Understanding Anti-Vaxxers in the Church

In light of the announcement that the Church is helping to fund UNICEF's effort to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, the backlash from a certain type of church member was both immediate and predictable. One example:

"The church funding a UNICEF vaccine feels far too globalist to me and I cannot understand what the hell is happening to people in this church."

Let's talk about this and take it apart. I call this one the "You People" offensive. I'm sensing that those of y'all who were born and raised in the Church aren't accustomed to having this thrown at you.

There's a kind of moral licensing that takes place within the Church on the part of those who are born and raised in it. No, not everyone. But enough people that it's one of the most deeply frustrating aspects of being a convert. Many who are born and raised in the Church genuinely believe that this makes them natural experts on the institution. This is reinforced by the natural nepotism within the Church for the oldest families to hold almost all leadership positions. 

Those born and raised outside of the Church are viewed with a natural suspicion, even once they join. They are assumed to be less capable and untrustworthy, regardless of any experiences or knowledge they've gained in their personal lives. I'm realizing as I say this that I didn't just study scripture, church history, institutional procedure, and cultural practice because I found them to be spiritually uplifting or edifying. I also did it as a means of protecting myself from people in the pews next to me.

I made a conscious choice to never, ever use being a convert as an excuse not to know something. I never wanted anyone to use that against me, to the point where I stopped openly telling people I was a convert.

 

Why? Because people did use it against me. They would make assumptions about how much I did or didn't know, and change how much they listened to me and valued what I had to say once they found out I was a convert. They viewed me as an outsider, and that it was their personal responsibility to guide and correct me to "correct" ways of thinking as a church member.

As a result, those habits have placed me into a position where I now know quite a bit more about the institutional church, its history and practices, than the average member. I am now constantly amazed at how little some Mormons know about the Church they were raised in, while simultaneously making their church membership their only personality trait. So at the same time that they're completely unfamiliar with the Church's extensive history of funding and participating in vaccination development and distribution, they view themselves as the natural choice to condemn that participation as "globalist."

That's how we end up in a situation where the same conservative person, fomenting the words of former President Boyd K. Packer in their church lessons and lectures to others, espouses an anti-vaccination take while having no idea that President Packer openly supported vaccination as a survivor of misdiagnosed childhood polio. The lifelong challenges of living with polio complications were with President Packer until the day he died. To reject vaccination is probably the most disrespectful stance a member of the Church can take in his memory.

 

It's frustrating. It's embarrassing. But the one thing I need my fellow church members to understand, from where I'm sitting, it that there's one thing it's not.

 

This isn't new. This type of church member has always been this way. Y'all who were born and raised in the Church have just been blissfully unaware of it until now because it's only now that their targets are focused on you.