TOO MUCH OF evangelicalism has, for too long, been hostile to too much of science—that’s a given, since opposition to evolution was in some ways the 20th-century coming-out party for a certain kind of fundamentalist Christianity. But that kind of militant ignorance didn’t do much practical damage; it was mostly an attack on the sheer beauty of the actual world God has created, one with its infinite, changing variety of life.
The 21st-century attacks on science are more dangerous, highlighted at the moment by the widespread refusal of white evangelicals to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Despite valiant efforts by some evangelicals to fight back—Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health being so often a good example—45 percent of white evangelicals said this spring that they didn’t plan to get the shot, compared with a quarter of the population at large.
Pressed by reporters, various evangelicals provided various reasons, but many of them sounded kind of the same. According to The New York Times:
Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.” Lauri Armstrong, a Bible-believing nutritionist outside of Dallas, said she did not need the vaccine because God designed the body to heal itself, if given the right nutrients. More than that, she said, “It would be God’s will if I am here or if I am not here.”
These sentiments sound pious, but they’re in fact the opposite—individualism masquerading as faith. God gave us a world that works in certain physical ways, and God gave us the brains to understand it. Scientists have done so—in this case, in short order, they’ve provided us with a vaccine that prevents a disease that disproportionately threatens people who are elderly, ill, or live in poverty. All we have to do is take the time to get a prick in the arm, and run the infinitesimally tiny risk that goes with any inoculation.
Those refusing the vaccine are precisely the same people who are most likely to reject the need to act on climate change. Just 24 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that human action is driving the warming of the earth, which doubtless is one reason they voted in such overwhelming numbers for a president who assured them that wind turbines cause cancer. As a result, we have wasted many years when we should have been grappling with the deepest crisis humans have ever faced.
The practical problems with this stance are overwhelming, obviously, but the theological ones are devastating too. We’re told on the first page of the Good Book to take care of the earth, and now we’re despoiling it; we’re told in the gospels that our job is to love our neighbors, and now we’re drowning them. It’s a great sad irony of our moment that Christianity—white Protestant Christianity, especially its evangelical variants—has become a potent tool for dismantling creation and spreading disease. One prays—constantly—that this mad spell will finally break.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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