“I’ll just tell you today, if anti-mask and anti-vaccine is anti-government, then I’m proud to be anti-government,” Spell, who has made a national name for himself by protesting against the Covid-19 Rules in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, told members of the Life Tabernacle Church.
Then he falsely says, “If you have a 99.6% survival rate, why do you want someone to contaminate your bloodstream with something that will or will not hurt you?”
Anti-Covid vaccine sentiment among evangelicals is fueled by a mixture of government mistrust, ignorance of how vaccines work, misinformation and political identity, some experts say.
“They (evangelicals) are the group most likely to say they won’t take the vaccine,” Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma who specializes in religion, told CNN. “They have exercised or expressed the most resistance to the vaccine from the start.”
And they’ve maintained that view over and over in surveys for the past six months, Perry said.
Misinformation has contributed to Evangelicals’ distrust of vaccines
“There is a tendency within white Christian nationalism to want to believe this kind of conspiracy because I think it reinforces this idea of us versus them,” Perry said. “The problem is that the people who feed that fear have an incentive to fuel that fear because people keep clicking and people keep listening.”
News and information silos also play a role in vaccine hesitation among evangelicals, who listen to conservative media hosts question or outright condemn the vaccines, Perry said.
Some at Life Tabernacle Church say they will not receive a vaccine
Although people of color are most at risk for Covid, the pastor said he still discourages vaccines.
“I don’t know anyone in my church, black, brown, El Salvadoran and Honduran and Mexican, who had the virus,” he said. “I do not know anyone.”
Perry said leaders like Spell “ really got into this idea that if I go on, to seed this story where people feel victimized and fearful and angry, I can continue to build my audience, build my own credibility in this group of people who says, “Yes, everyone else is untrustworthy except you.” ‘
At Life Tabernacle Church, a handful of people who CNN spoke to said they were not interested in getting the vaccine.
Jeff Jackson, a parishioner of the Life Tabernacle Church, told CNN he believes vaccines are “harmful to your health.”
Patricia Seal, also a parishioner of the Life Tabernacle Church, said, while loving former President Donald Trump, “when he talked about getting the picture, I said, you can have whatever you want. . “
Jacob McMorris, another parishioner of the Life Tabernacle Church, said he doesn’t want to get a vaccine either.
“I feel, and I know, it works medically, but if you put something in you to avoid getting it, it just doesn’t work for me,” he told CNN. “I’ve never liked the idea of that.”
Only one person who interviewed CNN, Kerry Williams, said he received a vaccine. “Yes, I have the vaccine,” he said, noting that he has yet to get his second.
Health expert: 70% of the population must be vaccinated to keep the virus under control
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the number of Americans vaccinated and planning to be vaccinated continues to rise, while the number of people who say they want to “wait and see” is declining.
But for White Evangelicals, the number saying they are against getting a Covid vaccine remains high, Perry said, and that could be a problem for some areas, where they represent a much higher percentage of the population than they do nationally. .
“We will see consequences in those regions of the country,” Perry said. “And that will be felt by the frail and elderly.”
According to Pew, Evangelicals make up about 25% of the American population. And some experts say 70% of the population needs the vaccine to control Covid-19.