metaxas is a millionaire who makes his money scaring Christians into believing that the American republic is devolving into the Third Reich. He claims to know this because he wrote a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I have to give Metaxas credit. He is a master at marketing himself. He also appears to be a wise and savvy reader of evangelical culture. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, if he read Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, learned that evangelicals have a long history of anti-intellectualism, and then capitalized on this deficiency in evangelicalism’s DNA by selling conspiracy theories about the vaccine, election fraud, and the collapse of American democracy. But I could be wrong. Maybe he really believes all this stuff.

Whatever the case, Metaxas uses his radio show and appearances to warn people that the apocalypse is coming. And how does he know the apocalypse is coming? Well, it’s all there in his Bonhoeffer biography–on sale at MyPillow.Com (and don’t forget to use the code word “Eric”).

In this video captured by Right Wing Watch, Metaxas is upset that a Lake Tahoe ski-lift attendant messed with his “right” not to wear a mask. Watch him draw a direct connection between this experience and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. (...)

Announcing the DOJ’s warrant on his show Friday night, Shroyer professed his innocence, claiming that he would turn himself in on Monday morning. He also wasted no time starting the GoFundMe campaign for himself, which was shut down ​by the platform on Saturday. By Sunday, Shroyer’s campaign was up and running on GiveSendGo.

As of Monday morning, Shroyer had raised over $160,000 on GiveSendGo.

Proclaiming to be the “#1 free Christian crowdfunding site,” GiveSendGo has become a safe haven for ​fundraising by right-wing extremists​. In February, Right Wing Watch reported ​that members of the ​Proud Boys neo-fascist hate group facing federal charges for their roles on Jan. 6 began raising money on the platform. A data breach of the site in April showed that the hate group and its members raised more than $375,000 ​through at least 11 different campaigns ​on GiveSendGo, according to reporting by the Guardian.

It appears that Shroyer’s use of the platform goes against GiveSendGo’s own terms of service, which explicitly prohibits “items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime,” a prohibition that extremists have found to be loosely applied, if at all.

Last week, we noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has turned religious-right activist Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel into hard-line anti-vaccine activist. On Wednesday, Staver appeared on a livestream hosted by World Prayer Network where he spent an hour spreading increasingly wild conspiracy theories while alleging that the vaccine is part of a globalist plan to depopulate the earth.

“What is involved in this is depopulation, population control to reduce the population of the planet, and to control everyone, and to do it by force and to have a tracking mechanism to determine whether or not you’ve had one of these particular injections,” Staver said. “COVID is being used as a mechanism for a bigger global agenda.”

When asked to explain how the vaccine is supposedly part of a conspiracy to depopulate the planet given that many vaccine advocates like Microsoft founder Bill Gates have taken it, Staver went deep down the rabbit hole.

“I don’t know whether (Bill) Gates got it. I don’t recall seeing anybody injecting his arm and if he did, who knows what they were putting in it,” Staver said. “Bill Gates is definitely a social Darwinianist, like Adolf Hitler, like Margaret Sanger, like J.D. Rockefeller, like the Carnegie Institute, like (Henry) Ford. … They were all Darwinianists, social Darwinianists. They believed in evolution, they believe that Blacks and people that were not white were not as evolved, and that the whites were the more evolved ones—and only certain kinds of whites—and that was their ideology.”

“If vaccines are supposed to make you more healthy, and you want to reduce population by 10 to 15 percent—which is going to be 700 million to a billion people on the planet, (Gates) wants to do that right away; about a billion people on the planet he wants to reduce and wipe off the planet now,” Staver continued. “You have to ask yourself how you’re going to do that. And if vaccines actually make you live longer, why would you then say people need vaccines? Well, it’s because they know that when they inject them, they can put things in your body that ultimately affect your reproduction.” (...)