The COVID-19 outbreak helped unite the nation’s anti-vax movement, with evangelical Christians convinced that vaccine mandates, masking requirements and social distancing violated religious freedoms, religion scholar Kira Ganga Kieffer said.
The two communities already shared a distrust of government when the coronavirus ushered in massive social, religious and medical controversies in 2020, said Kieffer, author of Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America.
Kira Ganga Kieffer
“They both get something out of this coalition, politically. It elevates the vaccine-hesitancy cause from a fringe movement into something that’s much more mainstream, and for evangelicals it brings the cause of medical freedom into the same realm of religious freedom.”
In her new book, Kieffer shows how debates over issues of vaccine safety and vaccination mandates reached beyond injections and disease into deep-seated concerns about theology, morality and justice.
Unvaccinated Under God also takes on the stereotypes in academia and the media of vaccine-hesitant people as unhinged conspiracy theorists.
“You see descriptions of anti-vaxxers during measles outbreaks as being rather ignorant or opposed to science, or that they just don’t get how important vaccines are to prevent disease,” she said. “I really wanted to dispel that and to provide more nuance to explain how people come to these opinions and how they can change over time based on what’s going on in the current moment politically and religiously and culturally.”
One of Kiefer’s deep dives examines the dynamics that brought two mostly unconnected movements together to oppose vaccine mandates at the state and national levels.
Prior to the pandemic, most vaccine-hesitant Americans were concerned about the possible link between vaccines and autism, and not so much about the religious dimensions of the issue. Actress Jenny McCarthy became a face of the movement after speaking about her autistic son on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007.
“She transforms herself into this super mom and she is connecting with other American moms who are saying, ‘I, too, am suffering from this situation with my child,’” Kieffer explained. Even though there is no scientific link between vaccines and autism, some parents of autistic children latched on to this idea as an explanation for something otherwise inexplicable.
The anti-vax movement gained a faith component in the 1960s and 1970s as some states offered religious exemptions to vaccine mandates for children.
“It was the only way for many of them to get non-medical exemptions for their kids,” she said. “Even for the non-religious, the (religious) exemptions provided the only legal means of exempting their children from vaccines.”
But those avenues were under threat by 2020 as years of measles outbreaks led some states to end the religious exemptions. While some attempts to rescind the exemptions failed, others went forward, including New York in 2019 and California and Connecticut in 2021.
“What happens then is you have this huge outpouring from the vaccine-hesitancy culture that says, ‘Oh, no, no, this was our only way to make our own decision,’” Keifer said. “And for people who are vaccine hesitant, it pushes this whole question into a more overtly religious territory and becomes what starts to feel like a First Amendment rights and religious-freedom issue.”
Evangelicals, meanwhile, were heavily engaged in culture-war debates on issues ranging from same-sex marriage, abortion rights and belief in their marginalization in a pluralistic society, she noted. “Evangelical Christians are heavily focused on First Amendment protections and using political strategies to fight against liberal social norms as this embattled minority.”
So, when the pandemic hit, the stage was set for MAGA Christians to join forces with families adamant that vaccines cause autism, she said. “What you see is this new political connection between vaccine-hesitant people out in the state capitals fighting for vaccine exemptions and this very right-wing, conservative Christian movement. It brings this idea of medical freedom into the same realm of religious freedom.”
“Vaccines for them were just a foil for this larger anti-government set of ideals and about opposing masking and lockdowns.”
But for many evangelicals, the advocacy for vaccine exemptions “had nothing to do with vaccines. Vaccines for them were just a foil for this larger anti-government set of ideals and about opposing masking and lockdowns.”
Involvement in the coalition also brought a new dimension to the anti-vaccine movement it previously didn’t have — partisanship. “Historically, vaccine hesitancy was not political at all, but with COVID it becomes political in the extreme.”
Even though a Republican — Donald Trump — was in the White House as the pandemic began and his administration supported development of the first COVID vaccines, it was Democrats who most ardently pushed the vaccine. By the time of Trump’s election to a second term in 2024, the tide had turned and vaccine resistance was firmly embedded in the Republican Party.
When Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a vocal anti-vaxxer — as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, the partnership was sealed.
“HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis in this country,” Trump announced.
Kennedy’s management of Trump’s Make America Healthy Again effort and his suspicion of just about anything injected into the human body resonated with the evangelical and anti-vax coalition, Kieffer said.
Kennedy “generated a lot of excitement with vaccine-hesitancy people during his presidential campaign by mixing freedom and anti-government language together and basically saying, ‘The government isn’t protecting you.’”
Now, in the second Trump administration, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Labor are targeting businesses that required employees to be vaccinated or lose their jobs.