CAN FAITH LEADERS MOVE THE NEEDLE ON COVID VACCINES?

SANDI DOLBEE: AS THE CORONAVIRUS CONTINUES TO RIP THROUGH AMERICAN COMMUNITIES, A BROAD SPECTRUM OF RELIGIOUS LEADERS ARE USING A VARIETY OF METHODS TO TRY TO PERSUADE THEIR MEMBERS TO GET VACCINATED

Second of two parts

Two weeks ago, we looked at a tale of two vaccines — polio and COVID-19. Today, we examine the faith-based campaign to persuade the unvaccinated to get inoculated.

As anticipation built late last year over COVID-19 vaccines, so did Curtis Chang’s angst. He was talking to a CEO of a health organization when he realized the person didn’t have a clue about the religious considerations for rolling out the shots to the general public.

Mark of the beast? What’s that?

Fetal cells? Is that a problem?

“This is trouble brewing,” thought Chang, a Harvardtrained evangelical theologian and former San Jose pastor, who now works as a consultant.

The level of distrust over the pandemic, especially among evangelical Christians, already was formidable. If they were reluctant to wear masks and heed directives against indoor worship, imagine the blowback over getting a new — and unknown — vaccine injected in them.

Chang knew that faithbased voices, especially from other evangelicals, were going to be crucial.

So in March, with the backing of groups ranging from the National Association of Evangelicals to the Ad Council, Chang launched an ambitious website, Christians and the Vaccine, featuring Youtube testimonials, biblical explanations and other faith-based resources aimed at converting the hearts and minds of Americans resisting the vaccine because of their beliefs.

“I want to reach people who genuinely feel that their faith is a barrier to getting the vaccine,” explains Chang. “I want to remove that barrier. And I want to counter the anti-vaccine movement hijacking the Christian faith.”

Chang is not alone in this quest. With COVID’S wrath well into its second year, a broad spectrum of religious leaders — from Catholics to Buddhists to Muslims and Jews — are using pastoral letters, online messages and media interviews to try to persuade their members to roll up their sleeves.

Evangelist Franklin Graham has repeatedly assured followers that his father, the late Billy Graham, would have supported the vaccine — and so would Jesus.

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry, the first African American to head that denomination’s U.S. branch, urged his flock in a video to get the COVID-19 vaccine, saying it was a way to “live out the Bible’s commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.” Curry also shared how his father walked with a limp, a remnant of his childhood battle with polio.

In San Diego, Catholic Bishop Robert Mcelroy echoed the pope’s pleas when he told parishioners that “it is entirely morally legitimate” to receive any of the vaccines. He’s also asked priests to “caringly decline” requests for religious exemption letters concerning vaccine mandates.

Likewise, United Methodist Bishop Grant Hagiya, whose jurisdiction includes this region, has called vaccines the best way for us to rebound, adding that “there is no basis for a religious exemption from vaccines or vaccinations in our United Methodist polity.”

The Rev. Kenji Akahoshi has encouraged members of the Buddhist Temple of San Diego to get vaccinated and wear masks, noting that interdependence is a major truth for Buddhists. “We consider each person an integral part of the whole,” he explains. “As such, each of us is responsible for the welfare of the whole.”

The Islamic Center of San Diego hosted two rounds of vaccination events. And Jewish Americans, who polls show have a whopping 85 percent acceptance rate for the vaccine, have heard from many rabbis that getting inoculated is a mitzvah.

As for Chang, he was right to worry about evangelical reluctance.

Moving the needle

Nearly one in four White evangelical Protestants don’t plan to get vaccinated, according to polling conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and Interfaith Youth Core. That amounts to nearly 4 percent of Americans.

But Robert P. Jones, CEO and founder of PRRI, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C., noticed something interesting between the polls conducted in March and June. While the hard-core resistors were holding steady, the people in the middle — the vaccinehesitant — were starting to change their minds.

Vaccine acceptance within this group rose from 43 percent to 55 percent in the time between those two polls. Jones expects that number to be even higher by the next joint poll, the results of which are expected in December.

He credits religious leaders for this shift. “I don’t want to overstate the case and say that this is the silver bullet to getting the country to herd immunity, but if we are really thinking about all the tools in the toolbox that we have to use, mandates may be one of them, public service announcements may be another one, but clearly what this data shows is that faith leaders, churches, synagogues, mosques have a really important role to play in getting us closer to herd immunity.”

Jones pointed out that the most resistant evangelicals also identify as Republicans. “What we see in that group is they are more likely to believe in Qanon conspiracy theories and far-right news like One America News and Newsmax, which have also been casting doubt about the vaccine.”

It is, he adds, “a real complex stew of overlapping identities.”

Religious exemptions

San Diego got a glimpse of those overlapping identities earlier this year when Dr. Simone Gold, a wellknown vaccine opponent who also participated in the

Jan. 6 insurrection, spoke at Awaken Church, a nondenominational megachurch with multiple campuses around the county.

“I think the future of humanity and freedom lies in the hands of believing Christians,” Gold told an applauding audience, according to an online video of her talk.

She denounced the vaccines, debunked the seriousness of the coronavirus and likened public health measures to Nazism. When asked whether the vaccine changes our DNA, Gold answered, “I’ve seen so much fraud in the scientific community this year that nothing would surprise me.”

Awaken’s senior pastor was not available for an interview, according to his assistant, and calls to the church for other comment were not returned. But Awaken has not been bashful about its resistance to pandemic directives since the onset. Last year, it repeatedly defied bans on indoor worship, citing “obedience to God.”

Awaken also is offering religious exemption letters to its members. The twopage letter, made public last month by NBC 7, cites nearly a dozen Bible verses to bolster its argument that taking the vaccine would be sinning against God. “We are commanded to take good care of it (our body), not to defile it, and certainly not to introduce something into it that could potentially harm it,” the letter states.

Since most people survive COVID-19, the letter says, it would be wrong “to undertake a superfluous procedure when the risk of death is substantially low.” And masks? They “dehumanize people” and “there are lots of evil practices that involve the covering of the human face.”

Awaken’s letter, along with others available on the Internet, share a key argument: the vaccine violates their anti-abortion commitment because fetal cells were involved.

Officials have acknowledged that cell lines containing fetal tissue from generations ago were used in the development phase, but insist there is no fetal tissue in the vaccines themselves. Many anti-abortion religious leaders have approved the vaccine, including the Vatican, which ruled that any connection to abortion is “very remote.”

The Rock, another evangelical megachurch with multiple venues here, has taken a neutral stance on vaccines, encouraging everyone “to respect the decision of each individual as this is a complex issue.” Because it’s a matter of individual conscience, the church “will not issue a statement of religious exemption for employment purposes.”

Chang, the vaccine evangelist, is blunt about the religious exemption efforts.

“I think it’s an incredibly short-sighted, irresponsible move on the part of religious leaders,” he says. “This is clearly something for the public good. It is not something that is dangerous. There is not an actual religious basis for this action.”

‘Persuadable middle’

Chang realizes he’s not going to reach everybody. Indeed, if my emails are any indication, those against this vaccine are both convinced and convicted in their resolve.

They have zero confidence in the science and the system, pointing out that vaccinated people are still getting COVID and viewing every revised health message as further proof that this is a dangerous, unproven treatment. One reader summed it up this way: They “would rather trust Jesus to be their vaccine over the manmade product that demonstrates no value for human life.”

But for Chang, it is still worth the effort to try.

“The problem is, if you don’t try and reach into that world, then that (far-right) voice dominates,” Chang says. “That voice becomes the only voice the people in the middle hear, so it makes it more difficult for them to actually consider taking the vaccine. They think to be an evangelical, to be a Christian, to be a conservative, is defined by these voices on the extreme. So it’s critical to have another voice out there to give plausibility to folks who are still in the persuadable middle.”

The “persuadable middle” is important for another reason. “It’s going to be the people in the middle,” he predicts, “who are going to be the bridge that prevents us from simply ending up with two warring camps in this country on every issue.”