Conservative Christianity, Anti-Vaccination Activism, and the Challenge to Secularism in Singapore

Abstract

A culture war has been brewing in Singapore since 2009 when a conservative Christian group conducted a reverse takeover of a feminist civil society organization and was subsequently expelled from the organization in a publicized meeting between the two groups. Since then, the state has mediated the contestation of values between religious conservatives and liberal groups allied around issues of gender and sexuality. The culture war between the two sides has revolved around creative protests that have evaded state prohibitions against public contestations over what is legally considered private beliefs and affairs. They involve innovative hybridizations of American discourses on values and rights mixed with Asian emphases on family traditions and sentiments. The COVID-19 pandemic has, however, laid bare the adaptation of the American culture war into the Singaporean public sphere. This article looks at and analyzes COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among conservative Christians in Singapore and their incorporation of anti-vaccination views from American Christian nationalism into secular framings, invoking legal rights and responsibilities aligned with the state’s nationalist discourse. I argue that this represents a new phase of contestation by conservatives, refashioning their religious views into secular frames of public good and morality serving the secular nation. By doing so, they implicitly challenge the state’s regulation of religion as private interests and beliefs. This altered religious activism has shifted the terms of secularism and loosened the hegemony of the state in defining these terms.