How church leaders in one Eastern Kentucky county are coping with vaccine hesitancy
When Pastor Sean Daniels heard his name called in the Food City parking lot in Harlan, he didn’t expect to be asked whether he thought the COVID-19 vaccine was an instrument of the biblical end times.
Daniels is a pastor at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Cawood, Kentucky, and this woman knew it. Having heard on social media and from friends that the vaccine was the Mark of the Beast, as it’s referred to in Revelation, she thought it made sense to ask a man of the cloth.
He recalled that conversation last Wednesday, sitting in the front pew of his church, which sits at the base of a hill a few miles outside Harlan. It was nearing 6 p.m. Cars were pulling in the parking lot and people were beginning to gather at the doors of the sanctuary, in anticipation of his mid-week evening service. “She wanted to know, “‘Is this true? Is what I’m reading online really true?’”
For the record, Daniels doesn’t believe the vaccine forebodes the end times, and he told her as much as they both stood there, holding their groceries. In fact, he was one of the first pastors in his southeastern Kentucky county to post a picture of himself getting the coronavirus vaccine back in January, when he first became eligible as a chaplain at one of the local hospitals.
But increasingly Daniels and other Harlan County church leaders are getting peppered with fear-based questions from their congregations and community about the vaccine, which they try to gently bat down. Though their denominations vary, most are white and all are evangelical.
As the state strives toward herd immunity — once 70-85 percent of the population is inoculated— public health experts believe trusted community leaders are vital to diffusing vaccine hesitancy. And in a state like Kentucky, faith leaders often carry more sway than elected leaders.
Kentucky is deeply religious. An estimated 76 percent of its residents identify as Christian, and the biggest chunk of that group — roughly half — are evangelical, according to the Pew Research Center. Of the 41 million people that belong to this trans-denominational group nationwide, 45 percent recently said they likely won’t get a vaccine, according to a Pew poll released last month.
Forty-five percent of evangelicals in Kentucky amounts to roughly 1.5 million people. Just over 1.6 million Kentuckians have already gotten their first dose — more than 36 percent of the state population. In Harlan County, close to 6,800 people are at least partially immunized — about 24 percent of the county’s residents.
It’s not likely to help overall hesitancy that the federal government asked on Tuesday — and Kentucky agreed — to halt its use of all Johnson & Johnson vaccines after six women in other states developed blood clots within two weeks of getting the shot. These incidents are so far the only ones health officials are aware of. More than 7.5 million people across the country have received this single-dose vaccine.
Gov. Andy Beshear has targeted Kentucky’s sprawling religious population in outreach campaigns to promote vaccination. In February he invited faith leaders across denominations to get their dose in the Capitol Rotunda.
“No one is more trusted in their communities than our faith leaders,” Beshear said at the time, urging churchgoers to follow suit.
Most people interviewed for this story already chose to get their dose to protect themselves and their community from a disease that has infected and killed people around them. But everyone knew at least a few people — neighbors, coworkers, friends, family or fellow church members — who won’t.
“A lot of people are worried about control. That the mask mandate, the social distancing, right down to the vaccine [are ways] they think that the government is out to control them,” Daniels said. “People really don’t like to be told what to do.”
Others sincerely struggle to distinguish between misinformation saturating social media from reliable information in newspapers, and falsehoods peddled by people claiming to be experts from credible information about the safety of vaccines from trustworthy institutions, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There’s a lot of what we call false doctrine that’s being taught,” said Daniels. “I’m not saying any particular church in Harlan County teaches that. But it’s just a conclusion of a lot of the conspiracies and things they’re reading on the internet.”
The white noise of misinformation bleeds across issues. ”It goes right into the vaccine, too,” he added, repeating what he’s heard. “’I’m not taking the vaccine. Why? Well, they’re wanting to control me. This is just part of their agenda.’”
David McGill, emergency management director and youth leader at Liggett Baptist Church in Harlan, can relate.
The Harlan County native recently helped organize a Kentucky Department for Public Health pilot program to deliver a few hundred doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to isolated Harlan County residents, who in some cases couldn’t leave their homes and needed doses delivered to their doorsteps.
McGill works in the old courthouse in downtown Harlan. On a recent workday, an elderly woman came to his office in need of an answer.
Like the lady who stopped Pastor Daniels at Food City, she was “scared that [the vaccine] was the mark of the beast, or that they were injecting a chip in you,” McGill said this week in his office, referencing a widespread conspiracy theory that the vaccine contains a microchip to track people’s behavior.
And like Daniels, he gently dispelled both myths.
“I told her it wasn’t the mark of the beast, that there’s not a chip in it, that I was fully confident in the vaccine. I’ve taken it, myself,” he remembers saying.
Reflecting on that conversation, he said, “There’s all kinds of misinformation that’s being put out on social media, and that is causing a lot of these problems. People just don’t know what to do or who to believe.”
‘Because I did, they did’
Harlan County’s battle with COVID-19 has ebbed and flowed. The virus has infected 2,673 people over the last year and killed 84 in this community of about 28,000. It’s currently one of seven counties across the state still in the “red zone” for its high level of community spread, in part due to an outbreak among members of a local sports team.
Like other churches in the area, Daniels moved his services out of the enclosed sanctuary last spring. Instead of preaching to people sitting shoulder to shoulder in church pews, he’s been blaring his sermons over a loudspeaker across a vacant mall parking lot, where people park in rows and roll down their windows to listen, like a drive-in movie.
“Instead of an amen, they give me a honk,” Daniels said.
Largely, pastors in Harlan County have spoken in a unified voice, both about adjusting their definition of church during the pandemic and, now, receiving the vaccine. In many ways, faith leaders have acted as translators, helping people who look to them for guidance discern between what’s true and false.
Twenty miles east, in Wallins, Pastor Buddy Simpson and his congregation at Wallins Church of God have just returned to in-person services on Sunday mornings. Simpson is fully vaccinated, and he wants to make sure bringing his 50 or so members under one roof is safe.
He encourages people to decide for themselves and to arrive at their decisions through prayer, but he knows a higher vaccination rate will mean safer worship. Simpson likens getting vaccinated during a pandemic to wearing a seat belt during a car crash.
“Is a seat belt 100 percent effective? No. But statistically, it’s proven that seat belts save lives,” Simpson said last week in his church’s fellowship hall. “The safest place in a crash is in the car. It’s kind of like a vaccine — it’s the safest place to be in all of this.”
Carl Canterbury, a local business owner, emergency responder, traveling minister and member of the Louellen Pentacostal Church, got a shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on April 1 from the mobile vaccination clinic. He had the virus two months ago.
“I know there’s loss of life from it, so it’s very serious. In that respect, my whole thought process is, and many may disagree with this — if we vaccine for smallpox, then why not vaccine me for this, too?”
Canterbury, who lives in Closplint, said each of the pastors in his small community has gotten the shot. But similar to Daniels and McGill, he knows misinformation about it is rampant.
He doesn’t talk about the vaccine from the pulpit, but if asked, he’ll tell. And many in his church have asked. “So many people think it’s a conspiracy, and they want to know, are you getting it? The day I had my shot, I had four members in our church to stop by and ask, did I take the shot, and I told them, yes,” he said. “Because I did, they did.”
‘What’s wrong with asking questions?’
For those in Harlan County who are reluctant to get the shot, their reasons are a complicated tangle of religious and political beliefs.
Tammy Owens, an emergency responder, missionary, and member of Pastor Simpson’s church in Wallins, got her vaccine back in January, calling it “an answer to a prayer.”
“If it’s protecting us, where we can get out and share Christ with people, what are we hesitating for?”
But she knows plenty of people who are dead set against it, not because they think it’s God’s will, but because they don’t trust a government they think manipulated information to rig the most recent presidential election — a falsehood that former President Donald Trump has continued to repeat.
Explaining the hesitancy of some in her community, Owens said “Anything that the government says is good, we’re stepping back going, ‘Well, we caught them lying about this, how do we know they’re telling the truth about that?’”
Generally, “I just say, turn all the information off. Do what the Lord tells you,” Owens said.
That’s what Brenda Blanton did.
The 76-year-old retired Harlan County school teacher, who lives just up the road in Wallins and attends the Church of God with Owens, prayed for weeks before ultimately deciding to be vaccinated.
“At first I was scared. I’m still scared, somewhat, of all these wild tales that everybody’s telling,” Blanton said. “That it’s supposed to have a chip in it and it’s supposed to change your DNA.”
Pastor Simpson urged her “to let the Lord lead me. And that’s what I did. I let the Lord lead me, and he led me to my doctor,” who told her it was safe, she said. Blanton gets her second shot this Friday.
But for others, like Darla Heflin, the push to get a vaccine chafes with her deep-rooted skepticism of mainstream institutions. That skepticism was exacerbated by a year of pandemic-related shutdowns that she feels trampled her freedoms as an American.
Last year, she grew disillusioned with many local church leaders who she thinks kowtowed to arbitrary public health guidance when they chose to suspend indoor services and ask their congregations to wear masks. Eventually, she left the traditional church because it “cowered to the state.” Now, she meets weekly with a group of like-minded followers of Christ who, equally irked, left their own churches with similar grievances.
“I just saw the goal post being moved continually, and I was very uncomfortable with that,” Heflin, 44, said. Likewise, she doesn’t plan to get the vaccine because it’s “experimental” and “dangerous,” and she’s “shocked” that more pastors aren’t openly questioning it.
“I don’t understand where the fear of man has come from. It worries me,” she said. “I’m uncomfortable with people being told they should take it, or that it’s the loving thing to do.”
The COVID-19 vaccine is not mandated in Kentucky, and Beshear has said he has no plans to mandate it. But like other church and community leaders in this story, he and Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack do encourage it. Vaccines are the safest way for a population to reach herd immunity and prevent a virus from spreading further.
But this prodding only makes Heflin more suspect.
“I feel like that’s something we’ve been conditioned to do — just believe what we’re being told all the time, and not do our due diligence and ask questions,” she said. “What’s wrong with asking questions [and] with doing your own research?”
Heflin said she doesn’t watch Fox News or CNN; she and her husband haven’t had a television for three years. Instead, she relies on the Bible for guidance, listens to Christian podcasts and political commentators, at least one of whom undercut the seriousness of COVID-19 in a recent radio interview. He claimed that coronavirus testing numbers are falsely inflated to cause panic, and that Bill Gates, owner and founder of Microsoft, controls messaging around coronavirus treatments as well as election ballot counting machines. There’s no evidence to support these claims.
Leaving the church and sharing her opinions has strained some of Heflin’s friendships, she said. But it’s a sacrifice she felt she had to make. “It’s the price I’m willing to pay for holding onto my views and living in a country that I believe is free and I want to remain free.”
‘Gift from God’
Within the last month, after talking it over with his deacons, Pastor Daniels moved his Wednesday night services at Friendship Missionary Baptist back into the sanctuary, since it draws a much smaller crowd than Sunday mornings. Families are asked to sit together, spaced apart from other families, and wear a mask while they’re moving around.
Daniels had prepared a sermon about Doubting Thomas, the importance of faith, and the dangers of excessive doubt on this Wednesday night. Though he doesn’t preach the vaccine from the pulpit, like Canterbury, when asked, he’ll say, “I believe it’s a gift from God. It’s still your choice, but I want people to understand that I’ve taken the vaccine. There’s nothing biblical you need to be afraid of.”
For all the hesitancy, many people are concluding to get vaccinated in this Virginia border county, even if that realization takes some time. Statewide, there’s hope, too.
A poll released Wednesday by the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky found that 71 percent of the more than 800 Kentuckians surveyed are in favor of getting vaccinated. While 43 percent of Republicans are hesitant, half said they are open to changing their minds.
Convincing this group will be key to reaching herd immunity — a task that falls to local “trusted messengers,” said Ben Chandler, CEO of the organization.
“We’re talking faith leaders, local public health officials,” he said. “We’ve got to encourage those people to speak out to their communities.”
Daniels understands this. Late last year, a member of his church died from COVID-19. In December, he went to three funerals in a week. All were people he knew who died from coronavirus.
“I’ve seen the hurt on these families,” he said. As such, he feels it’s incumbent on him to lead the way he believes Jesus would: selflessly and sacrificially.
His members took their seats. After singing a few hymns, Daniels took to the pulpit, opened his Bible to John 20:24 and asked the church to do the same.
“How many times have we heard in life, if only God would give me a sign?” he preached. “I have prayed and prayed for direction. Lord just give me a sign. But we forget that he gave us the Word.”
“Amen,” someone responded.
“Sometimes our faith is not where it ought to be. Until we go through some fire, some valleys,” he said. “It takes those events sometimes in our lives before we really quit doubting, and we begin to lead like never before.”
