(I hate to sound misanthropic but isn't there an upside to these
evangelical Trump voters refusing to get vaccinated? After all, since
there are about 40 million of them, their absence might help this
country at least become a bit less white supremacist and a bit less
mindless?)
NY Times, April 5, 2021
How White Evangelicals’ Vaccine Refusal Could Prolong the Pandemic
By Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham
Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to
get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell
tissue.”
Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash.,
said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and
deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”
Lauri Armstrong, a Bible-believing nutritionist outside of Dallas, said
she did not need the vaccine because God designed the body to heal
itself, if given the right nutrients. More than that, she said, “It
would be God’s will if I am here or if I am not here.”
The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may
vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get
vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health
officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.
The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding
wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural
distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories.
The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s
ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of
half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way
of spreading, even internationally.
There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45
percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against
Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do
so, according to the Pew Research Center.
“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come
around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs
to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian
Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in
Illinois.
As vaccines become more widely available, and as worrisome virus
variants develop, the problem takes on new urgency. Significant numbers
of Americans generally are resistant to getting vaccinated, but white
evangelicals present unique challenges because of their complex web of
moral, medical, and political objections. The challenge is further
complicated by longstanding distrust between evangelicals and the
scientific community.
“Would I say that all public health agencies have the information that
they need to address their questions and concerns? Probably not,” said
Dr. Julie Morita, the executive vice president of the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation and a former Chicago public health commissioner.
No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of
other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white
churches.
Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have
endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook
followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination. Pastor Robert
Jeffress commended it from an anti-abortion perspective on Fox News.
(“We talk about life inside the womb being a gift from God. Well, life
outside the womb is a gift from God, too.”) The president of the
Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, tweeted a photo of himself
receiving a shot.
But other influential voices in the sprawling, trans-denominational
movement, especially those who have gained their stature through media
fame, have sown fears. Gene Bailey, the host of a prophecy-focused talk
show on the Victory Channel, warned his audience in March that the
government and “globalist entities” will “use bayonets and prisons to
force a needle into your arm.” In a now-deleted TikTok post from an
evangelical influencer’s account that has more than 900,000 followers,
she dramatized being killed by authorities for refusing the vaccine.
Dr. Simone Gold, a prominent Covid-19 skeptic who was charged with
violent entry and disorderly conduct in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, told
an evangelical congregation in Florida that they were in danger of being
“coerced into taking an experimental biological agent.”
The evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas wrote “Don’t get the vaccine” in
a tweet on March 28 that has since been deleted. “Pass it on,” he wrote.
Some evangelicals believe that any Covid restrictions — including mask
mandates and restrictions on in-person church worship — constitute
oppression.
And some have been energized by what they see as a battle between faith
and fear, and freedom and persecution.
“Fear is the motivating power behind all of this, and fear is the
opposite of who God is,” said Teresa Beukers, who travels throughout
California in a motor home. “I violently oppose fear.”
Ms. Beukers foresees severe political and social consequences for
resisting the vaccine, but she is determined to do so. She quit a job at
Trader Joe’s when the company insisted that she wear a mask at work. Her
son, she said, was kicked off his community college football team for
refusing Covid testing protocols.
“Go ahead and throw us in the lions’ den, go ahead and throw us in the
furnace,” she said, referring to two biblical stories in which God’s
people miraculously survive persecution after refusing to submit to
temporal powers.
Jesus, she added, broke ritual purity laws by interacting with lepers.
“We can compare that to people who are unvaccinated,” she said. “If they
get pushed out, they’ll need to live in their own colonies.”
One widespread concern among evangelicals is the vaccines’ ties to
abortion. In reality, the connection is remote: Some of the vaccines
were developed and tested using cells derived from the fetal tissue of
elective abortions that took place decades ago.
The vaccines do not include fetal tissue, and no additional abortions
are required to manufacture them. Still, the kernel of a connection has
metastasized online into false rumors about human remains or fetal DNA
being an ingredient in the vaccines.
Some evangelicals see the vaccine as a redemptive outcome for the
original aborted fetus.
Some Catholic bishops have expressed concerns about the abortion link,
too. But the Vatican has concluded the vaccines are “morally
acceptable,” and has emphasized the immediate danger posed by the virus.
Just 22 percent of Catholics in America say they will not get the
vaccine, less than half the share of white evangelicals who say that.
White evangelicals who do not plan to get vaccinated sometimes say they
see no need, because they do not feel at risk. Rates of Covid-19 death
have been about twice as high for Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans
as for white Americans.
White pastors have largely remained quiet. That’s in part because the
wariness among white conservative Christians is not just medical, but
also political. If white pastors encourage vaccination directly, said
Dr. Aten, “there are people in the pews where you’ve just attacked their
political party, and maybe their whole worldview.”
Dr. Morita, of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said the method to
reach white evangelicals is similar to building vaccine confidence in
other groups: Listen to their concerns and questions, and then provide
information that they can understand from people they trust.
But a public education campaign alone may not be enough.
There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical
Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over
evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund,
professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life
Program at Rice University.
There are two parts to the problem, she said: The scientific community
has not been as friendly toward evangelicals, and the religious
community has not encouraged followers to pursue careers in science.
Distrust of scientists has become part of cultural identity, of what it
means to be white and evangelical in America, she said.
For slightly different reasons, the distrust is sometimes shared by
Asian, Hispanic and Black Christians, who are skeptical that hospitals
and medical professionals will be sensitive to their concerns, Dr.
Ecklund said.
“We are seeing some of the implications of the inequalities in science,”
she said. “This is an enormous warning of the fact that we do not have a
more diverse scientific work force, religiously and racially.”
Among evangelicals, Pentecostal and charismatic Christians may be
particularly wary of the vaccine, in part because their tradition
historically emphasizes divine health and miraculous healing in ways
that can rival traditional medicine, said Erica Ramirez, a scholar of
Pentecostalism and director of applied research at Auburn Seminary.
Charismatic churches also attract significant shares of Black and
Hispanic Christians.
Dr. Ramirez compares modern Pentecostalism to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop,
with the brand’s emphasis on “wellness” and “energy” that infuriates
some scientists: “It’s extra-medical,” she said. “It’s not anti-medical,
but it decenters medicine.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci are
not going to be able to persuade evangelicals, according to Curtis
Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School who is leading an
outreach project to educate evangelicals about the vaccine.
The project includes a series of short, shareable videos for pastors,
answering questions like “How can Christians spot fake news on the
vaccine?” and “Is the vaccine the Mark of the Beast?” The latter refers
to an apocalyptic theory that the AntiChrist will force his sign onto
everyone at the end of the world.
These are questions that secular public health entities are not equipped
to answer, he said. “The even deeper problem is, the white evangelicals
aren’t even on their screen.”
Mr. Chang said he recently spoke with a colleague in Uganda whose
hospital had received 5,000 vaccine doses, but had only been able to
administer about 400, because of the hesitancy of the heavily
evangelical population.
“How American evangelicals think, write, feel about issues quickly
replicates throughout the entire world,” he said.
At this critical moment, even pastors struggle to know how to reach
their flocks. Joel Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown,
W.Va., said several colleagues were forced out of their churches after
promoting health and vaccination guidelines.
Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals,
rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors’ influence on their
churches is decreasing. “They get their people for one hour, and Sean
Hannity gets them for the next 20,” he said.
Mr. Rainey helped his own Southern Baptist congregation get ahead of
false information by publicly interviewing medical experts — a retired
colonel specializing in infectious disease, a church member who is a
Walter Reed logistics management analyst, and a church elder who is a
nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
On the worship stage, in front of the praise band’s drum set, he asked
them “all of the questions that a follower of Jesus might have,” he said
later.
“It is necessary for pastors to instruct their people that we don’t
always have to be adversaries with the culture around us,” he said. “We
believe Jesus died for those people, so why in the world would we see
them as adversaries?”
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