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Politico: 'Southern pastors resist calls to promote vaccines, wary of another Covid fight' - SteveG - 07-03-2021
Cowards for Christ
Southern pastors resist calls to promote vaccines, wary of another Covid fight. Exhausted by backlash over pandemic restrictions, some faith leaders see little upside in urging skeptical congregants to get vaccinated.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/03/southern-pastors-vaccines-497898
Biden administration and state officials hoped that pastors would play an outsized role in promoting Covid-19 vaccines, but many are wary of alienating their congregants and are declining requests to be more outspoken.
POLITICO spoke with nearly a dozen pastors, many of whom observed that vaccination is too divisive to broach, especially following a year of contentious conversations over race, pandemic limits on in-person worship and mask requirements. Public health officials have hoped that more religious leaders can nudge their congregants to get Covid shots, particularly white evangelicals who are among the most resistant to vaccination.
The White House, which acknowledged it will fall shy of its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of adults by July 4, has stressed its robust campaign to inoculate the country will continue for months to come, though the strategy has largely shifted from mass vaccination sites to more targeted local efforts. With the rapid spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant, particularly in areas of the country where vaccination rates are lagging, the Biden team is making a renewed effort to enlist help from trusted community leaders like pastors while other initiatives like million-dollar lotteries and giveaways have failed to meaningfully blunt the steep drop-off in vaccinations.
State health officials are conducting informal focus groups and outreach to try to ease pastors’ concerns about discussing vaccination, but progress is often elusive, they said. Many pastors said they have already lost congregants to fights over coronavirus restrictions and fear risking further desertions by promoting vaccinations. Others said their congregations are so ideologically opposed to the vaccine that discussing it would not be worth the trouble.
“If I put forth effort to push it, I’d be wasting my breath,” said Nathan White, a pastor at Liberty Baptist Church in Skipwith, Va., a small town near the North Carolina border.
The pastors POLITICO spoke with are located across Virginia and Tennessee, mostly in predominantly white communities. Some in rural areas lead overwhelmingly conservative congregations while some in more suburban areas said their churches were more politically mixed. Each pastor had been vaccinated but not all were eager to discuss it with their congregations.
Polls have consistently shown that white evangelicals are among the groups most hardened against vaccination. The most recent, a June survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that 22 percent of white evangelicals said they would “definitely not” get the vaccine, a figure that’s barely budged since April. About 11 percent said they wanted to “wait and see” how the vaccines perform.
Re: Politico: 'Southern pastors resist calls to promote vaccines, wary of another Covid fight' - deckeda - 07-03-2021
And so, knowing their flock can so easily be lead astray, they leave them there.
Re: Politico: 'Southern pastors resist calls to promote vaccines, wary of another Covid fight' - PeterB - 07-03-2021
deckeda wrote:
And so, knowing their flock can so easily be lead astray, they leave them there.
I was just about to say something similar. So much for the religious leaders being moral compasses or in any way guiding the faithful to safety and a happy life. This is precisely the time at which they SHOULD be speaking out, because their speaking out could literally save lives.
Re: Politico: 'Southern pastors resist calls to promote vaccines, wary of another Covid fight' - RgrF - 07-03-2021
Can't do anything that might interfere with their tax-free revenue stream.