Dooyeweerd Against Vax Mandates

Originally published at The Laymen's Lounge.
German translation: https://www.libertaerechristen.de/?p=1840

Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) was a Reformed Christian philosopher and legal scholar from the Netherlands. For more about his life and work, see this article.

Before the bulk of his career as professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam from 1926-1965, Dooyeweerd spent about 5 years as director of the Kuyper Foundation, the policy institute of the Anti-Revolutionary Party. From 1922-1926 he produced several reports, including one in 1923 concerning compulsory or mandated vaccination by the civil government.

The report begins by saying that while some members of the political party are opposed to taking vaccinations, and others are themselves in favor of it, as a party they strongly oppose all civil government coercion of vaccination. Particularly, the party consistently opposes all mandates of vaccination for government school attendance when the civil government requires schooling.

Dooyeweerd then lays out 5 main reasons all civil government coercion of vaccinations must be resisted and opposed.

1. Compulsory vaccination violates God-given liberty of conscience.
2. Only each person, and not civil government, has a God-given right as steward over one’s own body.
3. Civil government has no God-given competence or jurisdiction to rule on medical/health issues.
4. Native or endemic illnesses are never rightly treated by means of any coercion.
5. Medical science can be flawed, and vaccinations can be more harmful than the illnesses they are intended to prevent.

The bulk of the report deals with the second main reason that coercive vaccination must be resisted and opposed. Dooyeweerd puts it this way: Civil “government does not have free disposition of the human body, even if it is convinced that such disposition is only for the benefit of that body.”

The term ‘disposition’ here refers to legitimate power or determination over something according to one’s own decision. In Matthew 20:15 where Jesus gives the parable about a generous employer, He illustrates “free disposition” asking rhetorically “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

Dooyeweerd explains that responsive coercion is legitimate, of course, against anyone who is conclusively proved to be initiating coercion upon others. But simply being unvaccinated is not coercive in any way. Moreover, even if civil government officers were angelic geniuses who had infallible knowledge of what is best for you, and were entirely motivated by your best interest, even then they could never have the right to initiate coercion against you, because you don’t belong to them.

The issue here is not a matter of whether just laws should be enforced, but of what kind of legislation is actually just. And whether something is actually just or unjust is not ordained by civil government, but by God. Of course, the God-ordained principles of civil justice don’t enact legislation by themselves, but rather show the proper boundaries and provide guidance for legislation.

The main principle to which Dooyeweerd points is the Christian understanding of human beings as created by God as persons. (What he refers to as “ethical” personhood, he would soon, in the development of his philosophy, come to call the full “religious” personhood of every human). The first thing Dooyeweerd emphasizes is that this principle is in diametric opposition to slavery. Even though it might seem like an extreme comparison, vaccine compulsion is an expression of the same root as the evil of slavery (namely, the claim of owning, and/or having a right to control other people).

Most commonly, in the 'classical liberal' or libertarian European political tradition that appreciates the inseparable connection between liberty and justice (the tradition of which the American founders, as well as Kuyper and Groen, were a part), this principle has come to be known as 'self-ownership'.

But Dooyeweerd is concerned to describe it in terms of its fundamental, true religious grounding. While with respect to other people, it may be said you are indeed the proper 'owner' of yourself (the alternative being slavery), in relation to our Creator to Whom we are ultimately accountable, we are only the respective stewards, the keepers and caretakers, each of our own lives. This is doubly so for those redeemed by Christ (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

The political bottom line of this, Dooyeweerd insists, is the fact that civil “government may not, according to God’s ordinances, force the ethically free man to accept physical treatment in any form.”

We must entirely resist all such government injustice from the start, without hesitation or compromise, or else it will inevitably grow like a cancer. This is the principle of obsta principiis. You must have a zero-tolerance policy towards tyranny. “Whoever accepts compulsory vaccination in principle,” Dooyeweerd warns, “has deprived himself of the moral ground for opposing [any] such usurpation by government of individual liberty.”

For a statement of principles influenced by Dooyeweerd’s philosophy that seeks to develop opposition to tyranny more fully, see here.