"Unvaccinated Under God" and Risking Infection
A timely new book considers U.S. vaccine hesitancy as religious expression.
Posted May 19, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
“There has always been vaccine hesitancy,” religious studies scholar Kira Ganga Kieffer argues of the United States in Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America, published today by Princeton University Press. “Since their inception in the late eighteenth century,” with efforts to inoculate against smallpox in colonial Massachusetts, “vaccines have provoked moral quandaries, and sometimes vigorous disagreement, among everyday Americans.”
The claim that vaccine hesitancy channels religious expression, rather than scientific ignorance, forms a welcome bid to neutralize this polarizing topic and engage with religious communities where they actually are, not where public health officials might prefer them to be. As Kieffer notes of the distinctions that emerge, “None of the world’s major religious traditions prohibit vaccination. In fact, most religious leaders encourage vaccination against vaccine-preventable diseases because it saves lives.”
Mandates and Medical Freedom
The protesters lining the entrance to a pop-up clinic at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, challenging vaccination against COVID-19 in January 2021, were from this perspective voicing concerns similar to their 18th-century counterparts. Bearing signs that warned, “Save Your Soul, Turn Back Now,” the protesters saw the newly available mRNA vaccines—approved and distributed at speed by the first Trump administration—as part of a larger battle against federal authority and mandates they found intrusive and coercive. In the years since, according to Kieffer, that battle has hardened into a populous, well-funded movement for religious freedom framed as medical liberty, natural health, and the right to be left alone.
Many will remember the aerial footage of Dodger Stadium at the time, with thousands of cars snaking slowly around the huge complex. To observers and much of the press, the long lines underscored tremendous pent-up demand for protection against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 and long COVID. The still-new, often-lethal coronavirus had already caused more than 25 million cases and 430,000 deaths in the United States alone, Kieffer reminds, and after an agonizing wait resulting in generational damage to countries and regions as far-flung as Peru, Iran, and Lombardy, northern Italy, vaccines were finally available. Yet the sudden protest in Los Angeles “briefly shut down the site … [and] footage of the traffic jam enraged national onlookers who had been clamoring for a vaccine since the pandemic began.”
The same coronavirus has since caused more than 1.2 million deaths in the United States, with millions more suffering from long COVID and multiorgan damage from its underrecognized sequelae. Yet even as the world waited for a targeted vaccine, one-third of American adults had aligned with the protesters, either firmly against or hesitant about being vaccinated. They were, we might say, predisposed to this position by influencers and leaders keen to downplay the risk of viral injury and death by attributing the sharp rise in respiratory and cardiovascular illness to vaccines only recently available, thereby eclipsing a year of repeat infections from the airborne and increasingly immune-evasive virus.
A Vaccine Debacle Leads to Claims of Irreversible Harm
Tackling the marked intensification of vaccine hesitancy between 1982 and 2022, Kieffer takes us from the debacle surrounding the first combined DPT vaccine—designed to protect children against diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), and tetanus—to the furor established over MMR vaccines, which offer safe, effective immunization against three more contagious, potentially serious viral diseases: measles, mumps, and rubella.
Kieffer turns next to the controversy fomented over Gardasil, a recombinant vaccine that protects against nine types of human papillomavirus (HPV), where infection is sexually transmitted and thus—for evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics—indicative of wrongful sexual activity in young women. A further, invaluable chapter studies the taint of medical racism that, to date, accounts for significantly lower vaccination against influenza among Black and Latino Americans than for their white counterparts.
Adverse Events and Proxy Fears
The controversy over the first DPT vaccine is perhaps the most complicated because the diphtheria part of the vaccine was found to cause adverse events, underlining the criticism of parents over its continued mass use. Presenting themselves as consumers wanting a superior product, the parents did not reject all forms of immunization, though they helped associate vaccine injury with irreversible harm. Yet while Japan and Sweden swiftly determined that an alternative formulation (DTaP) was preferable, because it was much safer, the United States for several years opposed the modest adjustment as a “break with professional consensus.” That escalated the crisis and needlessly alienated many.
Conscious of the damage caused by this delay—including to trust, authority, and claims of acting on solid evidence—public health officials responded preemptively to concerns about trace amounts of ethylmercury in MMR vaccines—a compound considered safe and wholly distinct from the neurotoxic methylmercury —by touting an alternative containing neither. With the DPT debacle still fresh in the minds of parents, however, the preemptive move was taken as an admission of guilt and recast as confirmation that all MMR vaccines were harmful—in this case, inducing autism , based on assertions about a nontoxic chemical that had long since been removed.
Zelig-Like Opposition
As Kieffer demonstrates with skill and subtlety, vaccine hesitancy has become Zelig-like, adjusting its shape and contention to fit whatever undesirable outcome can be attributed to it. With public fantasy and morality working overtime, compounded by rumor and social media , the attribution needn’t be sound for resistance to seem plausible and necessary.
Significant cultural and generational shifts also intensify these dynamics. After second-wave feminism and the 1970s-'80s’ rise of the women’s health movement, countercultural movements responded with a concerted push for homeschooling, “intensive mothering,” and claims for the superiority of natural health and natural immunity.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, by contrast, resistance morphed into full-throated vaccine opposition that was not just “angry and confrontational,” but driven by “masculinized libertarianism and conspiracy theories” that tended to bypass religious arguments altogether. Opposition to vaccines drew instead on “sensationalistic, militaristic messaging about fighting government corruption and crusading for medical freedom and religious liberty that fit directly into MAGA’s burn-it-down agenda.”
That outcome is all the more ironic because the first Trump administration drew praise from other, scientific quarters for endorsing “Operation Warp Speed,” a campaign built around mRNA vaccines that many in the newer administration now reject as a “bioweapon” ostensibly more dangerous than the SARS virus it was designed to counter.
Outreach Can Counter Distrust
Each iteration of vaccine hesitancy has tended to wrongfoot public health officials, who mostly still cling to “scientific illiteracy” as their principal explanation for poor national uptake. That emphasis leads to misplaced focus on facts alone changing minds; it also downplays the type of unconditional outreach to religious communities that, Kieffer shows, yields significantly higher vaccination rates in Black and Latino communities voicing comparable distrust in medical authority.
Although public health officials may chafe at Kieffer’s findings and conclusion, the accumulated evidence across seven chapters is difficult to dispute. Strenuous insistence on vaccine safety via distributed fact sheets has not resulted in greater trust or compliance; if anything, the opposite. “As we have seen time and again,” she notes, “vaccine-hesitancy movements absorb outside criticism as proof that their beliefs are true and worth defending.”
Since debates over mandatory vaccination and safety have served as “proxies for anxieties about ‘justice and values,’” Kieffer concludes, “the only productive path forward is to learn the language of vaccine hesitancy. Without it, any strategies to engage with vaccine refusers and dissuade vaccine-hesitant people risk being not only fruitless but deleterious.”
Timely and thought-provoking, Unvaccinated Under God should be mandatory reading for public health officials charged with vaccination outreach. The book is likely to prove invaluable in the ongoing battle against preventable illness from infectious diseases.
Kieffer, Kira G. (May 19, 2026). Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Christopher Lane, Ph.D., is a Professor Emeritus of Medical Humanities at Northwestern University.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.