For some Americans, vaccines aren’t about science but faith
www.cidrap.umn.edu
For some Americans, vaccines aren’t about science but faith
For some Americans, vaccines aren’t about science but faith
Sarah BodenToday at 2:45 p.m.
Public Health
None of the major world religions oppose vaccines, yet thousands of Americans claim that immunizations conflict with their faith.
School vaccine exemptions for religious or personal reasons are on the rise. At least five appeals that concern religious freedom and vaccines are pending before the US Supreme Court. And this summer, US Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, introduced a bill that would withhold federal tax dollars from schools that refuse to recognize religious exemptions for vaccinations.
In her new book, Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, which covers the past 50 years of vaccine hesitancy in the United States, religious studies historian Kira Ganga Kieffer, PhD, argues that vaccine hesitancy should be understood as genuine religious expression, not the product of misinformation.
In a conversation, edited for length and clarity, Kieffer explained to CIDRAP News that she defines religion broadly, with a focus on practices or rituals and questions of morality. For example, some parents reject vaccines because they want to keep their children’s bodies pure. It’s similar to how many religions have rules around bodily purity that range from bathing and diet to meditation and sexuality.
The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that Americans of all stripes can be skeptical of the medical establishment. By understanding these sincerely held beliefs, Kieffer says the medical community can better address anti-vaccine sentiments.
CIDRAP News: It’s hard to wrap my mind around vaccine hesitancy as being a type of religion. To me, it’s a question of science and data, not faith. So, what are some hallmarks of religion that you see in people with vaccine-skeptical beliefs?
Kira Ganga Kieffer: For example, look at the idea of a sacred text.
I don't necessarily mean that people who become vaccine hesitant are saying that a book by [anti-vaccine activist] Jenny McCarthy is the same as the Bible. I don't think anybody would say that, including people who are believers in Jenny McCarthy's works. But the way that they treat those works, as kind of like above and beyond everything else in terms of authoritative knowledge, is a form of sacralization.
Also meaning-making. After a tragic event, like a life-altering illness, people find they have to create meaning out of that trauma, which is another form of religious expression. By saying, “Okay, this happened, and I have to put that into a much larger kind of moral story to understand why it happened to me.”
You write about meaning-making within the context of the whole-cell diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus vaccine, or DPT vaccine, which was regularly administered in the 1980s.
This vaccine, which is no longer used in the United States, had higher rates of severe side effects. It’s important to note that a scientific review found insufficient evidence that DPT increased the risk of long-term neurologic damage.
Still, DPT was replaced with acellular vaccines, which have far milder side effects. You posit this change was due to advocacy from parents, which was somewhat religious in nature?
We can really take a page from evangelical Christians, or Protestants, who often describe this experience of being lost, being sinners, being someone who can't see the world clearly. Then they have a transformative moment that gives them a new identity: "I am now found. I understand the world more clearly. I understand what's right and wrong.”
This conversion narrative is very much mirrored in the vaccine safety movement of the 1980s, which is happening right in the same kind of cultural landscape as the boom in evangelicalism with the religious right.
Parents are saying, “I had a healthy child, then I had a sick child…it must have been the DPT shot. That has now reframed how I look at everything.”
This movement, which parents called the DPT safety movement, was not oppositional to all vaccines. But it was foundational to what has become the modern vaccine hesitancy movement. It was very much focused on safety and parental choice, with a near-religious framing that had a kind of conversion to the belief or understanding that vaccines could be unsafe and then needing to take matters into one's own hands, which creates meaning.
Then, in the 1990s and early 2000s, you discuss how changing societal expectations for moms, which demanded they pour a higher degree of energy and caution into parenting, further shaped the anti-vaccine movement.
Yes. These expectations cause women to sacralize their children by trying to control any possible bad outcome in their lives. It made women feel responsible for anything bad that might happen.
At the same time, the United States is experiencing this birth of natural health and wellness culture, in that you start seeing discussions about organic foods and artificial preservatives.
Also, there's a shift away from traditional religious identification to more of a spiritual way of being, especially for white middle-class women who are not conservative. And these women feel freer to explore spirituality on their own terms. That usually includes spiritualizing of the body, spiritualizing children, and their own role as being a mom.
So, for these moms, keeping their children healthy and pure from chemicals is an act of faith?
It's more adopting a whole way of living that makes every decision kind of high stakes, morally speaking.
Behavior becomes religion when you live your life according to more rigid standards than what is common, or ascribe extra meaning to everyday decisions, because you believe there’s a moral obligation to do things in a way that feels set apart from what is otherwise profane, normal, or mainstream.
Up until the 2010s, your book discusses how vaccine hesitancy cuts across the political spectrum. That starts to shift during the Obama administration, with white conservative evangelical Christians strongly embracing vaccine skepticism.
White evangelicals had a lot of angst and fear of societal changes during the 2010s. For example, the emphasis on LGBTQ rights seems to undercut evangelical Christians' understanding of how the world should be.
Against this backdrop, we start to see that there are more measles cases popping up around the country: Hasidic Jews in New York City, Amish people in Ohio, Somali Muslim immigrants in Minnesota … So states, especially liberal states, think the best way to curb this is to get rid of legal religious exemptions to vaccines.
That really riles up white evangelicals, who had not necessarily been involved in the vaccine hesitancy world. They get interested because they identify as a religious group that doesn't want their rights infringed on. And they already feel like they're being erased.
This happens right prior to COVID. It creates a grassroots medical freedom movement, which appeals to long-time anti-vaccine activists as well as white evangelicals within the MAGA movement. And it all coalesces under the banner of religious liberty.
Elsewhere in the book you discuss how vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans is linked to the long history of medical racism. And with ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, lower vaccination rates are partly because those communities are so insular.
But it seems that what’s happening with white evangelicals in the 2010s is different.
Yes. Unlike these other communities, white evangelicals held tremendous cultural power. But they, in my view, start to kind of falsely identify with these other religious groups that are tiny and have very little political power.
I don't question white evangelicals' sincerity. But there's more of this use of vaccines as a political tool, with leaders in the vaccine-hesitancy movement starting to see opportunities with Republicans.
So, with white evangelicals, it's not really about safety? It's about identity and freedom?
That's my argument, especially during COVID. From my analysis, safety was discussed often in terms that were more cultural and more about religious identity. It's very shrewd, and it's very emotional.
For example, some social media memes claimed the COVID vaccine could cause you to become impotent. And that taps into broader fears about demographic and societal changes.
Post COVID, evangelicals have taken on more of those original concerns about safety but also maintained this connection to leaders of the vaccine-hesitancy movement, such as US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who got taken into the Republican fold and created Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) in the same image as Make America Great Again (MAGA), even though the issues are not MAGA.
Do you think this marriage between vaccine skepticism and evangelical Christianity is permanent?
As a historian, I would say nothing is permanent.
If liberals and progressives put aside the partisanship around the COVID vaccine, I think they could potentially speak to the concerns of vaccine skeptics quite effectively. Perhaps more effectively than Republicans in terms of consumer protection, such as limiting harmful chemicals in products.
Democrats tend to be more of the regulation party, and that's actually what a lot of the MAHA people are looking for. They're not getting it out of the Trump administration for the most part. So, I think it's absolutely changeable.
I am optimistic there will be science messengers who can learn to speak to the concerns of vaccine-skeptical people. They'll need to demonstrate trust and belief in the sincerity of how hesitant people think and feel, but also convey evidence-based information about medicine. It will take someone with tremendous leadership and insight.
But there’s got to be a way to talk together.