Hey listeners, happy holidays. I'm going to keep sharing episodes that were some of my favorites

from the year that just was. Today, I'm sharing an episode from back in September.

That's when COVID vaccine mandates were just starting to roll out in earnest.

And there were these holdouts, people who were desperately trying to avoid the shot.

Back then, I talked to Ruth Graham from the New York Times about a very specific type of holdout.

Those that were trying to use religion as they're get out of vaccine free card.

For the last few weeks, Ruth Graham, she is a reporter over the New York Times,

has been logging on to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, to Evesdrop. Ruth reports on

religion. She was interested in QAnon at first. And then it turned out that there were all kinds of

interesting conversations happening there. It's just a much more freewheeling space, I guess you could

say. It's hard for Ruth to describe what she's hearing. Is it religious chatter, political?

You know, on some of these topics, it is so hard to disentangle the political from the religious.

I would say it was political conversations that were completely woven through with faith.

So people sharing prayer requests, but then the content would be

political, praying for Trump, praying for Trump's return. And then also people sharing a lot

of personal anecdotes, you know, feeling like it's a quasi-private space.

Lately, these personal anecdotes have started focusing on one topic in particular. Whether your

job can require you to get a COVID vaccine, and whether you're religion could get you exempted

if your employer is clamping down. So you have people, first of all, just letting each other know

that this is an option. You have people sharing language on, you know, certain Bible verses to site,

certain, just kind of legal language or quasi-legal, legal language to sound official. And you're,

you know, when you make a request to your employer, I would say like a rising kind of desperation in

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