Get Vaccinated!

Before I joined the Church, I came from evangelical Christianity. I'd been attending church with my best friend and her family. Her father was the pastor. They claimed to be non-denominational, but were actually Southern Baptists.

She invited me because she was tired of being the only girl get age in her youth program, and I never said "No" to an invitation to attend someone else's church. Her family was kind to me. They were lovely people whose influence on me was important in my life. That said, their message didn't resonate with me. I didn't feel like what they had to offer me was increasing my faith or bringing me closer to God. I couldn't articulate what I was looking for at the time. I only knew they didn't have it.

I left that church, despite the positive associations and friendships I had, because I didn't believe what they were teaching me. They were irreconcilable differences not only in thought, but in values.

I don't believe the Bible is the best representation we have of God's reality, purpose, and voice. The living God who speaks is. I don't believe spiritual gifts and divine works are manifest only through pastors. I believe all of us have direct access to the divine. Most importantly, I believe that God is present and real in the effort to teach and educate us because we need divine mentorship. We need guidance, help, and healing that doesn't come from a book. We haven't already learned everything we need to know from the Bible. 

When I was introduced to the Church and discovered the entire concept of continuing revelation, I was sold. Not because I was particularly attracted to the concept of living prophets. But because I'd found the place where no error in human thinking is permanently entrenched.

So when I give the following warning to those who choose to stay and be active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I'm speaking from personal experience.

When you interact with political parties, especially the Republican party, you are interacting with thoughts, ideas, and approaches to policy that come from these evangelical communities. Their ideas about vaccines, public health, the individual's obligation to their community, our obligation to sustain governments—we differ from them on almost all of these points. So why would we wholesale adopt their approaches on anything? Especially social distancing, vaccine, and mask mandates?

When we cling to their ideas, in contradiction of the instructions we've been given from our own leadership on how to protect each other with masking and vaccination, we introduce apostasy into the Church. To be clear, the personal and political positions of church leadership are not what define apostasy. However, harm and the disregard for human life and the dignity of others does.

I left evangelical Christianity for Mormonism because they are distinctly different from each other in ways that matter and need to be maintained. I'm not going to watch well-intentioned but willfully blind folks introduce evangelical failure into my community without pointing it out with the clearest language I possess. And when it comes to the choices happening in my community related to COVID-19, it's an influence of which we need to be deeply mistrusting. Taking unnecessary risks with other peoples' lives doesn't become acceptable because other Christians are doing it.