ConnorEl
Well-known member
Opinion: White evangelicals are wary of the vaccine. It shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Hint: they tend to be skeptical of science and perceived “elites”...of a wide range of disciplines.
Hint: they tend to be skeptical of science and perceived “elites”...of a wide range of disciplines.
... And the skepticism about elites did not stop with the clergy. In “The Democratization of American Christianity,” historian Nathan O. Hatch describes a populist revolt against the legal and medical professions as well. The Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s was accompanied by the rise of natural remedies and botanic medicine as an alternative to the norms of traditional medical education. One popular practitioner, Samuel Thomson, argued that Americans “should in medicine, as in religion and politics, act for themselves.”...
... These tensions have occasionally emerged in controversies surrounding vaccination. During a 2011 Republican presidential debate, former representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota attacked the routine administration of the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) as “innocent little 12-year-old girls” who were “forced to have a government injection,” which she later claimed might lead to “mental retardation.” Her description of this safe, easy, effective way for women to avoid cervical cancer was remarkable for its level of destructive ignorance. But it was also typical of some evangelical opinion.
Now a substantial minority of White evangelicals are hesitant about the vaccine for the coronavirus. I suspect that some of this is the result of believing absurd conspiracy theories (which I won’t repeat for fear of coughing this informational virus on the public). But this hesitancy is also the symptom of a much broader alienation between evangelicals and the scientific enterprise. Vaccine skepticism remains part of a populist revolt against elites whom evangelicals regard as hostile to their values.
In a highly technological society, however, there is often no alternative to social trust. None of us can master the highly specialized fields that help assure our well-being, including medicine and epidemiology. And it can be highly destructive — to ourselves and others — if we prefer our intuitions to the experts....