As winter falls on the Northern hemisphere and Covid’s Omicron variant drives a new surge in morbidity and mortality globally, vaccination rates in the United States remain uncommonly low among white evangelical Protestants. With white evangelicals making up 14 percent of the U.S. population, 32 percent affirmed in recent polling that they hadn’t been vaccinated, and nearly a quarter, that they wouldn’t be. Among the secular, or even adherents of other religious faiths, there may be a temptation to draw straight lines between these numbers and evangelical beliefs. But as recently as 2017, more than three-quarters of white evangelicals supported vaccine mandates in schools, for measles, mumps, and rubella. What’s happened here?
Curtis Chang is the founder of the evangelical organization Redeeming Babel, a senior fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary, and on the consulting faculty of the Duke Divinity School. According to Chang, there’s nothing intrinsic to the evangelical mind that’s caused widespread vaccine skepticism: Evangelicals are prone by their faith to question secular authority, not to reject it irrationally. What’s formed the correlation between anti-vaccine convictions and white evangelicals, Chang says, are a set of factors that have combined to break down their trust in U.S. pro-vaccine advocates and secular public-health authorities. The key to engaging white evangelicals on the pandemic effectively, as Chang sees it, is understanding that breakdown and how to create networks of trust capable of overcoming it.
Eve Valentine: How do you understand the factors driving such a high rate of aversion to the vaccine among white evangelicals in America?
Curtis Chang: There are two main factors driving that rate—and they’re factors that are important for understanding vaccine skepticism among many Americans, whether they’re evangelical or not. One is polarization, unsurprisingly, and the second is a distrust of institutions. More than religion, or even religion versus science, this is what’s going on.
On polarization, we’ve gotten into this situation in the U.S. where almost anything can become what I would call elements of the uniform for the two teams, and it can have nothing to do with a person’s core beliefs. The car that you drive, what you read, the TV shows you watch—they’ve now all essentially become, for complex reasons, markers of left and right, red and blue. For unfortunate reasons, the vaccine was enlisted into the culture war American life is now locked into, such that to be on one side of it this war to be on one side of the vaccine—which, when you step back, is nonsensical. It’s absurd that a public-health measure like this, which benefits everyone, would somehow get recruited into polarized political conflict. But here we are, now in 2022, when everything is sucked into that dynamic, including the vaccine.
On the distrust of institutions, this is where it’s important to realize that any of us who’s taken the vaccine has done so to the extent that we trust the institutions behind it. With a very small exception of high-end scientists, none of us can tell you exactly, Here’s the full range of studies that show the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. Here’s the chemical composition of the vaccine. Almost all of us are taking the vaccine because we trust the FDA, the CDC, Big Pharma, local public-health authorities—or we’re not taking the vaccine, because we distrust those institutions. And this is where understanding the white evangelical resistance to the vaccine in America means understanding the history of, and the reasons for, this pattern of distrust, especially in secular institutions.
Valentine: Have the interactions between those two factors changed, with Joe Biden succeeding Donald Trump in the White House and the U.S. federal government now under Democratic control?
Chang: The central dynamic between these factors, as they’ve affected vaccination rates, goes farther back, before the last federal election, to the early stages of the pandemic, when Trump downplayed the severity of Covid-19—and so downplayed the importance of the public-health measures, including masking and public distancing, that were needed to combat it.
If you don’t take the pandemic seriously, you’re not going to go through with especially difficult, or even somewhat intrusive, public-health measures to fight it. From very early on, it became clear that to be on Team Conservative was not to take the pandemic very seriously and to mock those who did—and attitudes toward the vaccine became part of that connection. And of course, before this most recent election and before the pandemic, white evangelicals we’re getting overwhelmingly enlisted onto Team Conservative. So they’d adopted this set of values that, it’s important to remember, is not intrinsic to their faith.
Before this most recent election and before the pandemic, white evangelicals we’re getting overwhelmingly enlisted onto Team Conservative. So they’d adopted this set of values that, it’s important to remember, is not intrinsic to their faith.
If you go back before this recent spate of polarization in the U.S., even as late as 2017, before Covid, there was a Pew Research Center study that included asking white evangelical Protestants their views on vaccines—and in particular, vaccine mandates. It turned out around 75 percent of them were actually in favor of vaccine mandates in schools.
So that’s now flipped almost entirely. It just shows you how current attitudes toward vaccination aren’t intrinsic to any deep-seated beliefs in the evangelical religious faith. They have everything to do with this recent spike in political polarization and how that’s disproportionately affected people in this faith.
Then to understand how this interacts with a distrust of institutions, you also have to understand that churches in particular, evangelical churches included, have had a conflicted relationship with public health—and some legitimate reasons for feeling that their interests weren’t being taken seriously in public-health decision making. Early in the pandemic, for example, churches were hit especially hard by forced closures—in ways felt to many churchgoers like they were being singled out or at least treated unfairly.
You have this classic example in Nevada, where the state Supreme Court ruled that churches could be closed down but casinos could remain open. It’s hard for an evangelical, or any Christian, pastor to look at that without saying, The state is making value judgments here about what’s important—the tax revenues of casinos—and disregarding the important human value of gathering together for worship. This is an example of the sort of experience that contributes to a sense of institutional distrust.
Valentine: When we think about the role of misinformation or disinformation specifically, we know that people of virtually any demographic can be vulnerable to them, particularly on a social platform like Facebook—but do you see any distinctive vulnerabilities in the evangelical community to specific kinds of misinformation or disinformation?
Chang: Yes, absolutely. I think you have to understand that inherent to the Christian faith—and I’d say evangelicals especially adhere to this aspect of Christianity—is, at its best, a healthy disposition to evaluate the ruling authorities and ruling news sources of the day critically. We do hold in our faith this radical claim that Jesus is Lord—and that is actually my highest authority and highest allegiance. Now, this doesn’t automatically mean that I reject all other authorities, but it does automatically mean that I have to adopt at least a critical evaluation of them.
So evangelicalism has a special sense of critical thinking built into it. But what’s happened is that this has been weaponized by forces external to the evangelical faith, which have effectively hijacked this built-in religious disposition—forces like politicians, media sources, or anti-vax advocates, or others who’ve figured out how to get our votes or our clicks or our purchase dollars for medical products or whatever else they might want.
Inherent to the Christian faith—and I’d say evangelicals especially adhere to this aspect of Christianity—is, at its best, a healthy disposition to evaluate the ruling authorities and ruling news sources of the day critically. We do hold in our faith this radical claim that Jesus is Lord—and that is actually my highest authority and highest allegiance.
This changes the built-in evangelical disposition from a state of critical evaluation into a state of reflexive suspicion or paranoia—and that absolutely is being fed on social media. Evangelicals live with a sense of being called apart from the rest of the culture—called not automatically to believe what everybody else is believing. Many evangelicals have accordingly created their own information ecosystem—an information ecosystem with its own publications, its own social-media platforms—and if that gets hijacked by sources of misinformation or disinformation, then it becomes a very dangerous echo chamber.
Valentine: Are there particular kinds of misinformation or disinformation that you find work more persuasively among evangelicals than across the U.S. population as a whole?
Chang: Yes. On the vaccine in particular, there’s a set of false ideas that shares a lot in common with what generally circulates in the conservative information ecosystem. So you’ll see ideas about, for example, Ivermectin being the real treatment or vaccines being a government plot to control you. There’s a lot of overlap. But then there can be a religious veneer over this in the evangelical community that gives it a special potency.
For instance, you’ll see in the evangelical subculture this notion that the vaccine is the mark of the beast, from the passage in Revelation—that it’s this prophesied mark that would bring Christians to bow to a secular ruler.
Then there’s the idea of a connection to abortion—a fear that fetal cells were used in the research of the vaccine, and that it’s therefore tainted, which taps into pro-life concerns in the larger community.
I don’t think either of these examples is legitimate—and a lot of our work is aimed at trying to strip away the kind of false veneer they represent. But you’ll find it brings a special religious energy to this broader American dynamic of polarization and institutional distrust.
Valentine: Do you think there might be ways in which vaccine skepticism is possibly leading evangelicals to ask better questions about vaccination than people may be tending to ask across American society generally?
Chang: Well, I wish that were the case. And I think there’s a potential for that to be the case. But I don’t think that is actually the case.
For example, evangelicals acting on their best impulses could have led to a healthy examination of the use of fetal cells in biomedical research today, which is a legitimate issue but also a complex issue. When you look at it closely, the way that, for instance, the Vatican has looked at it, throwing its best biomedical experts and researchers into it, you’ll see that it’s an issue where you have to make some distinctions.
There’s a set of false ideas that shares a lot in common with what generally circulates in the conservative information ecosystem. So you’ll see ideas about, for example, Ivermectin being the real treatment or vaccines being a government plot to control you. … But then there can be a religious veneer over this in the evangelical community that gives it a special potency.
If you go back into the 1970s, you can trace some of the origins of the vaccines to an aborted fetal cell, most likely, just like we would trace almost any modern medical intervention today to that cell line—such that if you were really going to adhere to a logic of I can’t be tainted at all by that cell line, you’d be forced to reject ibuprofen and then every diabetes drug or heart medicine and so on.
It’s a legitimate question to say, Hey, let’s not just accept whatever the biomedical industry throws at us. Let’s look at some of the ethical concerns—and look at them through a religious lens and an ethical lens. I think, if you did that here, you’d see this as a case where those concerns don’t apply but where there are other concerns that potentially could apply—where if evangelicals had been at their best, then the most critical, thoughtful, engaged-with-culture side of them could have contributed to the greater common good.
Valentine: What kinds of argument do you see as being most effective in persuading skeptical evangelicals about the Covid vaccines?
Chang: I think there are two kinds of argument that are effective. One is what I would call the stripping-the-false-veneer or clearing-the-brush kind of argument—where you have to take questions that have this religious veneer to them seriously.
So, if you look on our site at Christians and the Vaccine, we’ve produced a video on the question of whether the vaccine is the “mark of the beast.” Which is a question that, as a fellow evangelical, in some sense only I can do—which is to say, I can’t expect the secular public-health authorities really to weigh in on this topic. Even though I don’t ultimately think the idea is legitimate, I can take it seriously, respond respectfully, and argue on biblical grounds why it’s based on a false reading of the biblical passage about the mark of the beast.
Or we have another video that addresses whether you can be pro-life and pro-vaccine, which dives into the whole history of fetal-cell research and its connection to the Covid vaccine—again, not just dismissing it with a condescending wave of the hand but really taking the question on its own terms and diving into it.
These kinds of argument are necessary to clear the brush at the intellectual level, and we can disseminate the arguments, but what surveys have shown is that the deeper persuasion happens at the individual level—really, at the one-to-one level. Which makes sense when you recognize that, again, one of the core drivers of the problem is a distrust of institutions.
When you have a pervasive distrust of the institutions behind the vaccine, you need to inject some other source of trust into the system, and you can’t inject that via the secular institutions. That’s why the PSAs of the Biden administration, and of public-health authorities generally, just don’t work—because they’re coming from already distrusted sources.
When you have a pervasive distrust of the institutions behind the vaccine, you need to inject some other source of trust into the system, and you can’t inject that via the secular institutions. That’s why the PSAs of the Biden administration, and of public-health authorities generally, just don’t work—because they’re coming from already distrusted sources.
So you have to find and tap into another source of trust—and this is where you have to leverage relationships; you have to find people who are trusted at the individual, relational level by the vaccine-hesitant, and who can deliver the message directly. Which is why what’s most compelling for the hesitant but still-persuadable evangelical is when they hear the case from their pastor, or from a fellow church member, or from a relative who they already trust—from someone they can trust they share a worldview with. Now they don’t have their guard up. So they can hear from this trusted source, Hey, I really think you should take the vaccine—for these reasons …
That’s really what we’ve found to be most effective. And honestly, what’s been most frustrating in our attempts to partner with secular public-health institutions is how much they’ve ignored it. Even to this day, they’ve still, I think, grossly underinvested in outreach to the white evangelical community—and when they have tried to invest in it, they’ve done that through the old institutional public-health playbook, not realizing that you actually have to figure out how to inject information into these individual relational networks that share information primarily on social media.
Valentine: Do you do outreach to enlist political leaders on Team Conservative, as you put it, in your work—and if so, what does that look like?
Chang: No, we don’t, because studies show that white evangelicals don’t want to hear about the vaccine from political leaders—even the political leaders of their tribe. They want to hear about it from doctors they trust, people they trust, their own community. Even though the issue has become so politicized, there’s something white evangelicals recognize in saying, I don’t want this to be a political issue. They’re looking for information that they can feel isn’t being tainted by political dynamics.
Valentine: From your experience working with vaccine-skeptical evangelicals, what do you think secular authorities, or just secular vaccination advocates, in the U.S. could be doing better in addressing vaccine skepticism?
Chang: That’s a great question. I’ll speak to how they can do that with the evangelical community, since that’s what I know best—and that’s this: They could be doing a tremendous amount of good by convening partners in the faith community. And the reason for this is that, as I said, the message can’t really come from secular authorities—they’re already distrusted. So they can’t be the broadcaster. But they can work with trusted partners, who people can look at and say, Okay, now you’re speaking my language. The message just isn’t going to come effectively from the CDC. The CDC is going to lack the credibility to exegete Revelations on the mark of the beast, right?
But what they can do, and what they failed to do, is convene white evangelical leaders to come out on a united front. This was the great missed opportunity in the pandemic, because if you look at recent history, you actually saw leading white evangelicals take baby steps at different times to come out in favor of the vaccine. Rick Warren did this. Franklin Graham did this. J.D. Greear, who’s the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention did this. But they all did it individually, at different times, in small steps.
What’s most compelling for the hesitant but still-persuadable evangelical is when they hear the case from their pastor, or from a fellow church member, or from a relative who they already trust—from someone they can trust they share a worldview with. Now they don’t have their guard up.
And then what happened? Each of them got flamed by some by the most politicized, most volatile, most vocal parts of their base. They all got flamed and then they all retreated. What never happened was the establishment of a collective voice that meant strength in numbers among white evangelicals.
Which is in direct contrast to what public-health authorities did with evangelicals in the U.S. black and Hispanic communities. And that made a huge difference. In fact, when vaccine outreach began, hesitancy among black Protestants and white Protestants were identical in numbers—they were the same, for different reasons. For black Americans, you have historical factors like the Tuskegee experiment and so many other reasons for institutional distrust. But to the extent that public-health officials focused on faith-based outreach, they focused almost entirely on African-American and Latin communities. That was necessary; it was important; and it really moved the numbers. They just didn’t do this for white evangelicals.
That was decisive, because, you have to understand, crucial to the evangelical nature is that it’s decentralized. There’s no pope of evangelicals. There’s no one body that speaks for everyone. So it doesn’t self-organize very well. Rick Warren and Franklin Graham and J.D. Greear aren’t on their own going to be able to say, Hey, let’s get together. That doesn’t happen very easily in the white evangelical community.
However, I do believe that if the White House and public-health authorities had done the work to build relationships with leaders like them, and convene these leaders, and ask them to engage, and make resources available—to give them a convening power and to mobilize them to come out on a common front—we would have seen much greater movement among white evangelicals than we did. Still to this day, they lack that cohesive voice of white evangelical leaders, who are for the most part actually pro-vaccine themselves. They’re just definitely afraid of trespassing against their base.
Valentine: Do you see any opportunity in the pandemic for American Christianity?
Chang: I think the great opportunity is if we can recover the best of ourselves—to have a critical evaluative stance on secular institutions but ultimately to act on our best selves. And the idea of our best selves is summarized by Jesus’ second-greatest commandment, which is to love our neighbor as ourselves.
If we can recapture that, it’s our fundamental commandment in the world—not individual autonomy, or suspicion against the government, but to really ask what is the best for my neighbor. That includes our local neighbors, as American evangelicals look around and see the effects that our non-vaccination is having on them through the strain on our public-health systems, but also our global neighbors.
It’s important to understand, and often overlooked, how much influence American evangelicals, and American Christians generally, have throughout the world. We’re still in the early stages of vaccine distribution, and we’re already seeing the emergence of the same misinformation that we’ve been fighting in the last six to nine months here in America—we’re seeing it replicated and propagated in parts of Africa and Asia, where Christian communities so often take their cues from American, often conservative, evangelical voices.
So we’re in danger of replicating and transmitting not just the virus; we’re in danger of replicating and transmitting the misinformation and disinformation around the virus and the vaccine. And this is where American Christians need to join our voices not just to speak to our own Christian communities here in the U.S. but also to influence the rest of the world.
