It's not religious, it's political—it's not inviting an argument over religion, but clarification for which Christian group might have thought they actually had a hope of the government accepting their religious exception, since those are normally subject to fairly intense scrutiny—this is either a real thing, which needs clarification to be understood, or totally normal government behavior being cast as exceptional in order to advance, essentially, a lie.
Which, fine, maybe politics is a bad topic for HN, too (and yet, the front page on most days...) but in that case you're addressing the wrong poster. Getting onto someone for pushing back (in, I think, straightforward, but not harsh or provocative, terms, in this case) on a shitty post is missing the mark, IMO, and is part of why HN is very vulnerable to certain kinds of shitposting/trolling—if you can fly just under the radar, enforcement will fall on posters trying to police your shittiness (or, in this case, just trying to make sense of a bad post), not on you directly, which is is a classic effect trolls aim for.
(Please don't take any of this as personal—I'm sure this stuff's hard on the best of days, and you can never please everyone, and it's entirely possible I'm dead wrong about all this, and we're all just trying to get through the day in a complex world, and I'm very sure I'd be overall much worse at what you do than you are)
From my perspective these arguments are short-circuited by much simpler points, which is sort of the level at which I try to look at all this.
First, if the GP comment was shitty and/or trollish, then "pushing back" is exactly the wrong thing to do. That is known as feeding trolls, which of course is even more "the classic effect trolls aim for". This is in the site guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." – a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls.
Second, if we're making arguments about whether a political-religious argument is more political than religious or more religious than political, we've already lost. All this is obvious flame fodder and to be avoided here—no? I don't believe that anyone on HN is eager to discuss Christian-priests-issuing-vaccine-exemptions for simple reasons of intellectual curiosity. But if they are, the burden is on them to disambiguate their intellectual interest from garden-variety flamebait.
Which, fine, maybe politics is a bad topic for HN, too (and yet, the front page on most days...) but in that case you're addressing the wrong poster. Getting onto someone for pushing back (in, I think, straightforward, but not harsh or provocative, terms, in this case) on a shitty post is missing the mark, IMO, and is part of why HN is very vulnerable to certain kinds of shitposting/trolling—if you can fly just under the radar, enforcement will fall on posters trying to police your shittiness (or, in this case, just trying to make sense of a bad post), not on you directly, which is is a classic effect trolls aim for.
(Please don't take any of this as personal—I'm sure this stuff's hard on the best of days, and you can never please everyone, and it's entirely possible I'm dead wrong about all this, and we're all just trying to get through the day in a complex world, and I'm very sure I'd be overall much worse at what you do than you are)