White Evangelical Resistance to Vaccines is More Politics Than Religion

 
 
As an ex-vangelical myself, I always feel the need to comment on these sorts of things. I chalk it up to a mix of residual guilt on the one hand and a felt obligation to speak out on the other, each stemming from the fact I once counted myself among the rank and file of this deeply misguided demographic. More than that, I was an active participant on the wrong side of the culture war for several years before I decided to put my nose in a book not called the bible and lend an ear to those outside of my highly circumscribed bubble.

On the plus side, spending those first two decades of my life enmeshed in a retrogressive culture imparted an insider’s perspective that, combined with my post-Christian experience, can serve as a prism through which others may better understand the evangelical mindset. One development people have trouble wrapping their heads around is white evangelicalism’s close ties to anti-mask and other Covid-centric denialism, as covered in the The New York Times story linked above.

With more than a third of the country identifying as “born-again” or evangelical, and nearly half of white evangelicals saying they would decline vaccination, it’s looking more and more like a real possibility that this group could prevent us from reaching herd immunity and returning to some semblance of normal life. We need to talk about it.

It’s not that there’s some innately Christian reason for evincing skepticism about vaccines (or indeed about science), or a longrunning textual tradition that grounds conspiracist ideas about the pandemic. There is, to be sure, an emphasis in evangelicalism on faith healing and divine cures, and indeed some evangelicals may cite such convictions in defense of their contrarianism. There’s also the mark of the beast story from Revelation that some Christian and other groups have worked into their batshit theories about Covid vaccines being vehicles for implanting microchips in everyone (courtesy of Bill Gates of course). But these are not primarily what’s driving resistance within this group.

It’s less about religion than about politics. Evangelicalism is best understood as a political movement at this point in our nation’s history. Over the last four decades and change — ever since the Moral Majority movement in the Reagan years spearheaded by the late Jerry Falwell — especially white evangelicalism has more or less merged with the Republican Party in the US to the extent the two may as well be synonymous. It’s where the term “Christian right” found its origin. The two factions are so closely aligned that they serve as reciprocal echo chambers, each taking cues from the other in a concerted effort to crush liberal progressivism.

Throughout the past year, evangelicals’ preferred partisan authorities (i.e., conservative politicians and pundits) have parroted skeptical noises about masks and vaccines, and they’ve adopted these ideas in turn. Anthony Fauci’s scientific credentials are utterly irrelevant, associated as he is with Democrats and the liberal intelligentsia in their eyes. Even pastors and church leaders have been supplanted by Fox News and radio personalities. Time formerly spent in prayer and religious instruction is now devoted to consuming conservative media in its sundry forms. In short, their religious identity has become subservient to their political identity.

And it’s been this way in evangelical circles for quite some time now. When Trump arrived on the scene, most white evangelicals handed him their endorsement without a second thought: he was merely the next conduit for achieving their political goals and aspirations. That he despised the left as much as they do and rehashed the same familiar rhetoric they imbibe on a daily basis were the only ‘qualifications’ he needed. His religious cred was a factor as immaterial as Dr. Fauci’s scientific expertise. His white identity politics, meanwhile, only seemed to further endear him to this community. Unholy though it may be, the alliance between white evangelicalism and Trumpism was eminently predictable for anyone with insight into the Christian right. Not winning them over would have been the only real surprise, considering how far in advance this particular stage had been set for Trump’s brand of politics, and thus we cannot give him credit even for this.

This all begins to make more sense once you recognize that modern evangelicalism is only thinly related to the forms of Christianity that developed in the centuries since Jesus’ death. It has almost nothing in common, for example, with the more thoughtful piety of Augustine or Origen or Aquinas or Warfield, or even C.S. Lewis, each of whom held views that don’t line up with fundamentalist takes on scripture, salvation, or science. The evangelicalism so prevalent in American society today is more of a social pathology that expresses itself as religion. When you hear from Christians who articulate viewpoints at odds with mainstream science, the focus isn’t so much on religious premises as political ones; their worldview is grounded in a contrarian, anti-liberal, anti-D/democratic ethos that prides itself on anti-intellectualism and culture-war antagonism. The average white evangelical finds his or her central source of energy in political talking points, not religious convictions or creeds, and vaccine resistance is but the latest manifestation of this phenomenon.

Excerpts:

“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.”

[…]

“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.”

[…]

“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.”

 

Further reading and resources:

Image credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File

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