Religion

Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America

How vaccine hesitancy can be understood as religious expression

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May 19, 2026
2026
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Vaccine hesitancy in America didn鈥檛 begin with the uproar over the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw resistance to a wide variety of vaccines. In Unvaccinated Under God, Kira Ganga Kieffer shows that debates over vaccine safety and mandatory vaccination were about more than diseases or injections. They have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality. Kieffer argues that vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression鈥攏ot as the product of scientific misinformation.

Through a series of historical case studies, which range from the 鈥渕other warriors鈥 who claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism during the 1990s to opposition to masking and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, Kieffer frames vaccination controversies as contests over religious freedom and moral authority. These debates concerned bodily, spiritual, and sexual purity; the morality of state-mandated medical risk; the importance of children; and the authority of parents and doctors. Kieffer explains that diverse groups of Americans utilized religious ideals and practices to question or resist vaccination. With this new, illuminating perspective on vaccine hesitancy, Kieffer offers a novel and even-handed way to understand Americans鈥 changing and increasingly divided attitudes toward biomedical knowledge and technology. Her account offers readers an accessible set of tools for how to 鈥渢hink with religion鈥 when it comes to contemporary contests over medical authority.