US Faith in Action during COVID 19

The widespread attempts of many Americans to use the ‘religious exemption’ to avoid the COVID vaccine highlights multiple problems with modern American faith. Firstly, I would argue that Christian morality should be called into question if Christians are deliberately refusing to take steps shown to decrease the risk of illness and death for their ‘neighbors’ whom they are supposed to love. This refusal to accept the vaccine is one of the reasons that we never reached anything close to herd immunity. Christianity in practice today seems to be much more about elevation of the individual beyond the welfare of the many.

When I recently posted this challenge on a social media site, dozens of angry self-identified Christians took offense to the post and claimed that the issue wasn’t about morality, it was about ‘not trusting the vaccine.’ This raises the second red flag: even if we grant that some Christians were not merely using their ‘Christian’ label selfishly in demanding the religious exemption, they evidently have flawed critical thinking. Within weeks of the rollout of the vaccine, the evidence was overwhelming that vaccination saves lives and minimizes hospitalizations. Ignoring this evidence seems to indicate an inability to appropriately evaluate incoming medical information. Obviously, we are in a hyperpolarized political climate, and the left and right each have a history of spreading misinformation to some degree when it suits political aims, but the ‘it’s political now so I don’t trust it’ excuse only goes so far. There are and have been plenty of apolitical sources available online providing data that there is substantial benefit from the vaccine. Conspiratorial claims that the vaccine is dangerous or worse, that Bill Gates wants everyone to be injected with a tracking chip were sadly more convincing for many than a pile of actual evidence of vaccine efficacy. It does not seem surprising that a worldview based on unchangeable supernatural claims would lead to erosion of critical thinking. Maintaining beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence is only possible when one learns to avoid cognitive dissonance and treat the irrational with more respect than it warrants.

The third red flag is a major problem with Bible-based groups as a whole: the ease with which believers can project their own interpretation onto any random Bible verse to justify almost any behavioral imaginable. This fact is why the Bible has been used by various individuals and groups to justify homophobia, slavery, misogyny, bigotry, racism, even murder, going back for centuries. While the US has made significant moral progress over the past several hundred years, this has been the result of humanistic values being projected onto Biblical passages, not the other way around. As with the abortion issue, climate change, gun ownership—any other modern moral issue, the Bible has nothing relevant to say and lacks any moral foundation other than: obeying the arbitrary commands of a celestial dictator leads to reward or at least the avoidance of punishment. A quick google search reveals countless inane interpretations of Bible verses used to justify the religious exemption discussed here, but the most common seems to be the ‘body is a temple’ Bible verse found in 1 Corinthians 6:19. In context this verse is discussing the nature of sexual relations with others and is sadly also frequently used as one in the arsenal of many bible verses targeting homosexuality as evil. In this case, apparently, it also means that you are not to use preemptive medicine that could decrease the risk of illness for yourself and everyone around you. It seems silly to even have to state that there is no logical connection that can be made from those words in the Bible and their interpreted meaning.

There are undoubtedly millions of well-meaning Christians who did understand the science, did get the vaccine and want to do what’s right for the right reasons. However, a worldview that allows for the misattribution of one’s personal viewpoint to an alleged principle that can be interpreted from excerpts in a Stone Age book undermines the logical ground on which we need to remain in order to have conversations about reality. Persuasion is becoming a lost art, and sadly, identification as Christian increasingly carries the likelihood that one is unresponsive to reason and evidence.