A COVID MANIFESTO FOR CHRISTIANS
WINTER 2025
We, the undersigned, share a common Christian conviction that a half-decade is far too long, shamefully long, for the church of Jesus Christ—including many of our own congregations, dioceses and bishoprics, presbyteries and synods, denominations and fellowships, together with their ordained leadership—to have remained silent in the wake of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic and the equally unprecedented coordinated response to that pandemic by governments around the world. We join our voices together here, not only to give account of the hope that is in us, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death to life, but also to call out and condemn the identifiable evils of the COVID era, evils we have observed and, in many cases, suffered in ourselves, in our families, in our churches, and in our communities. We do so on no other basis than our solidarity with one another and with all those— whether alive on earth today, or dead in Christ, or yet to be born— who love, trust, and obey Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, as He is attested and revealed in the Scriptures of the Old and New testaments and universally confessed in the Apostle’s and Nicene creeds. And while we acknowledge a multitude of differences—of race, nationality, kinship, social class, economic status, political orientation, and Christian tradition—we deny those differences any power to weaken or divide our shared witness here.
We believe that together we have heard our Lord’s voice sounding clearly in the Scriptures and summoning His saints to collective obedience in a COVID-wounded world. “Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of the destitute,” He commands; “open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy” (Proverbs 31.8–9 [ESV]). Again, He calls to us: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Ephesians 5.11 [ESV]).
Yet, daring here to spell out gospel truths and to enumerate works of darkness requires, as prologue, that we bow together before the Lord’s holiness and our own unworthiness. We acknowledge that now, again, “it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God” (I Peter 4.17 [ESV]). Humbling ourselves together before the Lord, we publicly confess our own failures in the face both of the pandemic and of governmental responses to the pandemic, both of which have done such grievous harm. We deeply regret and repent of our own complicity—whether intentional or unintentional, whether early in the pandemic or late—in many of the moral failures, and certainly in what we believe may come to be recognized as crimes against humanity. So, because we trust that for us, too, “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (I John 1.7 [ESV]), we humbly beseech our Redeemer together, “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy;” and we gratefully own God’s promise that “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1.9 [ESV]).
I
Confident of God’s great forgiveness, we are bold to declare, first, that in any age or circumstance—even at the onset of or during a global pandemic—FEAR has no proper home among God’s people nor in the hearts of those who love and serve Jesus Christ. We gladly acknowledge a solitary exception, the “fear of the Lord,” a properly reverential awe before His power, majesty, holiness, and love, which is “the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10 [ESV]). We rejoice that, in every other respect, God’s “perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4.18 [ESV]). So much is this so that in Christ we need no longer dread even God’s final judgment, when it falls (as it will for all of us) on our own unrighteousness. Yet, neither are we to “fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matthew 10.28 [ESV]), nor to fear anything else in all creation, not “the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday” (Psalm 91.5-6 [ESV]).
We therefore humbly confess and regret how readily we succumbed, individually and corporately—especially early in the pandemic—to our fears for ourselves, for our families, for our churches, for our communities, and for our world. Among the fears to which we (and all fellow humans) were and are vulnerable, but to which we too uncritically and for too long surrendered during the pandemic are:
· the fear of serious or permanently debilitating illness;
· the fear of death, and perhaps especially of lonely death, separated from loved ones by strict infection-mitigating hospital measures; and
· the fear of infecting those more vulnerable than we, with fatal consequences; but also
· the fear of speaking up when we had serious questions or moral concerns, of being in the minority and out of step with others (especially, perhaps, those in our own families, churches, and professional circles), and of paying the social, political, and economic costs of non-compliance with immoral dictates.
In the name of Jesus Christ, we now renounce these fears and their power to deflect us from speaking, acting, and living faithfully and truthfully before God. We call upon the saints everywhere to do the same. And we pledge together here, by God’s grace, to resist surrender to such fears in any fresh “emergency,” especially when we suspect that they are being fashioned, fomented, and inflated by public health authorities, in order to induce our compliance with and complicity in harmful, even potentially criminal, countermeasures.
II
We are bold to affirm, secondly, that our God is the author of all TRUTH. “I the Lord speak the truth” (Isaiah 45.19 [ESV]), God Himself testifies; and “it is impossible for God to lie” (Hebrews 6.18 [ESV]), the Scriptures promise. Because He embodies this God, embodies our God, Jesus is, as He Himself declares, “the truth” (John 14.7). Each of us, insofar as he or she knows, lives from, and seeks to reflect God’s love for the world in Christ, “rejoices in the truth” (I Corinthians 13.7 [ESV])—not just Biblical and theological truth but also truth about how the world works, toward the knowledge of which the scientific method has been and should always be an immense resource, not only for Christians such as we (who believe in the unity of all truth) but for the whole human family.
Together, therefore, we publicly repudiate and reject what, a half-decade hence, all who have eyes to see and ears to hear now readily recognize: the monumental sacrifice of truth upon which so much of the official COVID narrative and the coordinated governmental responses to COVID were built. We especially repudiate the official lies and distortions that fed a host of public fears, among the worst of them:
· that SARS-CoV-2 was—when it was not—an utterly “novel” coronavirus, representing an unprecedented threat to our species, against which all natural and acquired “cross-over” immunity (through prior infection with one or more of a whole family of related coronaviruses) provided no protection;
· that the risks of infection, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19 dwarfed—when they did not—those associated with more common endemic outbreaks (e.g., of a severe strain of seasonal influenza), and that those risks were utterly undifferentiated—when they categorically were not—with respect, especially, to age and pre-existing medical comorbidities;
· that there was no effective prevention against, no effective early (out-patient) treatment for, and no effective hospital (in-patient) treatment for serious COVID-19 infection—when, in fact, a number of off-label drugs and drug combinations, along with many naturopathic interventions, were already known to be or were quickly emerging as effective options, whose use (in the place of a grotesquely inadequate “standard of care,” largely limited to premature intubation and the administration of the known toxic drug Remdesivir) might have prevented the unprecedented iatrogenic mortality associated with hospitalization and treatment for COVID-19 at the hand of the vast majority of professional medical and hospital practitioners, especially in the developed world;
· that the epidemiological data available by spring of 2020 warranted—when they clearly did not—declaration of a “public health emergency” and the mobilization of all the extraordinary provisions and permissions that such a declaration made available to governments, including an “EUA” (Emergency Use Authorization, especially in the U.S.) or its analogues, providing blanket protection against liability for all official “countermeasures” and empowering the indefinite and unlawful suspension of fundamental human rights (e.g., to free speech, to lawful assembly, to religious practice and expression) and of a number of legal, institutional, and manufacturing protections against potentially harmful medical and biological/pharmacological interventions (protections that include, e.g., long-established agency protocols for biological/pharmacological product development and, almost unimaginably, all the provisions of the Nuremberg Code);
· that lock-downs and closures of all “non-essential” businesses and institutions (including most of our churches), social distancing, and masking were necessary and effective—when they were anything but that, and did immeasurable harm—in order to “mitigate” the spread of infection and disease; and
· that “herd immunity” was impossible to achieve apart from inducing “spike” protein-specific antibodies in every human host through mass vaccination—when, as we now know, mass vaccination has driven the ongoing mutation of COVID pathogens and delayed “herd immunity.”
We also decry, however, the “official” untruths that shielded the public, to their great detriment, from rational and appropriate concerns that could have helped to reduce harms and save lives, such untruths as:
· that SARS-CoV-2 arose “in the wild”—as opposed to being manufactured in a bioweapons/biodefense laboratory—so that the mutation of the viral pathogen and the spread of infection and disease could be assumed by all to follow—when they manifestly have not—expected epidemiological patterns and trajectories;
· that, because SARS-CoV-2 arose (according to the official narrative) “in the wild,” the public health authorities who were managing the response to COVID-19 were not—as, in fact, they were—the same untrustworthy actors who had supervised and funded the illegal gain-of-function bioweapons/biodefense research that had engineered and refined the very pathogen we now believe was driving (in the initial outbreak, at least) COVID-19 disease, the SARS-CoV-2 virus;
· that the experimental COVID-19 biological countermeasures that were authorized and deployed were “vaccines”—with all the general acceptance conferred on “vaccines” by the public—as opposed to “gene therapies,” employing heretofore highly problematic synthetic mRNA and lipid nanoparticle technology—with all the reservation and hesitancy that a clear understanding of such might rightly inspire; and
· that the mRNA injections were “necessary, safe, and effective”—when they were none of those, were known by authorities from the outset to be none of those, and were a foolish immunological strategy, anyway, in the face of a rapidly mutating respiratory virus.
Most especially, we utterly renounce and condemn all the government officials, public health authorities, pharmaceutical companies, physicians and nurses (and their professional associations), hospital owners and administrators, established media outlets and journalists, professional medical and natural science research journals, “big tech” enterprises, health insurance companies, as well as the “scientists” and university “researchers” living off governmental and pharmaceutical largesse, who, to their shame:
· wove these lies and distortions into a dishonest narrative that cemented and compounded unwarranted fears in the public mind, in order to encourage public submission to and compliance with a host of harmful and, in some cases, criminal, mandates and practices;
· either actively disseminated and defended that false narrative or passively acquiesced before it, many continuing to do so, largely blindly and uncritically, to this day;
· promoted or administered, whether knowingly or unknowingly, medical and hospitalization treatment regimens and protocols (including “vaccination” against COVID-19) that were premised on this false narrative and that betrayed fundamental patient rights and protections, at an immense loss of life, especially in the developed world; and
· joined in or tolerated, not only the efforts to censor, suppress, and block public awareness of critical truths about COVID-19 and the official response to it, but also the reprehensible attempts to silence, delegitimize, deplatform, decertify, sanction, and punish other reputable public health experts, medical scientists and researchers, and physicians and nurses who, in defense of the truth, dissented from that official narrative and foreswore its mandated practices, at immense personal pain and loss.
Accordingly, we recommit ourselves, and call upon all fellow Christ-lovers everywhere to recommit themselves, to live more consistently and faithfully, by God’s grace, as truth-seekers, truth-tellers, and truth-brokers in ways that hedge the truth robustly against the inevitable encroachments of selfish interest and material gain and that renew a shared trust in government, public health service and policy, medical practice and the medical profession, journalists and journalism, independent university education and research, and the scientific enterprise itself.
III
Leaning further into God’s great forgiveness of sins steels us to proclaim, thirdly, that in God’s eyes—and despite what could be inferred from too much of our own and others’ behavior in the COVID-era—"CHILDREN are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127.3 [ESV]). Our Lord rebuked those who ignored little ones or saw them as a nuisance: “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God” (Mark 10.14 [ESV]). He demonstrated how precious they are when “he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them” (Mark 10.16 [ESV]); and Peter’s proclamation that “the promise is for you and for your children” (Acts 2.39 [ESV]) testifies to their full inclusion in the household of faith. Understandably, then, we are forbidden by the Lord from bargaining with their lives: “You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18.21 [ESV]).
We accordingly deplore the way that so much of the heavy weight of COVID’s harms fell, and was allowed to fall, so destructively and so inhumanely, onto our own children and children everywhere. We deeply regret and are terribly ashamed of our own complicity in the damage done to our youngest generation, and we lament especially that far too many of us countenanced it, for far too long, without sounding the alarm. Among the particularly faithless and child-sacrificing measures, into repentance for which we now summon all our partners in Christ everywhere to join us, were:
· the subjection of little ones, repeatedly and often graphically, to the messages that they might be the infectious agents—when it was known that they absolutely could not be such—through exposure to whom grandparents (and other vulnerable individuals) could be infected by and perish from COVID-19, and that so much public good depended—when it categorically did not—on their strict compliance with all official disease-mitigating mandates;
· the school closures, remote learning, social “distancing,” and compulsory mask-wearing, many of which measures were adopted and practiced uncritically, certainly for too long, in our own churches—all of which were not only useless, and known to be useless, but did incalculable physical, emotional, and spiritual harm to children and youth; and, most awfully,
· the injection, mandated by public health authorities and administered by the medical establishment, of young children and adolescents with experimental and potentially dangerous mRNA “vaccines” against COVID-19—especially when it was known, although rarely acknowledged by public health authorities and medical practitioners, that children and youth were at essentially “zero-risk,” apart from serious comorbidities, for infection with and transmission of disease.
So help us God, we pledge to be ever vigilant now against any weakness that permits children, our own and those of others around the world, to become “sacrificial lambs” to be offered up on some disease-mitigation or disease-prevention “altar,” no matter how urgent the emergency may appear to be, or may be declared to be by government or public health officials. And we invite the strong “Amen!” of the older brothers and sisters of these children everywhere.
IV
Finally, out of our confidence in God’s forgiveness and restoration in Christ, we affirm, with Christians through history, that GOVERNMENT occupies a prominent place in the catalogue of God’s providential goodness. “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13.1 [ESV]) is God’s Word to us, too. And, with respect to those in governing authority, we embrace our responsibility, as the Apostle Paul commands, to “Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due (Romans 13.7 [ESV]).
Yet, because we “are not our own” (I Corinthians 6.19 [ESV]), because “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3.20 [ESV]), and because “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5.29 [ESV]), we are bold now, too, to stand against and repudiate all agencies, officials, and actions of governments everywhere—especially when there was (and is) so much potentially lucrative benefit universally available and attendant to them—which or who:
· produced, published, promulgated, or defended—or simply aided in or remained silent before the same—any or all of the “official” lies about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, and any or all of the “official” countermeasures that were based on those lies, which we have renounced and rejected above;
· led, abetted, or abided efforts to suppress truths about COVID, or efforts to discredit, deplatform, and destroy the reputations and livelihood of those physicians and scientists who dissented from what was false and unwarranted in the official narrative and response; and
· failed to come to the aid and defend the real interests of the citizens for whom God gave them responsibility, and especially of those most vulnerable, including children and youth, elderly residents of nursing homes, hospital patients denied effective COVID-19 treatment, military personnel and collegians objecting (often for reasons of conscience or faith) to mandated vaccination, and untold numbers of those who have suffered adverse events from the vaccinations they received.
We call upon our sisters and brothers in government service, whose colleagues some of us are, not only to join us now in renouncing the COVID-era failures of governments everywhere to fulfil their first principles, but also to advocate for and to seek and establish justice—up to and including official inquiry and investigation into whether some wrongs, because of their magnitude or their agents’ turpitude, represented crimes against humanity, for which personal and public accountability should be sought—in behalf of all those who have suffered the severest harm, especially in the loss of their own or their loved ones’ lives, during and in the wake of COVID.
V
In a spirit of restoration and renewal, we urge and encourage the churches of which we are part, and those who preside either individually or collectively over their common life and work, to remain silent no longer before the spiritual and moral darkness of the last five years. We believe that, going forward, the harm done to human reproductive health and human immunological strength, by the administration of experimental and potentially dangerous mRNA gene therapies (“vaccines”) to a large fraction of the Earth’s populace, may in itself be incalculable. But the terrible loss of life, both from COVID-19 itself and as a consequence of the deadliness of the pandemic countermeasures in the coordinated “official” response by governments and health authorities everywhere—and this is to say nothing of a far vaster number of serious and debilitating “vaccine” injuries—is literally that: it is incalculable. Consequently, what are faithful God-fearers to do if it is, as we believe, the Lord Himself declaring to them now: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Genesis 4.10 [ESV])? Dare we assume that we may go on with “church as usual,” when He Himself protests afresh, in His Word, “Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5.23–24 [ESV])?
“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5.14 [ESV]), bids the Lord to His saints—and certainly to an apparent majority of our undiscerning leaders who have left us like sheep without shepherds, and our churches like cities without watchmen—for too many who call themselves after Him have been slumbering too deeply and for too long before the horrors of COVID. Eyes open now, at least, we solemnly summon, in Christ’s name, all who love and serve Him as Lord and Savior to observe a season of self-examination and repentance, to make their own individual and ecclesial investigations into and assessments of their postures, pronouncements, and practices in the COVID era, and to submit it all to and seek restoration for it all from that same Lord. And, because faith is in order to virtue, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, in every corner of our COVID-wounded world and according to every tribe and tongue, should prayerfully consider whether it is not the Holy Spirit Himself who is stirring and steering us all now, toward a general ecumenical council directed at amending our ways of reading and interpreting the Scriptures and of understanding and articulating the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1.3 [ESV]) which have permitted so grave a failure to be His faithful church in the COVID era and which will equip us more fully for whatever greater challenges and threats will, no doubt, confront us before His return.
Ut in Omnibus Glorificetur Deus