As White Evangelical Vaccine Refusal Reminds Us, Sometimes Religion is the Problem [View all]

[Nevilledog]

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Chrissy is fully vaccinated
@C_Stroop
I have evangelical vaccine refusers in my family, and I’ve covered the Christian Right beat for six years. I’m done sugarcoating things. Coddling Christian nationalists is a luxury Americans can no longer afford.

My latest, on evangelical vaccine refusal

As White Evangelical Vaccine Refusal Reminds Us, Sometimes Religion is the Problem
This week, you’re likely to encounter a lot of commentary on PRRI and Interfaith Youth Core’s new report on religious groups and vaccine acceptance, most of it optimistic. And to be sure, there are...
religiondispatches.org
9:48 AM · Jul 29, 2021

https://religiondispatches.org/as-white-evangelical-vaccine-refusal-reminds-us-sometimes-religion-is-the-problem/

This week, you’re likely to encounter a lot of commentary on PRRI and Interfaith Youth Core’s new report on religious groups and vaccine acceptance, most of it optimistic. And to be sure, there are good reasons for optimism relative to the majority of faith communities in the United States, where interventions from religious leaders seem to have helped to reduce resistance to receiving the COVID vaccine. What you will probably not see outside of this article, however, is any pushback on the authors’ underlying assumption that religious communities are, in and of themselves, essentially good, pro-social things—an assumption that’s clearly implicit in the report’s emphasis on how “faith-based approaches still have the potential to be effective for hesitant and refusing groups.” And yet, to riff on Maya Angelou’s important insight, when a religious group tells you that their racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ, and conspiracist politics are an integral aspect of their religious identity, it’s prudent to believe them.

It’s worth noting the religiously unaffiliated are doing reasonably well at 75% vaccine acceptance, although some religious demographics are doing better. 12% of the religiously unaffiliated are vaccine refusers, a number that has held steady since PRRI’s previous survey, while 13% are hesitant, a figure that fell from 28% in March. It’s likely that the middling performance of the religiously unaffiliated has something to do with the demographic’s relative youth and the barriers to access the report shows to be disproportionately affecting younger respondents as well as respondents of color. In addition, based on general trends in data where such differentiation is used, I feel reasonably confident suggesting that if self-defined atheists, humanists, and agnostics were polled separately from the undifferentiated mass of “nones,” their numbers would be better.

In any case, the report’s assumptions notwithstanding, the data clearly show that America’s white Christians continue to exhibit a large and dangerous anti-social and anti-democratic streak. The report’s treatment of the white evangelical demographic in particular seems to be overly rosy, given that the drop in white evangelical vaccine refusal from March to June, from 26% to 24%, is tiny and only just inside the survey’s margin of error (+/- 1.65 percentage points). White evangelicals are also tied with Mormons, at 72%, as the demographic that’s most supportive of arguably unconstitutional and certainly anti-social religious exemptions to vaccination requirements.

To be sure, in the interest of seeing as many Americans as possible get vaccinated, particularly as the Delta strain surges, it’s worth understanding what might motivate even the most resistant populations to take that step. The PRRI report indicates that religious intervention most likely influenced the uptick in vaccinations among the white evangelical population from March to June, from 45% to 56%, with a concomitant decline in hesitancy from 28% to 20%.

*snip*