Category: health care

Is a Vaccine at Odds with the Christian Faith?

The Christian faith is all about loving God and neighbor. Get immune, save and love your neighbor and their children. Get the Covid vaccine.

Perhaps it’s never been possible to have agreement on the definition of a faith tradition; ideas about what it means to follow a religion have always been fluid and contentious. I read a news article this week that a settlement was reached in an employment religious discrimination lawsuit, granting a Minnesota man $65,000 in back pay and damages from his former employer over his refusal to be fingerprinted for a required background check. He said it was against his Christian faith to do so.

Henry Harrington claimed that his employer, Ascension Point Recovery Services (APRS), a debt collection company, had failed to make the required accommodation for his belief and fired him. A similar employment case was filed four years ago in Pennsylvania, when a local school bus driver refused fingerprinting as part of her background check, claiming that the process would leave the “mark of the devil” on her, preventing her future entrance to heaven. That’s news to me.

Many more of these religious objection cases have been filed across the country in recent years as social and legal changes have pressed up against long held personal beliefs about social responsibility, employment requirements, privacy rights and our own physical autonomy.

Can a life insurance company, considering you for a new policy, require you to release to them your full physical and mental health record, disclose your family medical history, take your blood pressure and a sample of your blood? Might they also review the public filing of your divorce decree from 10 years back? They have been doing such things legally for decades. Can a federal employer take your photo, driver’s license number, Passport information as well fingerprints to screen you for a job? Will it search for any records of arrest or legal charges brought against you in national data bases? Most certainly it will.

As more information about our individual lives is collected and shared, many of us are pushing back. Where does my right to security of person and property end and legal or social demands begin? And when we must make arguments for protecting those intuitive, personal boundaries, it’s no wonder that issues of faith, meaning and core values come front and center.

These same issues, it seems to me, are at the center of the debate around Covid vaccine mandates. For most of 2020, we prayed and hoped for the miracle of a safe and effective vaccine to be created by our nation’s research scientists, folks who have been steadily working on similar virus strains of influenza, bird flu, and SARS for decades. Because of the previous research, the vaccines came quickly, tentatively released after multiple trials with eager volunteers, giving us hope that it would snuff out the pandemic and its possible mutations with our majority immunity.

The vaccine is free for all. Now anyone over 12 can get immunized! And even after weeks and months of pleading and even cash incentives, 20% of eligible Americans have refused this life-saving medicine.

I have come to understand this refusal by so many as the result of all the loss of privacy many of us feel over the last two generations mentioned earlier. Some people, claiming conflicts with the vaccine and their faith practices, have received exemptions from vaccination in the past few months, risking their own health and the life and wellbeing of those around them.  Even when such exemptions don’t seem to be wise or practical, current law does allow such freedom when it comes to boundaries set by a person’s sincere religious practice.

But people are still dying, children are still not protected, and our medical personnel are traumatized by the continuing demands on their health and stamina. As new mandates are announced, reluctant employees are claiming a religious exemption, requesting letters of support from their Christian clergy. I want to go on the record with this admonition: Don’t ask your pastor for such a letter. Your pastor can’t make a coherent faith argument against receiving an approved vaccination that will save your life and the life of those around you.

Why? Because, quite simply, the Christian faith is centered on the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. And if there is a central theme to his life and teaching, it is love of God and love of neighbor. In this, Jesus taught, is all the Law and the Prophets. It’s not about creating a cover for your distrust of government, or resentment that you are expected to take medicine because someone else says so. It is not so you can live your life exactly on your own terms, shouting “freedom” until you are hoarse. Every day of his life, Jesus spoke and demonstrated his gospel, that as God loves us, so we are called to that same love of one another. To take proven medicine when you can, to save your own life as well as the life of the weak, young or vulnerable, is discipleship work. There is no religious excuse that makes any sense to me. Love Jesus? Love your neighbor. And get your shots.

 

(Written for The Savage Pacer, Spiritual Reflection column; Published Saturday, 9/18/21)

 

 

Mass Murder & Mental Illness

As the roar of reaction begins to quiet following the horror in Newtown, many media comments I have read express a demand for better “access to mental health services.”

I’m not sure what that means in this case.

The biggest gap in mental health care in our country, as I have come to know it, is in in-patient hospital care. After Congress passed laws in the 1980’s that down-sized state hospitals, hundreds of people were released from care. States and communities were expected to provide needed services, but in many places, such care never materialized. The numbers of homeless, mentally ill and/or addicted persons swelled, and state and federal dollars for the seriously and/or persistently mentally ill dwindled and has stayed low.

We have now have a chronic shortage of psychiatric hospital beds, and an even more critical shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists. The cost of in-patient care is close to $1000 a day in some cities like Minneapolis. We have a shortage of psychiatrists because our medical system is controlled by the third party payer system of insurance companies, and they don’t pay psychiatrists commensurate to their 10 year + post-college medical training. Fewer medical students want a job with longer training and lower pay.

If the shooter in Connecticut wanted mental health care, there are plenty of master and doctorate level out-patient counselor/therapists in Fairfield County. Family physicians are often the first level of care for mental health, and would have been able to offer referrals for counselors and medication if needed. If anyone feared for his life or someone else, state laws around the country commonly allow for persons to be held in a locked hospital ward for up to 72 hours for evaluation.

But that is all for those whose mental health is clearly disturbed and dangerous. We’d like to believe that we can see the most dangerous among us coming from a mile away. The plain truth is that we often can’t.

Contemporary research into the minds of mass killers in America has shown that the majority are men who have had difficult lives and blame their pain on everyone else. They don’t have a sense of their own responsibility for their lives, and when pressed even harder by some large stressor like the loss of a job or an important relationship, plan a sweet revenge upon their oppressors. These are usually men with personality disorders, people whose characters have little concern for the well-being of others. These folks make up about 10% of the population and don’t seek mental health care. Or when they do, can fake their way through and get released without any improvement.

Stalin. Hitler. Mussolini. Pol Pot. Idi Amin. These men are mass murderers too. Do you think more mental health care would have solved the problem of human evil in them? No. We will always need to build a world that takes human sin seriously. That does what it can to control for access to weapons that kill quickly. That knows that evil doesn’t come at us through normal channels. That remembers that evil seeks power, and that power can overtake governments, too.

We weep with those whose lives have been shattered by evil in the form of a silent 20 year old killer. For their young lives lost. But also for all who, throughout human history, have died at the hands of evil persons. Evil does exist, and it exists not outside of us, in some kind of satanic underworld of the devil. Every evil I know of is born of a bent human mind, and the continuous will to wreck vengeance, power and control of others.

We can’t medicate, hospitalize, or counsel our way around human evil. Looking for relief from the mental health system is looking in the wrong direction.