The Evangelical Anti-Vaccine Movement 50 Years in the Making
Brad speaks with scholar Mark Fugitt whose recent work explores the various sources and factors in evangelical opposition to the COVID vaccine. He provides the historical context for this movement, showing that it is half a century in formation. He explains to Brad how everything from creationism, to Christian wellness, to anti-abortion sentiment, and the apocalypse play into fear-mongering around the COVID vaccine.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Sorry, y'all.
It's been a long week.
I'm tired.
Forgot where I work, I guess.
Our show is also in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm here today joined by Mark Fugate, who is a historical theologian, pastor, professor at various places, including Missouri State University, You bet.
teaches widely philosophy, religion, theology, and so on.
And we're going to talk about some great research you've done in a paper you just gave at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion on a vaccine movement, or I should say an anti-vaccine movement in evangelical and conservative Christian circles that's been building for a long time.
So let me just stop and say, Mark, thanks for joining me.
You bet.
Thanks for having me.
We're recording here sort of in the run up to Christmas and the holidays.
And so friends, we've had a bunch of schedules and reschedules and mini calamities and other things.
So Mark has graciously sort of hung in there with all of the different times we were trying to make all this happen.
So, all right, so I need to start by saying this, Mark, your paper made me Eat crow and that is because I grew up in what you call in your paper a name brand evangelical church and I didn't hear from my pulpit and I didn't hear from the radio and other places a kind of anti-vaccine sentiment.
Now that doesn't mean there weren't people in the pews next to me who had an anti-vaccine sentiment but my experience was not one where I ever heard a teacher or preacher tell me, hey You know, that measles vaccine is from Satan, or if you go to the doctor, you need to be careful about what they give you.
And so there have been several times on the show when I have said, hey, you know, this opposition to the COVID vaccine on the part of evangelicals and other conservative Christians is seemingly new, or at least it's just kind of coming out of the current political context rather than a A kind of long tradition of anti-vaccine teachings.
Reading your work made me realize, I think I came to that conclusion way too quickly and way too blithely.
And so, what you've done in your paper is really provide us a kind of, you know, unfortunately, a buffet of anti-vaccine sources that developed over the last half century.
And I wonder if we can just go through those.
Does that make sense to you?
I mean, do you feel like when you present this kind of work, other people have the kind of reaction I had?
Yeah, by all means.
And this is something I've been watching, of course, like you, for the last couple of years.
And one of the reasons I wanted to write this, I think a couple of years ago, or about a year and a half ago, I saw a Twitter post with somebody just kind of basically echoing what you just said.
And I thought, there is something a lot deeper there that goes back farther.
And of course, Like you said, my experience is similar.
I didn't hear this preached from the pulpit, or I didn't hear this taught, but I was exposed to a lot of these influences, and I think that's my point here.
When respected voices from our past, from our experiences, have made these suggestions, what was just maybe on the back of our minds or on the fringe of our minds, now it had a little resonance now whenever somebody says, oh, this is a thing.
And so, yeah, the big point of my paper is basically this moment now is And intersection of all these ideas, not an initiation of these ideas.
And so it's important to look at this back history to see how come the anti-vaccine movement, at least among Christians, got going so quickly.
I think that's what surprises people so much now, so many writers, that it just took off.
Well, it didn't just come out of nowhere.
No, yeah, that's well said.
And you begin the paper with some statistics that I've actually cited on the show, which are from PRRI.
And those statistics are basically revealing that counties with greater shares of white evangelical Protestants have lower rates of vaccination.
And I don't think people listening will be surprised by that.
Counties with greater shares of religious Okay, so the question is, as you just sort of outlined, where did this come from?
of the nun have higher rates of vaccination.
So it seems as if, if you're in a county with more white evangelical Protestants, less people will be vaccinated.
Okay, so the question is, as you just sort of outlined, where did this come from?
How did the anti-COVID vaccine movement get going and pick up steam so quickly?
Because it's now, and I think you hinted this at the end of the paper, and hopefully we can get into it, is it's now providing a nexus for connections across groups?
So, you know, when Sean Foyt is leading worship rallies with the Proud Boys sort of standing nearby, and the Proud Boys are standing at anti-vax, alongside anti-vaccination parents at school board meetings.
You're starting to see some of these groups really start to form a coalition, right?
And so the question is, how did all of that happen so quickly?
So let's just go through a list.
I mean, you provide in the paper such an unfortunately extensive list.
The first is the Christian wellness movement.
And so there's going to be folks out there that are like, what is that?
You know, what is a Christian wellness movement and how does it lead to anti-vax sentiment?
Yeah, the Christian wellness movement is one of those things that if you've spent any time in a church, you've certainly encountered it, this idea that God wants you to be well physically.
And of course, that's a great sentiment, but it's how we interpret that, right?
What do we do with that?
And so you see a lot of things over the last couple of decades or more That really emphasize this idea of spiritual wellness being connected to physical wellness, whether it's diets of the Bible.
I remember, you know, different books in the church libraries when I was a kid, it was more diets of the Bible, eat these things.
Here's a recipe that we found in Exodus and we're going to make it somehow.
So those types of things have been around.
You see it a little bit more now in the last, before COVID, but in the last while where people are Really extrapolating wellness ideas directly from verses.
I think in the paper I quote one Bible study leader online who interprets a verse from Isaiah that in one translation says, my people will live as long as trees.
And she then takes that and says, God wants us to live long.
And so then she thus is able to open doors to all these different wellness ideas.
And I think that's the notion that we're really seeing.
We're also seeing this push to alternative medicines, this desire to find some secret knowledge, something more than what a doctor will tell us.
And And a lot of sources have been talking about this for years.
That doctors that deal with Christians need to be aware of alternative therapies because chances are Christians are going to have heard about these and so they'll need to be able to respond to those alternative treatment ideas.
And of course, this goes into a lot with vaccines over the last few years, specifically with parents.
And this biblical notion that the parents know best, which is a great idea to emphasize personal responsibility, but it also then carries this potentially harmful thing when it goes into the parent knows better than the doctor.
And we see a lot of that in writings coming up to this moment.
And it's really strange to read a lot of books by doctors and a lot of articles by doctors in the years prior to COVID.
Because they read almost like prophecy in the fact that they're saying, hey, this is a problem.
This is a trend.
And now we're seeing it happen on a much bigger scale when the stakes are a lot higher.
And I think that's the most profound difference now.
We always shrugged our shoulders before when there'd be a measles outbreak or something, and it would be isolated.
And of course, COVID didn't go away.
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