Spread God's Love, Not Measles

I don’t believe that government regulation and intervention is the answer to every problem.

I also have no problem acknowledging — and condemning — instances where our government has created policies that prioritize corporate profits over the health of the American people. For example, thanks to the efforts of agricultural lobbyists, the government continues to subsidize corn and wheat, thereby incentivizing their use in cheap, ultra-processed foods that are linked to worse health outcomes. The opioid crisis is another complex and particularly tragic example of government prioritizing powerful corporate interests over Americans’ health.

Rejecting well-established science and instead trusting our own individual ability to “live healthy” is a religious fallacy

Some of these same themes recently appeared in “Make America Healthy Again,” a new report led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. But while I share a healthy skepticism about corporate influence on federal health care policy, I am alarmed to see vaccine skepticism and outright anti-vaccine attitudes enshrined at the highest levels of government, especially within entities responsible for overseeing public health. And I’m especially grieved to see how bad Christian theology and warped notions of religious freedom are used to fuel that skepticism and its deadly consequences.

Abusing religious freedom

The report, which will guide the work of a MAHA commission to craft specific policy recommendations, amplifies and helps legitimize Kennedy’s well-known and long-running skepticism of vaccines, including his efforts to promote the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. In a 2023 podcast interview, Kennedy even said he believes “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

Meanwhile, increasingly widespread opposition to vaccines in some communities — including some religious communities — has led to declining vaccination rates in U.S. children and a corresponding resurgence of previously eliminated diseases like the measles.

Taylor, Measles testing Texas.png

Some faith leaders have encouraged vaccine hesitancy. For example, Gene Bailey, host of a prophecy-focused talk show, warned his audience against the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, telling them that government and “globalist entities” would “use bayonets and prisons to force a needle into your arm.”

Pastor Greg Locke of Global Vision Bible Church similarly discouraged people from getting the vaccine, telling his congregation: “I ain’t getting it, I ain’t promoting it, and I discourage everyone under this tent to get it.” These pastors are contributing to a dismaying trend: Millions of white evangelicals who opposed getting vaccinated during the height of the pandemic continue to refuse vaccines today. This trend stands in contrast with efforts like Faiths4Vaccines, through many faith leaders, myself included, led by example in getting vaccinated, advocating for equitable vaccine distribution, and mobilizing congregations to do likewise.

As a Christian who cares deeply about religious freedom for people of all faiths and none, I’m sensitive to the concerns that some religious communities have around vaccines and the government’s role in mandating them. Yet as David W. Congdon pointed out in Sojourners in 2021, few objections to vaccines that claim to be on religious grounds are from faith traditions with “any doctrinal or moral belief related to the use of vaccines;” instead, he argued that these objections are more properly understood as “weapons in a culture war, in which ‘sincerely held beliefs’ are manufactured like bullets in a wartime factory.” This idea is supported by the fact that so many faith leaders, from the Vatican to the Greek Orthodox Diocese of America to conservative pro-Trump pastor Robert Jeffress, have expressed support for vaccines and cautioned followers against any kind of religious exemptions to vaccines.

In legal matters, religious freedom is about ensuring everyone can practice their faith — providing that religious practice doesn’t violate a “compelling” government interest. This matches how Paul explains government authority in Romans 13, which I’ve argued boils down to promoting the common good and restraining evil.

When I look at vaccines through that lens, I see a powerful religious case that the government should play a role in mandating vaccines that keep communities safe from potentially deadly diseases like the measles.

Taylor, Measles vaccination baby.png

Vaccines play a key part in protecting children from preventable deaths in the all-important first few years of life, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimating that childhood vaccination saves 4 million lives worldwide each year. As a father of two sons who are now 12 and 14, I have many memories of reassuring my sons with each new round of vaccinations and then submitting the required school forms to verify they received the requisite shots. While the forms were sometimes a headache, I knew complying with these requirements provided an essential public service to ensure individual children — and the entire school community — stayed healthy and safe. Viewed in this light, vaccines and vaccine mandates are critical tools for governments to support flourishing futures for the youngest and most vulnerable members of society.

Twisting Christian theology

Other Christian vaccine opponents and skeptics argue that they are best positioned to keep themselves and their families healthy without availing themselves of vaccines. But rejecting well-established science and instead trusting our own individual ability to “live healthy” is a religious fallacy; it fails the test of loving our neighbors as ourselves — and misapprehends how God works in the world.

The idea that a vaccine is meant simply to protect the individual is woefully incomplete. 

When Christians trust their own ability to “live healthy,” I believe they’re making a couple of key theological and moral mistakes. When I think about vaccines, I’m inclined to see God at work in the scientists whose tireless research over decades has made them available to us. I identify with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s social teaching, which characterizes medicine as “a gift of God for the good of the community.” For this reason, it’s a big mistake to view getting vaccinated as somehow a lack of trust in God’s providence and protection. On the contrary, refusing vaccination is what shows a lack of trust in God’s providence — as in the famous joke about the man who prays for deliverance from a flood on top of his house, only to have God ask him when he gets to heaven why he didn’t avail himself of the boats and helicopters God sent to rescue him.

Second, the idea that a vaccine is meant simply to protect the individual is woefully incomplete. The real purpose of a vaccine is to protect not just individuals but all of us. For a disease like measles, so-called “herd immunity” is achieved in a community when 95% of people in that community have received the vaccine. It’s at that level that the virus no longer has enough vulnerable hosts in which it can spread. In other words, being vaccinated against dangerous infectious diseases is one of the most concrete things any of us can possibly do to fulfill Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

A real “Make America Healthy Again” agenda would be very different from what Kennedy and the Trump Administration are pushing, in that it would encourage greater vaccine uptake and, at the very least, avoid discouraging localities, states, and schools from mandating a robust childhood vaccine schedule. It would also support early childhood development programs that give children and families the critical supports and resources they need to develop and thrive, including access to healthy food and affordable health care, particularly for underserved communities.

A real MAHA agenda should also include a greater focus on identifying and dismantling barriers to good nutrition, physical exercise, and affordable health care for all age groups; this would include ending food deserts, expanding access to food assistance through SNAP and WIC (rather than cutting these programs), and strengthening Medicaid alongside other policies and programs.

Most of all, an agenda truly dedicated to making the U.S. healthier would look beyond a purely individualistic focus on personal choices and responsibility and examine the structural changes that will allow us to move the entire country in a healthier direction — an agenda that would help as many people as possible and not leave any communities behind. That’s how we’ll build a country where everyone is able to protect and improve their health, and everyone can thrive.