For people of faith around the world, Christmas is more than a festive holiday: It’s the holy celebration of God’s perfect love intersecting with our imperfect reality.
For Christians in this country, it is also an opportunity to pause and be grateful for our ability to express and practice our faith freely.
This year, that freedom has been tested. Faced with an unprecedented global pandemic, governments at every level relied on restrictions in an urgent attempt to contain the spread of this novel coronavirus. Across different states, gatherings of the faithful came to a grinding halt. Churches were shuttered. In Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill Baptist Church had to sue in Federal Court in order to meet for worship services because the government was holding houses of worship to a more restrictive standard than bars or gyms. At one point, a Catholic gathering was even prevented from allowing worshipers to participate from the isolation of their own cars.
While precautions were initially critical to slow the spread, protect hospitals from reaching capacity, and learn about this novel virus, staying home is not a long-term solution. The freedom to practice our faith, enshrined in the Constitution, is not optional. The prevailing national narrative, which argues otherwise, attempts to force us into a false dichotomy: Either accept an uncurtailed infringement of religion, or contribute to the uncontained spread of the virus.
This narrative is both counterproductive and deeply concerning.
As a physician, one of my top priorities is ensuring everyone’s health — but that includes their mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being in addition to physical health. These are interconnected, not mutually exclusive. We can both diligently battle this virus and exercise our deeply held beliefs. For different faith communities, how they innovate and adapt their practices to protect their members from the coronavirus may look different. It is their right and their duty to decide what best serves the physical, mental, and spiritual health of their own community. Forcing them to abandon these practices is neither the government’s duty nor right.
We will never regulate our way out of this crisis. Rather, it will be solved the same way we have overcome challenges in the past: through innovation, scientific research and discovery, and through faith. For, far from exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic, faith practices are actually part of the solution.
Dr. Francis Collins, a leading scientist at the helm of the National Institutes of Health and our nation’s efforts to develop treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, shares that part of what catalyzed his journey from atheism to faith was witnessing the transformative power of prayer in his patients’ lives. Faith provides community, comfort, and courage amid suffering. It equips us with hope and empowers us with purpose. In a recent interview, Collins was asked how he grapples with the challenges of this pandemic. He replied: “As a person of faith, I am not discouraged. I’m inspired. I go to Psalm 46 when I’m having a bad day. ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.’ Well, we’re in trouble. So, we need that present help.”
The ability to choose what faith you practice and how you practice it is the very reason early generations of pilgrims and refugees sought our shores. Every year, thousands of people still immigrate to the United States legally, fleeing persecution and discrimination in their own countries, because they crave the ability to live according to the dictates of their own consciences. This applies to people of all faiths and no faith. Every human being has the inalienable right to formulate and follow their beliefs.
This Christmas, perhaps more than any Christmas in recent memory, let us treasure the ability to practice our religion. Let us celebrate, sing, pray, give thanks, and not take a moment of it for granted. No government can ever truly take away your faith. But the ability to live out your beliefs, without fear of coercion or punishment by the government, is a freedom that was hard-fought and hard-won.
This year and every year, I am grateful to live in a country that was founded on that freedom.
Let us cherish it, exercise it, and protect it.
Brad Wenstrup represents Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
