Public Health as a Common Good

This article reports that institutional religious voices in Canada, Germany, Ireland/Northern Ireland, and Poland conceived of public health as a common good during the COVID -19 pandemic, offering almost unqualified support and advocacy for vaccination. Discourses of the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Anthroposophical Society in Germany differed from this norm. In these contexts, Christian institutions’ use of secular/scientific justifications alongside moral/theological ones represented a positioning of numerically large and previously powerful religions as still-important societal actors that were rational and reasonable, as well as ethical. Yet this positioning did not fully overcome dissenting religious voices, which vied for attention in these public spheres.