WASHINGTON (RNS) — Earlier this month, the White House announced a “month of action” to help ensure 70% of U.S. adults are at least partially vaccinated by July 4. Officials have since outlined a flurry of faith-based partnerships, hoping to leverage the clout and know-how of faith groups to aid in immunizing the public against COVID-19.
To help explain the role of faith groups in the national vaccine push, Religion News Service spoke with Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian who also serves as director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins discussed the program, as well as his faith and how he views the intersection of religion and science. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is the government is looking to religious groups for help in vaccination efforts?
It’s nice to be able to have this conversation. As a scientist and a person of faith, this is right in my sweet spot.
People of faith have issues (with vaccines), and every person has some different set they’re concerned about. When getting an answer from a guy like me, a scientist who works for the government, maybe they say, “Well, maybe he has a reason to want us to do this.” But if your pastor says, “I’ve looked at this information and I want what’s best for my congregation. I don’t want to see more people die from this terrible illness that’s taken almost 600,000 American lives. So I’ve educated myself, and I’d like you to know, from me, the benefits and risks. Can we talk about it?” — that gets people’s attention.
While vaccine hesitancy or anti-vaccine sentiment is not unique to any faith group, a recent poll found white evangelicals have a higher-than-average rate of vaccine refusals. But the same poll also found many of them said they could be persuaded by faith-based overtures. Have you seen evidence these overtures are moving the needle?
Yes, although it’s hard to collect really solid data to say how many people changed their minds because they heard from a faith leader. I could give you lots of anecdotes — although the plural of anecdotes is still not data.
I do think it is not a stretch to say, for all of us who’ve prayed for deliverance from COVID-19, the vaccines are an answer to that prayer. That is very much consistent with the way God often responds to our needs — by working through human capabilities that we’ve been given as a gift by the Creator. Why wouldn’t you want to take that gift and not just look at it, but open it up and then roll up your sleeve?
You noted federal government officials aren’t always the most effective messengers to some communities. But as an evangelical Christian, what about your faith compels you to want to embark on this vaccine push?
When you look at what we know about the time Jesus spent on this earth, it is interesting — read through the four Gospels — how many instances where he is involved in healing. If we are called to be followers, as I am, then shouldn’t we also find opportunities to provide healing as well?
If anybody asks you, “Has it been that bad?” Well, gosh, we’ve lost almost 4 million lives on the planet, and almost 600,000 right here in the United States of America. It’s not over, and if we don’t get the vaccinations up to a high enough level, we may see in the fall and the winter a resurgence — particularly in areas where vaccines were least adopted. Then here we are all over again with people in ICUs, people dying that didn’t have to. As believers, is that something we can look away from? I don’t think so.
Many religious communities of color have not only been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, but also suffer from access issues when it comes to vaccines. Have you seen dividends from efforts by the White House and others to partner with faith groups to help combat those access issues?
Absolutely. That has included some churches that have volunteered to be sites for immunization — right in their fellowship hall. That’s a great thing to do. In this national month of action, we have done additional outreach to those communities that haven’t felt necessarily like they had access, making it possible to get immunized in the barbershop or in the beauty salon, or providing child care for people who might otherwise have trouble figuring out “How am I going to get a shot when I have these two little kids with me that are going to need my attention every second?”
The federal government’s partnership with faith groups in this vaccine push seems unusually robust. What is it about faith communities that makes them particularly beneficial when it comes to vaccination?
As the director of the National Institutes of Health for the last 12 years, we have had partnerships with faith communities for things like hypertension screening, diabetes management and asthma management, but nothing quite like this.
It has been an inspiring occasion, I have to say, to have the opportunity to work side by side with leaders of the faith community to try to get this healing information in front of people. And I hope when we get through COVID-19, which we will, that we won’t lose that.
As a medical expert and a person of faith, what do you think gets left out of disputes between faith groups and the medical community during this pandemic?
One of my goals as a person of faith and a scientist is trying to get people to see the wonderful complementarity and the harmony of scientific and spiritual worldviews.
But I think a lot of people in faith communities haven’t found that to be the case, and maybe have even heard things from the pulpit like “You can’t really trust those scientists because they’re all atheists.” Well, here’s one who’s not, and I’m not alone: About 40% of working scientists are believers in a God who answers prayer. There’s a lot of us out there.
Maybe this is another occasion to try to get a broader understanding about how science and faith are wonderfully complementary. Science is great at answering questions that might start with “how?,” and faith is really good at answering questions that start with “why?” Don’t you, as a person on this planet for a brief glimpse of time, want to be able to ask and maybe get answers to both those types of questions?
Have you seen some of that distrust slip away?
I have, yeah. Going back more than 20 years ago, it did seem like there was a lot of tension for me as an evangelical. There were times where I wasn’t sure I was welcome in the church, and then I’d go to the lab, and I wasn’t sure I was feeling welcomed there either. I wrote a book about this called “The Language of God” back in 2005, trying to put forward arguments about how science and faith really are different ways of looking at God’s creation. It got a lot more attention than I expected.
I think out of that, and a number of other efforts … I do see there has been a shift here, more of a willingness to consider what the harmony is instead of what the battle is.
Are you optimistic the U.S., with the help of faith communities, can meet this July Fourth deadline to partially vaccinate 70% of the adult population?
I am optimistic, but it’s going to be a stretch. It’s going to take the full efforts of lots and lots of people — and especially faith communities — to get us there over what is just another three weeks.
The number of immunizations happening each day is just barely on that pathway, and it actually looks as if some of those immunization levels are dropping instead of going up. We need everybody to line up behind this goal, recognizing this isn’t about pleasing Joe Biden, because a lot of evangelicals are not that interested in pleasing Joe Biden. This is about saving lives.
As you lay in your bed at night, maybe you feel a sharp, persistent pain in your chest that will not leave. Or perhaps it is a sunken feeling in your stomach that feels like you swallowed a golf ball. For another person, it might be an inability to click the off-switch on your thoughts. Like waves, one thought continually crashes over the other until, eventually, it feels like you’re drowning in an ocean of thoughts that you cannot escape. Still, for another, the opposite may be true. Instead of a flood of thoughts, there is an obsession or a constant preoccupation with a single thought. Whatever it feels like for you, we have all felt it. It’s worry. It is one of many things that God warns us against, and yet, countless people still wrestle with this feeling on a daily basis.
For me, worrying was a way of life. In the morning, I would lie awake in bed and work myself up over all that I had to do that day. As I dwelled on the what-ifs, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as it beat faster and faster. What if I fail? What if the money never comes in? What if I drop the ball? What if they don’t like me? What if I’m not as intelligent as they say I am? What if my child gets sick? The shackles of worry became so familiar to me that I did not realize I was bound by them. I had no concept of life without worry. As a result, I became dependent on my worry and anxiety, and I stopped depending on God. I relied on my endurance to overcome each day. I trusted my intelligence and my accomplishments to assure me of my future. I put my hope in measurable and calculated outcomes that I analyzed over and over in my mind. Slowly, my faith began to dwindle. Deep down, my heart was satisfied with wallowing in worry, and I started to think that God had left me stranded.
My story, and so many others, remind me of how God’s chosen people lost their faith even though God redeemed them from hundreds of years of oppression and slavery. When the Israelites were challenged by difficult circumstances, they worried and they complained. Their immediate reaction to trouble was not to trust God—instead they trusted their worries. When the Egyptians chased after them, they worried that they would die at the hand of their oppressors (Exodus 14:10-12). Two months after they escaped Egypt, they came to a wilderness and the waves of worry came crashing down on them again (Exodus 16:1-3). There was probably no food or water in sight and they all thought, what if we die out here? They complained to Moses and Aaron saying “You’ve brought us out into this wilderness to starve us to death, the whole company of Israel.” (Exodus 16:3 The Message). Like me, they became so comfortable in their fear and worry that they thought God had left them stranded to die.
Yet, it was not too long before that moment in the wilderness that God instructed his people to remember their redemption through the celebration of the Passover meal. Could it be that God instituted Passover because He knew the Israelites would succumb to their worries? Could it be that God knew that their worries would chip away at their faith, so He gave them a strategy to rebuild it? For the Israelites, Passover was their wake-up call. It was a reminder of God’s redemptive power, and if God could free them from slavery, He could save them from anything.
So, why worry? One could only speculate, what if the Israelites’ story would have unfolded differently? If they had clung to the story of their redemption instead of worrying, maybe they would not have crafted a powerless god made of gold. If they had remembered the day they were set free, maybe they would have mustered up enough faith to escape their worrying in the wilderness. If they had only remembered the meaning of their Passover meal, and the freedom that it represented, perhaps we would be reading a different story today.
Our story, however, is not finished. Every single day, when life’s troubles seem to be closing in on us, we have to make a choice—will we worry or will we remember? As we reflect on the Passover story and its representation of freedom, we should also remember our own redemption stories. I remember mine quite well. When I was a little girl, my parents thought I was going to die. After a severe allergic reaction, I laid on my parent’s bed in my childhood home, breathless. As my father administered CPR he cried out to God in his heart. He began to make plans for funeral arrangements and he thanked God for the six years that he spent with me. And then, as he retells the story to me, he heard a gentle voice affirmatively tell him that I was not going to die. Seconds later, I coughed—and then I took a breath. In my adulthood, I now often recall the day that God saved my life. I really mostly recall waking up in the hospital, because I was unconscious during the most severe moments of the allergic reaction. And when I awoke, I saw my mother and father by my side and they said to me, “You almost died.” When I think about that moment in time, it reminds me that God saved me, and my worries slowly begin to disintegrate. The pain in my chest goes away, and the waves of anxious thoughts transform into still waters of peace and clarity. Thinking back on my day of redemption freed me, and the freedom from worrying was in the remembering.Remember your day of redemption. Remember the day that God freed you. Remember the day He rescued you. Remember, and watch as your worries melt away into triviality.
This month is National Foster Care Awareness Month, an opportunity for people across the nation to learn about and speak about the challenges and opportunities of the foster care system in the United States. In honor of this month we are glad to share this interview with Steve Pemberton. Steve Pemberton is a man with an incredible story of resilience, determination and vision. After spending years as an executive, philanthropist, and speaker he decided to tell his story in his new USA Today Best Selling Memoir: A Chance In The World. Our UrbanFaith Contributing Writer Maina Mwaura had the opportunity to sit down with Steve and discuss the book and how his faith was at the center of his incredible journey from Foster Care to Fortune 500 companies and philanthropy.
Republished in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month.
When you see a man walking down the street talking to himself, what is your first thought? Most likely it’s, “He is crazy!” What about the lady at the bus stop yelling strange phases? You immediately become guarded and move as far away from her as possible. I know you’ve done it. We all have.
We are so quick to judge others on the surface level without taking the time to think that maybe God is placing us in a situation for a reason. Maybe it is a test and in order to pass, you must show love and compassion for something or someone that you do not understand.
Perhaps the man or woman you judge are suffering from a mental illness. However, do not be deceived by appearances, because mental illness does not have “a look.”
More Than What Meets The Eye
When most people look at me, they see a successful, 20-something-year-old woman who is giving of herself and her time. In the past, they would only see a bubbly, out-going, praying and saved young lady who is grounded in her faith. When outsiders look at me, they often see someone with two degrees from two of America’s most prestigious institutions, an entrepreneur who prides herself on inspiring others to live life on purpose, and simply lets her light shine despite all obstacles.
However, what so many do not know is that there was a time when I was dying on the inside. On a beautiful summer morning, at the tender age of 25, I suddenly felt sick. It was not the kind of sick where one is coughing with a fever and chills. I felt as if there were a ton of bricks on top of my body and I could not move my feet from the bed to the floor.
Then, there were times when I was unable to stop my mind from racing. I had a hard time concentrating on simple tasks and making decisions. My right leg would shake uncontrollably and I would get so overwhelmed by my mind.
It was in those moments when I inspired to begin researching depression and anxiety. I had the following thoughts as I read the symptoms: “This sounds like me. But, if I’m diagnosed with depression and anxiety, does this mean I am no longer grounded in my faith? Would I walk around claiming something that the Christians deemed as not being a “real” disease? Am I speaking this illness into existence?”
Who Can I Turn To?
According to the National Association of Mental Illness (NAMI), Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain and mood disorder that causes persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, guilt and one cannot “just snap out of it.”
NAMI also describes anxiety as chronic and exaggerated worrying about everyday life. This can consume hours each day, making it hard to concentrate or finish routine daily tasks.
As the months passed, my symptoms became progressively worse and I became so numb to life. I slowly began to open up to my church family and some of the responses I received were so hurtful. I received a variety of suggestions on everything from speaking in tongues for 20 minutes to avoiding medication because it would make my condition worse.
As a result, I did not know what to do. I felt lost and alone, because a community that I turned to first in my time of trial and tribulation did not understand me. I was so deep in my depression that praying and reading my Bible was too difficult of a task to complete.
As time went on, I eventually went to the doctor and guess what? I was right. I went undiagnosed for over 10 years. Imagine the consequences if a person with cancer, AIDS/HIV or diabetes went undiagnosed.
The Breaking Point
I eventually found myself in the hospital after a friend called 911 to notify them of my suicide attempt. I was so removed from life that when the doctor asked me the day of the week and date, I could not tell him.
Honestly, I can tell you a number of reasons why I tried to commit suicide. Some of them were external factors, such as finances. Some of it was burn-out. Some of it was unresolved childhood issues and genetics.
However, after learning my family medical history, I discovered that several members of my family battled mental illness during their lifetime. Both of my parents battled mental illness, and my grandfather informed me about the time he tried to commit suicide at the age of 14. My uncle was admitted to the hospital due to schizophrenia.
A Bright Future
Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no reason to feel ashamed or embarrassed. God has placed amazing people in my life from family members, friends who are simply extended family, doctors, therapists, and medication.
While my goal is not to rely on medication for the rest of my life, I am grateful that I found something that works while I work through recovery. Looking back to where I was about two years ago, I would have never saw myself living life with depression and anxiety.
I believe in the power of prayer and God’s word. As the scripture states in James 2:17, “Faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.” This leads me to believe that no matter how difficult the situation is, I will have to work towards healing and recovery even though I have a strong foundation and faith.
Do you have words of encouragement for someone who is battling mental illness? Share your thoughts below.
(RNS) — On Wednesday (May 19), Quintin Jones is scheduled to be executed in Texas. It is the first state execution of 2021, and the first time a state has executed anyone in nine months.
It’s been 40 years since we’ve gone this long without a state execution.
Quintin is not the only person currently scheduled to be executed in Texas this year. So are four other people. Typically, Texas accounts for about half of the executions in the U.S., but this year it could account for all, or almost all, of them. Five of the six executions planned for 2021 are in this one state. Until just this year, Texas has had a law called the “law of parties” that allowed people not directly responsible for a murder to be executed for the crime, sort of guilt by association.
And, even now, Texas considers “future dangerousness” during sentencing, an idea that’s been debunked by most criminologists and experts because it is impossible to predict who someone will become. In some cases, like Duane Buck, court “experts” have even suggested race can be a determinant of future dangerousness … not even subtly suggesting black people are more likely to be violent than white people. Perhaps one of the many reasons African Americans account for a disproportionate number of our executions and of the death row population.
In contrast to other Texas cases like Rodney Reed, where it is quite clear there was a wrongful conviction, Quintin does not claim to be innocent of the crime for which he faces execution. He was 20 years old and addicted to drugs when he killed his great-aunt, Berthena Bryant, with a baseball bat. It is terrible, and he knows it. Early on, he too was convinced he deserved to die, and even attempted to take his own life. But over the past 22 years, Quintin’s story has taken an incredible, grace-filled turn.
His family, and the victim’s sister in particular, have seen the power of forgiveness, redemption and mercy. They are among the most vocal opponents to his execution. Every time they speak you can feel their authentic faith shine through the cracks of their pain. They have seen the changes in Quin’s life, the ways he has embraced his faith, tried to heal the wounds he inflicted, and the steps he’s taken to change his life.
Speaking of his faith, in a viral video produced by The New York Times, Quin quoted a passage from the Bible that says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). Quin went on to say if he is executed, Texas will be executing the child he was, not the man he is now. He and tens of thousands of others are asking for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to stop his execution.
Many of us who are asking for Quin’s life to be spared are Christians. And at the heart of our faith is the belief no one is beyond redemption. We are praying. We are calling the governor. We are hoping this is a moment Abbott can show the best of his faith tradition as a Catholic. Pope Francis has called for a worldwide abolition to the death penalty, and the Catholic catechism teaches that the death penalty has no place in modern society.
And yet one of the tragic realities in America is, up until now, the Bible Belt has been the death belt. In the very part of the country where Christians are most concentrated, and under the leadership of Christian governors like Abbott, the executions continue. Despite our claims to be pro-life, Christians have been the firm base of support for the death penalty. But this too is changing. Recent polls of millennial Christians (born after 1980) show overwhelming support for the abolition of the death penalty.
There are many things we are excited to see return to “normal” in our country as it begins to open back up after the massive death and sickness from COVID-19. Worship services. Going to coffee shops and concerts and on a date to the movies. Playgrounds and swimming pools. But resuming state executions is not something on that list.
State executions are not something most Americans want to see “return to normal” after the pandemic. Many of us would like to see the nine-month halt on state executions be “the new normal.” For the first time in my 45-year life, a majority of Americans are done with the death penalty.
Even though it is partially true that it took a pandemic with a massive death toll to slow down the machinery of death when it comes to capital punishment, there’s more going on. Let’s not forget that the Trump administration set a record number of federal executions during the same period state executions were hitting a record low (there were only seven state executions in 2020, the lowest number we’ve seen since the 1980s). After 17 years without a single federal execution, former President Donald Trump carried out 13 executions in the last seven months of his presidency. He executed people at a rate we haven’t seen since the 1800s, and he did it in the middle of the pandemic. When Trump left, federal executions stopped, and President Joe Biden has pledged not to carry out any more.
Meanwhile, a lot of states are recalibrating, trying to figure out if the death penalty has a future. State by state, the number of executions has been dropping nearly every year. So have new death sentences, which are the lowest they’ve been in a generation. Nearly every year, a new state abolishes the death penalty. Early this year, in March, Virginia made history, becoming the first formerly Confederate state to abolish the death penalty.
There is reason to hope the Supreme Court, even a conservative-leaning court, could deem the death penalty unconstitutional — not only because it is cruel, but because it is “unusual.” Executions are rare and arbitrary, and most of the country is ready to move on, along with the majority of the world, from executing people. A mere 2% of the counties in the U.S. generate the majority of executions. Right now, Texas is on the wrong side of life, and Texas is an outlier.
It is also noteworthy the states that continue to hold onto the death penalty are not only the states in the Bible Belt, but they are also the states of the former Confederacy. The states that held on to slavery the longest are the same states that continue to hold on to the death penalty. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is precisely where executions continue to happen today.
A generation from now we will look back on the death penalty like we look back at slavery — with shame and horror, with many of our grandchildren asking how Christians used the Bible to defend such a thing. So this is a time for courage. It does not take courage to say slavery was wrong generations after we abolished it. But it took courage to say slavery was wrong when many people thought it was acceptable, even God-ordained. This is a time for courage.
(Shane Claiborne is an activist, author and co-director of Red Letter Christians. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of Religion News Service.)
