The tortured theology behind vaccine resistance
why "loving your neighbor" is not sufficient cause for evangelicals to follow CDC guidance
This is a companion article to Is Shaming Vaccine Resisters a Useful Strategy?
It may be confusing for much of the Christian world to come to terms with the refusal of their erstwhile brothers and sisters to just take the COVID vaccine. It sure seems to a good many of us that accepting Jesus’ words to love one another should be enough of a theological justification for taking public health precautions including masking up and vaccination.
But clearly the conversation is not as open and shut as many are framing it.
As a study from the Public Religion Research Institute recently found in their Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus (Wave 2 June 2021),
A majority of Americans (56%) agree with the statement “Because getting vaccinated against COVID-19 helps protect everyone, it is a way to live out the religious principle of loving my neighbors,” while 42% disagree with the statement.
The study went on to say:
With the exception of white evangelical Protestants (43%), majorities of all major religious groups agree that getting vaccinated is a way to live out the religious principle of loving their neighbors.
In other words, everybody but nearly half of white evangelicals buys the straightforward, if not oversimplified reasoning that loving your neighbor means following current CDC recommendations.
In a recent interview exchange between journalist John Yang and Christianity Today’s Public Theologian Dr. Russell Moore on vaccine hesitancy among white evangelicals has the headline, “Pastor reveals the reasons behind COVID hesitancy in the evangelical community”. Perhaps looking at the religious beliefs of church leaders can shed some light on the vaccine resistance?
John Yang:
From what you can tell, this skepticism among — that the polling is capturing among people who identify as white evangelicals, does this have anything to do with religious beliefs?
Russell Moore:
No, this doesn't have anything to do with religious beliefs.
To restate the claim, the higher prevalence of skepticism regarding the vaccine among religious folks has nothing to do with theological belief.
And yet, as baffling as it may seem, the countless dead-end conversations I’ve had with church leaders in four Alabama counties with among the lowest rates of vaccines in the state (Alabama, as it is well-documented, has the lowest vaccination rates of any state in the nation) seem to confirm Moore’s statement.
Is it possible that skepticism among white evangelicals, specific to Alabama, are somehow making decisions that affect themselves and their communities completely apart from their religious identities?
I spoke to church staff member, who declined to be named in this article, from Etowah county, which has a vaccination rate of twenty-five percent. He summed up his evangelical church’s approach.
“We don’t do political endorsements, what we do is focus on scripture,” he told me.
And while in our conversation, he described the various precautions the church has made, from the entire staff receiving the vaccination to creating “mask only” sections and discussing hosting vaccine drives, the church’s public stance was simply to encourage their congregants to consult with their doctors.
When asked about the leadership’s theological conversations that led to deciding the church’s public messaging campaign, his assessment was simple.
He said in our phone call, “There were no strong (theological) conversations one way or another.”
Russell Moore may be right. The reasons for either public silence or explicit resistance from white evangelical leaders are truly not self-identified as religious.
But I’m still unconvinced.
It Isn’t About Theology. But It Is.
Since at least the First Great Awakening, what would come to be known as the evangelical tradition has focused largely on the individual’s experience with God. This development took on a whole new level of meaning with the ascendance of Billy Graham and the coming of age for the evangelical movement in the twentieth century.1
It is the personal relationship with Jesus Christ that matters more to evangelical theology than everything else put together. Whether or not somebody is saved, is transferred from hell (the starting point for everybody) to heaven not only takes primary focus but serves to frame the rest of the picture.
To be clear, this is a distinctly new position within the long history of the Christian church. Up until first Jonathan Edwards then Charles Finney and finally Graham, Christianity was primarily a task for the community to live out.
This communal focus can still be seen in the older Christian faiths from Catholic theologies along with their Liberation offshoots to Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopalian traditions (Which include Methodism). In each of these traditions salvation happens in a communal context.
But for the vast and influential world of evangelicalism, the most important, even sacred priority is that the individual remains free to live out their own personal salvation story. Best if this happens in an autonomous church of like-minded individuals, but still more than acceptable for individual practice, so long as you don’t infringe on the rights of anybody else.
There are all manner of bonkers theories I’ve subjected myself to in the course of this article. And every one of them has been offered by religious figures that would parrot Moore’s statement.
Many of us have read and heard from evangelicals who point to various pseudoscientific conspiracy theories and faith healers.
But perhaps more to the point, a friend shared a podcast with me that featured a pair of southern pastors on a claim that a Christian’s obligation to love can be define as narrowly as “fulfilling God’s law…there is no other way to love your neighbor than to follow the commands of God”. This interpretation rested on the last six of the 10 commandments (Don’t kill, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, don’t covet your neighbor’s things).
If you don’t intend to kill your neighbor in this schema, then your actions are secondary at best. Under this logic, since God didn’t command his people to take the vaccine then whatever consequences fall as a result of our decisions, we cannot possibly be held culpable. This logic, of course breaks down immediately when you consider that abortion is also nowhere in the bible but I digress.
This tortured definition of love perhaps seems insane to most of us but from an evangelical perspective at least, it makes sense. And maybe that’s the problem. If the primary motivating factor in decision making for a person of faith is avoiding the guilt associated with active rule-breaking, rather than actively doing good on behalf of others, it’s really a bankrupt set of beliefs.
So while arguments can reasonably be made that there hasn’t been enough time, evidence or efficacy to sway a majority of the remaining white evangelical holdouts, denying that a focus on the individual rather than the collective serves to obscure the main point.
When loving your neighbors requires a tortured gymnastic hermeneutic and the individual’s choice is the theological starting point, these choices are almost inevitable.
For a more detailed history of this phenomenon, along with evangelical theology becoming synonymous with militarism and free markets check out Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God and Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne.