These Evangelicals Are Equipping Church Leaders To Address COVID-19 Misinformation

Curtis Chang addresses Christians in a video about spotting misinformation online. Still image from Christians and the Vaccine’s series “Should Christians take the vaccine?”

This project was supported in part by the Fetzer Institute, where Chelsea serves as a program officer. This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.

A new project by evangelicals, for evangelicals aims to persuade those on the fence about vaccination to go ahead and get the shots and equip church leaders to lead fact-based discussions while appealing to biblical values.

Christians and the Vaccine, an online platform that includes tool kits for pastors, is a project of Redeeming Babel, which has produced online video resources for churches on topics like anxiety and promotes “biblical thinking in a confusing world.” The National Association of Evangelicals, COVID Collaborative, the Ad Council, Values Partnerships and Public Square Strategies are also supporting the project, seeking to “inoculate” the large number of Christians in the “unsure middle” from the confusing misinformation that has rapidly spread through communities about COVID-19 vaccines.

Christians and the Vaccine has produced short online videos that answer common questions and help Christians reframe the vaccine as fully consistent with a biblical worldview. Key targets of these videos have been pastors and other faith leaders who can use these tools to guide fellow believers toward vaccination.

ReligionUnplugged columnist Chelsea Langston Bombino talked with the founders of this initiative, Curtis Chang and Kris Carter. They discussed the need for the project, its impacts in terms of vaccine-hesitant believers, and the deeper spiritual anxieties and fears that drove so many to be fearful of the COVID-19 vaccine. 

Chelsea Langston Bombino: Can you share the origin story, if you will, of Redeeming Babel as an organization and the Christians and the Vaccine initiative in particular?

Curtis Chang: So I think, for me, the origin story has to start with my own sense of calling in the world as somebody that stands at the intersection between the world of secular institutions and the world of faith-based institutions. In terms of the world of faith and the church, I am a former pastor of an Evangelical Covenant Church. I am also on the consulting faculty at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary, so I've always had one foot in the world of Christian faith.

In the last 15 years, I’ve run a consulting firm that serves secular nonprofits and government agencies, and I teach strategic planning at American University. And so, I also have this other foot in what we would call the secular world, especially the secular world of institutions. I think that vantage point — as somebody who has had one foot in both worlds — probably prepared me to see the problem coming down the road in terms of the vaccine. For example, in my work with consulting for secular nonprofits and government agencies, I would have conversations with them at the end of 2020 about doing vaccine outreach.

It was clear to me that religious communities — and specifically White evangelicals — were simply not on their radar as a population with which to do outreach. Any discussion of religious outreach around vaccines was predominantly around African American and Latino communities, for good equity reasons. But in terms of especially understanding the White evangelical population — which was arguably going to be the largest and most vaccine resistant group among religious Americans — it wasn't even on their screen.

In addition to these observations in secular institutions, my experience as a pastor in an evangelical community also influenced my perspective. I witnessed how hostile that community could be to public health measures like masking or social distancing. I thought we were headed for trouble there.

And I was committed to standing in the gap. I saw how big that gap was between these two worlds and how one didn't understand the other. And so fear, separation and misunderstanding characterized the relationship between secular public health and evangelicals. This wasn’t only going to be trouble for Christians or for secular public health, but it was going to be trouble for the entire world. This was going to impact the flourishing of our entire society if these obstacles to vaccination went unaddressed. So that's the origin story for me. Kris do you want to chime in for you?

Kris Carter. Photo courtesy of Redeeming Babel.

Kris Carter: There's a little bit about the functional component of the origin story that is worth noting. At Redeeming Babel, we had earlier in the pandemic released a church small group series called “Anxiety as Opportunity for Spiritual Growth.” This series was was intended to be something that Christians could use to navigate the emotional anxiety around the pandemic, and the context for how that was deployed was video-based. I was working behind the scenes to support these production efforts, and I noticed something surprising: namely, that Curtis was excellent at summarizing pretty complex points in short periods of time.

That was something that I'm not even sure Curtis recognized in himself. I mean, he is an intellectual. He's a theologian. But one thing that I caught from Curtis’ work on the anxiety series was that we had a bunch of small snippets of video. Curtis communicates really well in five-minute chunks. The first thing I said to him after the anxiety series was, “We need to curate more contexts of these 5-to-10-minute chunks because I think you've got things to say to the world that are valuable, and those small chunks are how most people are consuming content these days.” People are not consuming long content. But they love short form and compelling articulations of complex and relevant subjects. Based on this joint realization of a critical need to address the evangelical community and that short form video was the right vehicle, the Christians and the Vaccine series was born.

CLB: That is wonderful. So with your partnership, Curtis and Kris, it sounds like it was a little bit of form meets function. Could you share briefly some of the results that Redeeming Babel’s Christians and the Vaccine initiative has had over the last year or so?

CC: We are always careful to note that it is difficult to prove the precise impact Christians and the Vaccine has played in motivating conservative White evangelicals in particular to get vaccinated. Determining precise causality is impossible for any intervention in this context, but here are some of the major arcs and trends around our work:

Evangelicals’ acceptance of the vaccine is finally rising. Our project especially targeted White evangelicals as the largest and most vaccine-hesitant demographic. When we launched our project in March 2021, acceptance in this group was only at 45% — and had been stuck there for months. By June 2021 (even before the Delta scare), vaccine acceptance in this group had risen to 56%, and by November 2021 (before the omicron scare), it had risen to 65%. We have learned that faith-based appeals are a critical tool of persuasion. Almost 1 in 3 vaccine-hesitant White evangelicals who attend religious services reported that faith-based approaches would sway them.

We also were excited to learn that the videos we produced were effective. James Chu, a sociologist at Columbia University (in collaboration with the Stanford Polarization and Social Change Lab), ran controlled experiments on the particular efficacy of one of our key videos (our interview with Dr. Francis Collins). The research, which was published by the National Academy of Sciences, showed that our video was significantly more persuasive to Christians than purely secular appeals.

I also had the opportunity to testify before the U.S. Senate. On June 22, 2021, I testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, calling on senators to prioritize faith-based outreach on the vaccine.

In terms of the broader culture, we sought to present a thoughtful Christian voice on this issue at a time when evangelicals were viewed so poorly by many secular audiences. Our message was shared to the public via two New York Times guest essays (one in May 2021 and one in September 2021). Curtis also appeared on CBS News, NBC News, multiple interviews on CNN, NPR’s“All Things Considered” and numerous other outlets that resulted in viewership in the millions.

CLB: That is a really helpful summary of the trends and impacts around vaccine-hesitant Christians. What were some of the foundational spiritual concerns these conservative Christians might have been holding? How did you honor the seriousness of their concerns while helping maybe offer a new narrative from the same spiritual perspectives as vaccine-hesitant Christians?

CC: On pro-life concerns, many Christians, both evangelical and Catholic, feared that aborted fetal tissues were used for the vaccine. I realized I had to be able to speak to that and hear the heart of their concerns. They were concerned for unborn life, and that had to be acknowledged and taken seriously. It had to be met with compassion and truth, through a faith lens.

Another significant area of concern for vaccine-hesitant Christians was that the vaccine was the “mark of the beast” from the book of Revelation. Given this concern, it was so obvious that a massive government-run vaccine outreach campaign would not be effective with these populations. Secular public health officials couldn’t speak to these concerns because they did not understand them. They did not necessarily have the religious literacy to address them. And even if they did, secular public health officials would not be a trusted voice to vaccine-hesitant Christians with these concerns.

So it needed to be a Christian speaking who was able to dive into the actual interpretation of Revelation. The same was true for being able to dive into the pro-life concerns. This movement needed folks from a sympathetic, insider perspective. And that's why we ended up producing videos on both of those subjects (pro-life concerns and the mark of the beast) that end up being, I think, a pretty helpful tool for folks to share because those were the actual concerns Christians were struggling with.

KC: I would add one thing. As Christians, you can choose to emphasize parts of Christian Scripture and Christian faith that diverge with the rest of the culture. Or you can choose Christian tenets that are less divisive. Frankly, there is a season and a time for both. I think that, as Christians, sometimes we do need to draw the line with the culture and state that our faith calls us to act counter-culturally.

But in an American evangelical context, divides become almost a measure of how Christian you are. For some, the more divisive you are, the more Christian you are. If you look at the theology and the work that is consistently coming through Redeeming Babel, the heart of our focus is redemption. Our approach, even to a divisive topic like vaccines, is predominantly redemptive.

Another word I would use to describe the approach of Redeeming Babel is communitarian: It brings people together, even people of different faiths. So, if I'm a Christian who is focused on love of my neighbor in particular, that really calls me to spend all of my faith energy trying to understand how my Muslim neighbor understands his own faith and what he needs to thrive. It is critical for Christian believers, of course, to understand the distinctive features of the Christian faith and what sets our faith apart from any other faith tradition.

But there are threads and things about our Christian faith — and about Jesus's teachings specifically — that are quite universal and that are very powerful in a social context. And you know, our democracy is one of them. Democracy is not the only political system compatible with Christianity, but it has components that are very consistent with Christianity. Democracy is perhaps one of the only forms of government that can effectively take into account both the glory of humans as image bearers and the brokenness of humans and the fact that they're going to fail. Democracy does a very good job of holding those two things in tension. 

So these ideas that are sort of deeply embedded in our Christian faith, I think can better prepare us to engage in a society that is not a Christian society, but that is a society that we have to engage in a pluralistic way that's helpful to everyone. And that is the ultimate goal of Christians and the Vaccine and all the work of Redeeming Babel. We seek the good of diverse neighbors. We believe we can all thrive together in shared flourishing.

Chelsea Langston Bombino is a believer in sacred communities, a wife and a mother. She serves as a program officer with the Fetzer Institute and a fellow with the Center for Public Justice.