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.

What Faith in Jesus Christ Looks Like During a Global Pandemic

This is a real line from a conversation I had with a man in Brazil, who left the Church to become whatever the Brazilian version of an Evangelical Christian is. 

"Faith is all you need. That's it. Only faith. Nothing else. If I have faith this car can fly, then it can. God can make this car fly."

I stood there politely, understanding completely why I found half the list of members for that unit on the floor in the kitchen. I thanked him for his time and we walked away without much further conversation. I didn't go on a mission to argue with people. But what he said ended up teaching me something very important that I've carried with me ever since.

When the only thing you care about in your religious life is "faith" as an abstract, isolated concept devoid of any context or connection to reality, you can use it to justify pretty much anything. God, in that scenario, ceases to be a parent or a source of moral teaching and becomes a gumball machine for increasingly ridiculous requests.

To teach faith in Jesus Christ correctly means understanding what hope, love, and loyalty in the living, breathing Christ can and cannot produce. It means valuing Christ as a person and the message he taught, not making a spectacle of the miracles he performs.

I don't believe in Jesus Christ because I want him to overturn the limits of reality and good sense to help me evade the consequences of my actions. I believe in him because he is my teacher, mentor, and friend helping me to achieve my true potential. I don't need him to pick up a car and chuck it across the sky just because I asked him to for my faith to be made manifest.

I would suggest that if you do, it's not faith you're actually looking for. Commanding God into making a spectacle of divine power is the definition of asking for a sign. For too many people in the Church, that is their only plan for how they intend to remain uninfected from COVID-19.

Pray AND Vaccinate!

If you're going to pray to God in all sincerity that you will be spared from becoming infected with COVID-19, even though you're unvaccinated, that's not faith. That's a mockery of faith. It's the perfect example of asking for that which "is not expedient for you," as taught in D&C 88. The consequence of that? That prayer will not only go unanswered, but it will also "turn unto your condemnation."

Why should a loving, intelligent God facilitate ANY request where a person refuses to help themselves through vaccination, and instead asks God to do all the work of preventing contagion for them? Why would an intelligent God, who prioritizes mortal wisdom and experience we came to earth here to obtain for ourselves, do that for us?

A God who has the power to elevate the mind and transform our condition would reason with us to help ourselves by choosing to be vaccinated⁠—not the equivalent of chucking Volkswagen Beetles through the air.

 

President Russell M. Nelson receiving a vaccination for COVID-19.

  

Why do people honestly think they can prevent the spread of COVID-19 with faith alone? Because they've fundamentally (and perhaps willfully) misunderstood the nature of what faith in Jesus Christ is designed to accomplish.

Faith in Jesus Christ doesn't get you what you want, no matter how unreasonable, as a condition of being a Christian. If God has to help you avoid the consequences of your actions in increasingly grandiose and ridiculous ways, chances are it wasn't God who put you in that position. You did that all on your own.

Faith in Jesus Christ teaches us to give away every sin and selfish thought we have until none remains. It turns us into the people who simply do the loving thing naturally, just as the Savior did, without cajoling or difficult persuasion.

Get vaccinated. Wear a mask.

Stop asking God to save you when you have everything you need already to do it yourself.

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.