Religion And Vaccination

Can you stand one more diatribe about vaccination refuseniks?

I receive the Sightings newsletter from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. (I couldn’t find a URL). A recent essay–authored by Laurie Zoloth, a scholar of religion and bioethics–addressed the (mis)use of religion by those wishing to evade vaccination.

She dubbed it “The Great Defiance.”

Zoloth served on a panel that had been convened to review and evaluate exemption requests. After reviewing dozens of such requests, she noted “patterns emerging which revealed much about the way these Americans thought about themselves and their faith.”

Zoloth began with a history of religious and legal authorities’ approaches to vaccination.

 In 1905, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the US Supreme Court upheld a Cambridge City Council law mandating vaccination for citizens. 1922, it upheld a similar law for childhood vaccination. Cases about religious refusals for vaccines followed the same logic. The U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2017 decision in Fallon v. Mercy Catholic Medical Center which addresses a religious objection to a flu vaccine for a healthcare worker, rejected the claim that any subjective opinion was protected. As scholar David DeCosse notes, the court ruled against Fallon, establishing three criteria for religious objections. To be “religious” the claims had to address “fundamental and ultimate” questions, consist of a comprehensive belief-system and “not an isolated teaching,” and have “formal and external signs” like clergy, services, or rituals.

Zoloth then ticked off the positions of major American religious traditions, and found that– across the board–they were firmly committed to vaccination.

In Judaism, she found unprecedented agreement. Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist rabbis; Chassidic, Haredi, and Modern Orthodox from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic tradition, agree that “the Torah obligation to preserve our lives and the lives of others requires us to vaccinate for COVID-19 as soon as a vaccine becomes available.”

Pope Francis was equally unequivocal: “Vaccination is a simple but profound way of promoting the common good and caring for each other, especially the most vulnerable.”

Leaders of the Protestant denominations, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and finally, Christian Scientists, either pulled away from previous hesitancy or actively supported vaccination for their congregants. Both Sunni and Shi‘a imams, Buddhist monks and Hindu leadership wrote in support of vaccination. Only one prominent religion—the Nation of Islam—opposed vaccination.

Why, then, are people characterizing their refusal to be vaccinated  “religious”?

Zoloth writes that “claim after claim” was taken verbatim from the internet, warning of the spiritual danger of vaccines, and displaying “a serious misunderstanding of basic biology.”

A frequent “religious” objection was that COVID vaccines were tested in cultures made from cell lines that included fetal tissue gathered years previously– evidently oblivious to the fact that common drugs like Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, Tums, Motrin, Benadryl, Sudafed, Preparation H, Claritin, and Prilosec, were similarly tested.

Zoloth concluded with three very potent observations.

First, we live in a society where intuition and feelings have replaced reason as the justification for moral action, where earnestness and sincerity are the stand-in for authenticity, and authenticity has replaced what we mean by “true.” ….When one turns away from central texts, leadership, or traditions to make individual claims about religion—then faith, turned inward, becomes nothing more than a personal preference.

The second problem is that religions, like states and markets, have a polity, and all polities have authority. What is striking about religious refusals of vaccination is how so many reject religious authority as well. When the Pope or the local minister told their followers to get vaccinated, many were prepared to turn to the internet to find an online cleric who would testify to their position. It was often the only testimony they would accept, for religion in this case, like the pandemic itself, had devolved into a set of completely individual, self-involved activities.

The final problem also emerges from within religions themselves: that stubborn insistence in so many faiths on loving the neighbor. Religion is profoundly other-regarding, and the outworking of this principle came to have a precisely defined place in the public square, and it was to live as though your neighbor’s life was as holy as your own. In concrete terms, it meant at least getting vaccinated if you were to live in the world we shared, and certainly, if you were to provide healthcare in a morally responsible way. Yet in example after example, in the America in which we have come to live, this obligation to the other was not mentioned in the letters we scholars were asked to read. At the center of the argument was the self…religious conscience had become entirely privatized, an opinion about what made them unhappy, as if the enormity of their responsibility to the whole of the social world simply did not matter.

We’ve really lost our way.

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A Pivot Point?

I was a child during World War II, and in the many years since–although the United States has rarely not been at war somewhere–I had come to believe that warfare would continue to be confined to localized conflicts and terrorist forays. The world economy had become too interrelated and interdependent for “old fashioned” state versus state conflicts.

Or so I thought.

Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine certainly tests that theory. In a recent “Letter from an American,” Heather Cox Richardson suggested that, as a result of that attack, the world may be experiencing a “paradigm shift.”

The question, of course, is the direction of that shift.

Despite the naysayers on the Left, the traitorous crazies on the Right, and those in the media who have automatically defaulted to what Jennifer Rubin calls “partisan scorekeeping,” President Biden has thus far managed America’s response masterfully. Despite his predecessor’s constant attacks on NATO, he has strengthened that body and united the West (including, unbelievably, Switzerland) in opposition to Putin’s assault. As Rubin says,

We are all too familiar with the journalistic inclination to make every story into a political sporting contest denuded of moral content or policy substance. Who does this help? How did Biden fail? Aren’t the Republicans clever?

This sort of framing is unserious and unenlightening, failing to serve the cause of democracy, which is under assault around the globe. (If you think the media’s role is pure entertainment and coverage must be morally neutral in the struggle between democracies and totalitarian states, this critique may be mystifying.)

A real question is whether the American public’s short attention span will prevent us from (1) understanding the nature and extent of the ongoing global assault on democracy; and (2) displaying the staying power that will be required to reverse decades of  decisions that have undermined and weakened that democracy.

As Rubin writes,

Let’s get some perspective. Russia’s invasion was decades in the making. Under three presidents, two Republican and one Democratic, we failed to address the threat Russia posed to democracy and the international order. President George W. Bush’s response to the invasion of Georgia in 2008 was entirely insufficient; President Barack Obama’s reaction to the seizure of Crimea in 2014 was equally feckless.

Then came Putin’s dream president, who could amplify Russian propaganda, divide the Western allies, abandon democratic principles, extort Ukraine in wartime, vilify the press and interrupt the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump and Putin had a sort of call-and-response relationship, damaging democracies and bolstering autocrats.

No wonder Putin got the idea that he could erase national borders, stare down the West and reconstruct the Soviet empire. (If you think this all came about because Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, you’ve missed decades of Putin’s deep-seated paranoia and crazed ambition to reassemble the U.S.S.R.)

As I write this, the unprecedented sanctions imposed by a united West have already begun to bite.

The degree to which the global economy is interdependent means there will be negative consequences for the West, as well– we have become too dependent on Russian oil and gas– but sanctions are already having huge consequences for Russia’s economy and the fortunes of the oligarchs who surround Putin. Critics who minimize the effects of the sanctions that have been leveled simply don’t recognize the extent to which Russia’s feeble economy is dependent on continued integration with the broader world.

I have no crystal ball, and no idea how this immensely dangerous conflict will turn out. Putin’s none-too-veiled nuclear threat is unnerving–after all, here in America, we’ve seen how unpredictable an unhinged President can be, and how much damage one can inflict.

On the other hand, the bravery and determination of the Ukrainians who are faced with an unprovoked assault by a much more powerful neighbor has been heartening. The courage of Ukraine’s President, who has refused to run to safety–unlike Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his Ukrainian predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych– has been inspiring.  Ukrainians  fighting for genuine self-determination and political freedom are exposing the sniveling complaints of our various home-grown “freedom fighters” for the childish  tantrums they are. ( Wearing a mask to protect your neighbors is not what  actual tyranny looks like..)

America’s long enjoyment of relative peace and prosperity has allowed far too many of us to avoid growing up. If, as Richardson suggests, we are at a point of “paradigm shift,” I hope that shift is in the direction of maturity.

All those Putin loving “Christian warriors” need to actually read their  bibles, especially 1 Corinthians 13:11. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

And for those who pray– put on a mask and pray for Ukraine and its people.

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When Facts Became Irrelevant

A couple of weeks ago, a reader tipped me off to an article in a science journal, highlighting a study that traced the decline of public rationality. It was profoundly depressing

Scientists from Wageningen University and Research (WUR) and Indiana University have discovered that the increasing irrelevance of factual truth in public discourse is part of a groundswell trend that started decades ago.

While the current “post-truth era” has taken many by surprise, the study shows that over the past forty years, public interest has undergone an accelerating shift from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

The researchers analyzed language from millions of books, and found that words  we associate with logic and reasoning, such as “determine” and “conclusion,”  began a steady rise around 1850; at the same time, words expressing emotion, like “feel” and “believe” began to decline. That pattern , however, reversed over the past 40 years. At the same time, the research found a shift from what they termed  “a collectivistic to an individualistic focus” as reflected by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we.”

Interpreting this synchronous sea-change in book language remains challenging,” says co-author Johan Bollen of Indiana University. “However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as non-fiction. Moreover, we observe the same pattern of change between sentiment and rationality flag words in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed.”

Determining that a shift occurred, while a complicated research problem, is obviously much less complicated than figuring out why it occurred.  One intriguing (and concerning) factor was the finding that the shift from rationality to sentiment in book language accelerated around 2007, a date that coincides with the rise of social media.

At that point, the researchers found that– across languages– the frequency of fact-related words dropped and emotion-laden language surged, and there was a similar shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.

I suppose the two language changes–from collective to individual and from rational to emotional–could be coincidental, but I doubt it. When the focus of one’s life moves from community to individual, from “us” to “me,” the importance of exterior reality ebbs and the significance of interiority expands.

The ancient Greeks talked about a “golden mean” between extremes. They were onto something.

I’m a civil libertarian and a longtime advocate for individual rights, but I understand that concern for protecting the “unalienable rights” of the individual cannot and should not erase concern for the common good. (For that matter, self-interest properly understood actually requires a concern for the health of the community in which one lives.)

In so many ways, contemporary humans–and certainly, contemporary Americans–are encountering the considerable downside of a lopsided emphasis on individualism. The research cited in the article found an erosion in the use of reason and logic, and an increased emphasis on the individual; the”freedom lovers” who endanger others and slow recovery from the pandemic by refusing to be vaccinated are a perfect example of both.

The health of the broader community–not just public health, important as that is, but measures of justice, fairness,  appropriate and honorable governance–is ultimately the guarantor of individual wellbeing. We’ve evidently lost that insight, and with it, an appreciation for the importance of objective reality.

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A Shameless Plug..

I hope readers will forgive me if I take time off from my  usual (pretty depressing) preoccupations to brag about one of my nephews. (I do usually restrain myself when it comes to my own kids–that’s a tacky step too far…)

My nephew Josh Prince is a Broadway choreographer. Among his credits: Shrek the Musical, Beautiful, Trevor.  He began as a Broadway song-and-dance man, but choreography was his love. As he embarked on that trajectory, however, he realized that aspiring choreographers faced a major hurdle to honing and realizing their creations; in order to create, a choreographer needs dancers, space, and time—three essential elements that are prohibitively expensive.

So in 2012, he undertook the fairly arduous task of creating a nonprofit and qualifying it under Section 501c3; it opened its doors in 2015.  Dance Lab New York (DLNY) is an organization–actually, the only organization–dedicated to the advancement of choreography by providing those three vital resources  to aspiring choreographers free of charge.

DLNY raises money to provide choreographers with a curated company of professional dancers, expansive studio space, and structured rehearsal time complete with a rehearsal director and staff support, allowing choreographers, as he says, “to incubate new ideas in a professionalized, supportive environment.” Since 2015, DLNY has served over 70 choreographers.

What prompted this post, however, wasn’t the growth and good work being done by DLNY; it was a recent addition to its mentorship program.

The original  mentorship program–DLNY Connect– was created in 2017; the idea was to help rising choreographers by matching them with established experts in the field. Mentors  observe the “mentees” as they create, using  dancers from area universities. They then meet privately with them to offer feedback and guidance. Although there is no pressure to complete a dance, those that are completed can be shown as part of videos, school showcases, or via open studio forums.

DLNY Connect: NextGen is an offshoot of that original program. It supports aspiring high-school choreographers, and it is intended to encourage creative thinking, collaboration, the development of leadership skills and teamwork in young, aspiring choreographers–and not so incidentally, to nurture the next generation of  those Josh calls “dancemakers.”

My sister shared a brief video from this year’s pilot program. I hope you will click through and watch it. It’s far more informative than what I share in this post.

I take three lessons from the video: the obvious one is the benefit to a teenager whose feelings of being different might have led him to an unhappy or less-rewarding adulthood.

The second is that young people like my nephew (he’s still in his mid-40s, and I consider that young!) aren’t just “bitching and moaning” about perceived problems–they are moving to solve them. During the years when I was teaching, I had a number of students who joined and/or established nonprofits aiming to fill a variety of “gaps” in the social safety net.

Third–and perhaps most important–is that the video reinforced for me the enormous importance of the arts, in this case, dance. I am hardly the only person who believes that the arts are central to being human; Saul Bellow said it well in his Nobel lecture in 1976.

Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides – the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive. Proust calls these hints our “true impressions.” The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a ‘terminology for practical ends’ which we falsely call life.

 John Dewey, the noted American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, agreed:

Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the individuality of others to those others. In participating in the work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The free individuality which is the source of art is also the final source of creative development in time.

If you want to feel better about mankind and the younger generation, or just want a “feel-good” few minutes, click through and watch the video. I did, and  I’m going to send a few bucks to DLNY–and kvell a bit over my nephew. I hope some of you will join me!

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The Problem With A Two-Party System

What do you do in a 2-party system when one party goes off the rails?

Americans tend to view European multi-party systems with incomprehension, if not disdain; how do the representatives of different parties form coalitions to support particular policies? Isn’t the electoral competition of multiple parties an invitation to chaos? We Americans prefer our Manichean dualism, the “either/or” of “right or wrong” (or actually, the tribalism of “us versus them.”)

It’s time to recognize that two-party systems have considerable downsides, too. 

In reality, our two major parties have always been collections of not-necessarily-consistent factions. They haven’t always been really big tents, but each party has historically encompassed a variety of philosophies. When I was much younger, the complaint was that the tents were too commodious–that having to choose between Republican and Democrat didn’t really provide the voter with a way to declare a clear policy preference, the way a Brit voter for the Green Party could, for example.

As the GOP has become far, far more monolithic, we can see the downside of that once-desired clarity. For one thing, there’s currently no political home for sane, principled conservatives, many of whom are appalled by what has become of a once-traditional party. (Remember when many Republicans were “fiscal conservatives and social liberals”?) 

To the extent that some of those homeless conservatives have reluctantly become Democrats, the Democratic Party faces a huge challenge.

Democrats have always had a bigger tent than Republicans, and have accordingly  had trouble enforcing anything that looks like party discipline. (What was that old saying? I don’t belong to an organized political party–I’m a Democrat.) With the addition of disaffected former Republicans, Democratic strategists find themselves  trying to herd cats–trying to achieve something approaching consensus among legislators and voters who come from very different places on the political spectrum.

It’s one thing to note that the devolution of the GOP into a conspiracist cult is a huge headache for the Democrats. A much bigger worry is what that devolution means for American democracy. As Jennifer Rubin has written,

A new survey from Bright Line Watch, an organization that monitors democratic practices, provides some interesting insights but little solace about Republicans’ commitment to democracy. They might say they support democratic principles (e.g., “All adult citizens enjoy the same legal and political rights”), but they fail to embrace the most fundamental democratic principle: acceptance of election results and the peaceful transfer of power.

The most basic disconnect from reality (and democratic values) remains the 2020 presidential winner. The survey reports, “94% of Democrats say [President] Biden is the rightful winner compared to just 26% of Republicans — a split that has also remained remarkably stable since Biden took office.” As a result, only 42 percent of Republicans have confidence in the outcome of elections compared to 80 percent of Democrats. That raises a question that was so prominent throughout the Senate runoffs in Georgia: Why vote if you think the whole thing is rigged?

Rubin notes that political scientists “are especially alarmed” by the number of  GOP candidates who do not accept the results of the 2020 election–not just those running for Congress, but at least 10 GOP candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states. Putting partisans who endorse Trump’s “Big Lie”  in charge of administering elections  poses a huge threat to election integrity from within.

The transformation of one major party into an illiberal, authoritarian movement is the greatest threat to democracy we face. It manifests itself in the “anti-fraud” measures (when there is no fraud) to restrict access to the ballot and to put partisans in charge of election administration; in the GOP’s decision to rally around House members who spout virulent racism and depict violence against Democrats; and in the real potential that the John Eastman memo becomes the 2024 post-election game plan for Republicans.

Unless and until all 50 Democratic senators realize that “bipartisanship” on voting and democracy reforms is impossible with a party infected with anti-democratic impulses, they will fail to install the guardrails needed to protect the country from these authoritarian forces.

In multi-party systems, members of a Green Party can find common ground with legislators from a Labor Party or a Conservative party on a number of issues. In today’s U.S.,  however,”bipartisanship” requires lawmakers who are trying  to enact reasonable policies to work with people who are steeped in racist conspiracy theories and are clearly untethered to reality.

Research confirms that there are many more sane voters than the Trumpers who control today’s GOP, but they need to vote and those votes need to be accurately counted. When the Whigs disappeared, they hadn’t gerrymandered themselves into positions of power disproportionate to their numbers. Today’s Republicans have.

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Note: like most of you, I am watching–with fear and disbelief–the Russian assault on Ukraine. I have no foreign policy expertise, and there are numerous sources of genuinely informed news available, so I don’t intend (at this point, at least) to post about it. That said, I will make two observations: first, President Biden has spent much of  his career immersed in foreign policy, and I have confidence in his leadership at this very perilous moment; second, the Trump party’s reflexive support for Putin isn’t simply on the wrong side of history, it is reminiscent of the Americans who sided with Hitler and the Nazis at the outset of WWII.

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