By John Klar

On July 23, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced bill S5128, known as the GRACE Act, the acronym for Guaranteeing Religious Accommodation in Childhood Education. If passed, it will require public schools to offer religious exemptions to vaccine mandates for school children.

The proposed legislation is nearly identical to HR5075, introduced by Greg Steube (R-FL) in the House of Representatives on August 29, 2025, also as the GRACE Act. It, too, requires public schools to grant religious exemptions to families that request them.

Under the Act, K-12 schools that refuse to grant vaccine exemptions for students on the basis of their religion will not receive educational funding from the government.

Moreover, the Act stipulates that schools would be barred from requiring students to provide documentation to prove the sincerity of their religious beliefs – and would be free to wear religious clothing, pray, or opt out from lessons should they feel they conflict with their religion.

The Senate and House, currently on hiatus, are expected to vote on the proposed legislation in the fall.

More than 50 organizations nationwide have already endorsed the bills – and the MAHA movement has, too, for it aligns neatly with a principle fundamental to MAHA: that neither the government nor schools should make medical and health decisions for children. Their parents should.

The Trump administration has also signaled its support for religious liberties in a recent executive order, which calls to ‘maximize’ parental choice over childhood vaccines, and specifically instructs federal agencies to ensure states are compliant with “their obligations to provide religious and medical exemptions from childhood and adolescent immunization requirements.”

While only four states – New York, California, Connecticut and Maine – do not allow religious (or philosophical) exemptions to school vaccine mandates, it’s an issue that has long deserved to be tackled at the federal level. America needs federally mandated religious protections against precisely the kind of vaccine mandates foisted on the country during the Covid pandemic.

Just one month before lockdowns, advocates for religious liberty had been lobbying for constitutional protections for American parents. A letter to President Donald Trump, dated February 3, 2020, commissioned by Freedom of Religion-United Solutions (FOR-US) and presented by the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, garnered over 39,000 signatures. The letter called attention to the campaign to pressure state legislatures to repeal laws allowing religious or philosophical exemptions to vaccination.

The CDC, FDA and state agencies, it said, lacked the science to support their recommended vaccination schedules and were essentially using “police power” to force these vaccines on children.

“The religious exemption repeal bills which have already passed, and those pending in 2020, demonstrate that state governments around the United States are committing a flagrant violation of U.S. citizens’ right to freedom of religion,” the letter read. “Informed consent cannot be present where there is state coercion.”

Many religions have some theological basis for refusing vaccinations, and the concern predates the controversial mRNA vaccines. Shannon Kroner, executive director of Freedom of Religion–United Solutions (FOR-US), has been uniting diverse faith traditions behind religious freedom for vaccine choice since 2019, including Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and others.

“It is clear that Americans want their religious freedoms honored and protected,” Kroner told The MAHA Report earlier this month “Our sincerely held convictions must be respected, and no family should be forced to choose between their faith and their child’s education or participation in school.”

Kroner and FOR-US support the GRACE Act, saying it reaffirms that the government “must not compel citizens to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

For a large swath of people of faith, the issue of vaccines is tied to Biblical teaching about caring for children and avoiding injury. In a recent interview with Kroner that can be watched on Rumble, Rabbi Pinchas Yehuda Levin referenced the teaching of Orthodox Jewish scholars:

“Many great Torah scholars said, by definition, every vaccine is a biblical sin, because the vaccine violates God’s commandment that we guard our health,” Levin said. “It’s very explicit. You just take out the insert to the vaccine, you’ll see a vaccine is dangerous to our health and that’s why there is [a] religious exemption. We cannot be forced to take something that is detrimental to our health.”

The issues of informed consent and religious freedom have never been more important, and the Covid-19 ordeal demonstrates why. MRNA vaccines were never safe or effective for healthy young children. This reality was always clear, yet the medical establishment obfuscated and outright lied about it.

“Religious liberty is not a partisan issue,” Kroner said. “It is a foundational American right that protects people of every faith and of no faith at all. When we defend the right of families to live according to their sincerely held beliefs, we strengthen the fabric of our entire nation.”