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Those of you who were offering concerns about medical autonomy might be particularly interested in this piece by Whitney Pipkin from The Common Good. She interviewed me when she was working on it. I'll excerpt liberally below, but go and read the whole thing (and support a new young writer).
No huge conclusions here, but a useful accounting of some of the reasons why conservative evangelicals are more likely to suspect medical expertise.
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Only 32 percent of Americans polled by Gallup in 2025 said they had any degree of faith — or “confidence” — in the medical system. That’s compared to 80 percent in 1975…
Medicine and religion have had often overlapping, often oppositional relationships…Entire religions such as Christian Science have been formed largely over skepticism toward modern medicine. But within American evangelical Christianity, broad distrust toward the institution of medicine has been spreading with renewed fervor in recent years…
“One of the main problems with mistrust is that one cannot live by skepticism alone,” [Josh] Reeves [of Samford University] writes. “We have to rely upon others to know about the world.” Culturally, we accept this about our auto mechanics or the people who dye our hair. We acknowledge that this individual has studied the complexities of a system far more than we have, and that our own opinion of how well they perform is limited by our expertise — or lack of it. While we could technically DIY aspects of their work, we pay them because we’d rather not devote the time it takes to do it well.
But the internet and its algorithms have turned a lot of that on its head. YouTube videos make us feel like we actually could remount the engine ourselves — or at least attempt a partial highlight at the bathroom sink. And whether or not we ever do it, having access to such information makes us feel more capable of forming our own opinions about it.
That said, unless you have reason to mistrust your mechanic or hair stylist, you’re not likely to go through the work of extensively fact-checking his or her findings. When it comes to medicine, though, there are reasons why some people, and especially in the church, might mistrust the machinery.
Conflicts between Christian and secular understandings of the world have been around since at least the 1920s in America. It was then that these oppositional frameworks began contributing to the rise of the Christian fundamentalist movement.
Darwinian evolution had laid a naturalistic foundation on which disciplines like psychology and sociology were being built. Social sciences and universities seemed to be charting a new course — a new way of understanding the world. And churchgoers were left to decide whether it could fit with the one the Bible also gave them…
The role religion plays in individual views of medicine reached a new inflection point during the COVID-19 pandemic, with more people citing their faith as a reason for hesitancy over certain medical interventions. A Pew Research poll conducted in February of 2021, for example, showed that nearly half of the 41 million white evangelical adults in the country did not plan to get vaccinated against COVID-19. This compared with atheists, 90 percent of whom said they did plan to get the vaccine. Suddenly, white evangelicals were one of the most vaccine-resistant demographics in the country, mirroring a hesitancy around medical intervention that had previously been more common among certain minority groups…
How did we get to a place where Christians can disagree on so much about medicine? Plenty of cultural factors have whittled away at some Americans’ trust in the institution of medicine, an unwieldy phrase encompassing everything from governmental health agencies to a local pharmacist. And among them is a sordid history of medical missteps.
These include the U.S. Public Health Service withholding the available treatment for syphilis from hundreds of Black men who participated in a 40-year study of its effects at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama through the early 1970s. In the 1990s and 2000s, opioids that prescribers initially said were safe proved in the end to be addictive, harmful — and incredibly lucrative for the systems that sold them. By 2023, more than 800,000 deaths were attributed to opioid overdoses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These struck rural and often religious communities harder than others, contributing to an underlying distrust of the “big pharma” companies that undersold the drugs’ dangers…
The cracks in the public health system that became more glaring during the pandemic have only been exacerbated in its aftermath. That’s perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the case of vaccines and religious objections to them in particular.
Bauer points out in her book that steep skepticism of vaccines has been around since their inception. This, she writes, is in part because it’s always been difficult to explain exactly how they work, with the scientific method preferring to focus on the effectiveness of their results instead. The earliest inoculations, precursors to vaccination, were initially considered a “folk practice” by medical practitioners who found them largely suspicious. But they quickly reduced mortality — and in the face of diseases like smallpox that seemed otherwise insurmountable.
Still, there were other physicians who initially opposed measures to require vaccinations, even those that were effective only if enough of a given population received them. An English doctor’s opposition to the “Compulsory Vaccination Acts” of 1853 at Parliament essentially boiled down to vaccination not having enough “scientific backing” to justify its imposition on religious “conviction” and “freedom.”
Similar arguments found fertile soil during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among American evangelicals. Some Christians saw getting a vaccine as a way to serve the common good and restrict the spread of disease, while others saw it as an issue of religious freedom and bodily autonomy. As one evangelical parent testified in a hearing about religious exemptions to vaccine mandates in Connecticut, getting the vaccine was sometimes seen as a “strict violation of our imperative to treat our bodies as holy temples of the very Spirit of God.”
Getting a vaccine has always required some sort of trust in a system of experts whose understanding surpasses your own, whether that’s the CDC or the local doctor who assures a mother a shot is “safe and effective” before administering it. But that’s the sort of trust that is now measurably slipping…
In many cases, those most hesitant to place their trust in medical institutions are far more likely to place it instead in individuals, especially those who brand themselves as anti-establishment. Those most likely to reject “big pharma” over the high costs of certain prescriptions could then be more likely to spend hundreds of dollars on supplements that have very little regulatory oversight of whether they deliver the results they claim.
“Many Christians combine extreme mistrust of mainstream institutions of knowledge with a gullible trust of alternative news sources, social media, and cable TV hosts,” Reeves writes. “If skeptical Christians held their own favorite sources of information to the same scrutiny … our situation would be much improved.”
The medical decisions we all make…are not nearly as rational as we’d like to think. Bauer makes a compelling argument that many of our old ways of understanding our bodies and the world haven’t been fully replaced by more scientific ones. We’ve simply added germ theory and the hubris of an age of antibiotics to our modern understanding — while clinging to some oddly superstitious beliefs on the side, like the Hippocratic concept of achieving “balance” in our bodies, or the age-old warning that you’ll “catch a cold” if you go outside with wet hair.
“We don’t move cleanly from one belief system to the next,” Bauer told me. “We just carry all the baggage of the previous belief system along with us and revert to it when it’s convenient.”
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We’ve Lost Faith in Medicine | Common Good Magazine
commongoodmag.com
A decline in trust in medicine follows the downward curve of trust in all institutions in America over the last 50 years. Have we lost faith in medicine?20 hours ago
This conflates distrust of a medical establishment with distrust of medicine itself. Hear me out: My grandfather understood this distinction 70 years ago. He warned his teenage daughter to be cautious about the new hormonal birth control because he believed new treatments should be approached carefully when long term effects are not yet fully understood. His concern was not a rejection of medicine. He was one of the leading physicians of his time in women’s health. His point was that doctors, researchers, and corporations are human institutions, and human institutions can make mistakes, overlook risks, and change their conclusions as more evidence becomes available. That is why many people distrust parts of the medical system without distrusting their own doctors. We recognize that even an excellent physician works within a system shaped by incentives, regulations, pharmaceutical companies, and imperfect information. A history of drugs being approved by the FDA and later restricted or withdrawn is one reason some people approach newer interventions with caution. Do we distrust our family doctor? Not necessarily. Some of the doctors we respect most are the ones who avoid rushing toward new treatments, read the studies themselves, acknowledge uncertainty, and treat patients as partners. I have a great respect for the many specialists who have helped me and my family throughout the years. My grandfather’s caution was not rooted in religion, though he was a Christian. It came from professional experience and an understanding that expertise does not make someone infallible. Reducing medical skepticism among Christians primarily to a lack of trust in expertise misses an important distinction. Of course, skepticism can go too far, and expertise should not be dismissed simply because institutions have flaws. But trust is not maintained by asking people to ignore those flaws. It is maintained when institutions are transparent, accountable, and willing to acknowledge mistakes. Do some Christians take this skepticism too far? Absolutely. But this excerpt seems to imply that those examples are representative of Christian resistance to medical authority as a whole. I would question that assumption.
I’d add another plank to that argument: the fraud perpetuated by Andrew Wakefield. Even though his fraud has been thoroughly exposed (and for those in the sciences, his science looked dodgy from the get-go on multiple levels) many people still cling to the false idea that vaccines are broadly harmful. Collide the timing of that issue with the rapid expansion of both the internet and the opportunists who saw a chance to make bank by peddling alternatives, plus the very real human tendency to over estimate our knowledge on any given subject, and the stage has been set.
I’m in rural family medicine. Our area in general has a lot of folk medicine and skeptics, but I’ve had a lot of my patients for 20+ years and I think that makes all the difference. Even though I wear a rainbow heart pin and my FB has anti MAHa stuff posted they generally trust me. I think a large factor in the distrust of doctors is how everything has moved to large clinics, fast med, telehealth etc. it’s rare to have small independent practices where your doctor actually knows you.
I’d also say there’s also a not-so-latent anti-intellectualism in certain circles that has its roots in the split between the fundamentalists and modernists as exemplified by Scopes. I hear the same sorts of arguments grounded in sloppy hermeneutics. Also, I should read your book. Did you talk about Basil’s Long Rule on the medical arts at all?
I appreciate the spark of discussion here. It’s an important topic and the connection between trust and religion and large institutions is one worth exploring. At the same time, I find it sorely lacking in the explanations I have experienced first hand regarding the lack of trust in the medical system. For example, in asking the question, why would a person trust an individual doctor over the system and spend the same amount of money in supplements as they would in medical costs…what about the lived experience of individuals for whom their unexplained chronic health issues are not being helped by the drugs being prescribed? What about the idea that Western Medicine no longer asks “why” a symptom exists, but rather how to resolve the individual symptom. The amount of chronic health issues that exist today are not well understood at all, and historically, it has been the marginal groups that pin point root causes before the system does: for example, the GAPS diet has spoke of leaky gut and the need for balancing gut bacteria and how it relates to multiple symptoms decades before that became common knowledge. There are kids who are getting chronically sick in ways that the medical system barely touches or understands and there are individual doctors who may not have official trials but have equivalent anecdotal evidence to support the approach that differs the systems solutions and actually helps resolve the issues without the side effects that often come with medical pharmaceuticals. I think it would be better to explore the cultural influences on trust in the medical system, such as black and white thinking that doesn’t allow for nuance, or how do we establish authority scientifically? The pandemic exposed the medical system as being strongly influenced by the political authorities and much of what was sold as hard-truth has since then been undone, and not without harm, sometimes great harm, to individuals who blindly trusted the system. We ought to encourage critical thinking and curiosity and a willingness to learn and think outside the “established system” as part of how the scientific community grows its body of knowledge. No one should ever have blind trust in a system. That is not how we learn and grow and it’s certainly not being faithful to the idea that science is at its foundation meant to be a discovery of what already exists. So let’s be good scientists and keep asking questions!
While I would agree that there are way more Christians that now mistrust the medical establishment, for good reason, there are still WAY more secular folk who are in this camp. When I was growing up, our more natural stance was almost unheard of for Christians. Joel Salatin talks a lot about this too. Natural health has been mostly owned by new agers and etc. It is only within the last ten to fifteen years that I have seen any marked difference in Christians accepting that maybe there is a better way to take care of our health. I can finally talk much more openly about alternatives. The trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry is finally losing its propaganda grip on society, which is absolutely amazing to me.
If you lived during the time when 1/2 or more of your children died of cholera, or got polio, smallpox, etc, vaccines would seem like a gift from heaven. My grandmother was born in 1912, and married in 1928-ish. She was pregnant 14 times, but only had 5 children live to adulthood. I don't know what happened to the others - we didn't talk about things like that when I was growing up. But I can easily believe those diseases we now vax against were part of the reason. Thing is, we've had decades where no one got pleurisy, whooping cough, smallpox, cholera, etc. We may intellectually realize it's due to the vaccines that were developed, but over time it becomes easy to forget that, and to discount the severity of those "old" diseases. That creates fertile ground for those who have their own reasons for sowing discord and distrust. Add the trauma of the thalidomide babies, and the knowledge that the FDA was trying to fast-track its approval in the US, and it adds more validity to the distrust of some institutions, especially when something is being fast-tracked. I don't have a solution - I'm very grateful my PCP is willing to discuss things with me and not just dictate to me.
A significant reason people claim religious reasons for their stance is that it has become the ONLY WAY to opt out. So we craft religious statements of objection because we are not allowed to just say we don't want it. Medical doctors are not at liberty anymore to write excusals for us (they risk losing licenses). I'm kind of shocked the author and those interviewed didn't mention that or realize it. Many of us would rather find our own way, through trial and error and sharing information with others outside the industry, than trust the systems we know have tremendous financial incentive to erase natural options in favor of pharmaceuticals and cover up anything that would call into question the safety or efficacy of a treatment. We also see damages that mainstream medical doctors refuse to acknowledge, while those who adhere to their religious fanaticism over their "doctors orders" seem to bury their heads in sand and refuse to believe something their doctor ordered could be harmful. I'm 50. I've raised four kids and I began with complete trust in most institutions. My life experiences have taught me that there are too many perverse incentives to protect the institutions and not enough to protect the individual.
Kind of interesting how intellectual perspectives get completely binned into religious buckets. I know a ton of doctors, lawyers, executives, home makers and everyone in between that are atheists or agnostics with similar views. It turns out God equipped everyone with a brain, some sense of morality, and some sense of discernment. Who knew!
Sounds interesting! The internet does play a big role. So many varying opinions and “cures” as well as exposure of when the medical establishment has been in serious error-info that in previous times might only have been known to those studying medicine or medical history-doesn’t help.
Faith is right. It was always faith.
This post was under yours… Interesting… So many differing points of view unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-primary-cause?fbclid=IwZnRzaAS5POtwZG9mA2ZkaWQWUKFDMiU8TY4qRctX1k1D...
Some of us just have histories of really bad personal experiences.
I think a large part of the mistrust was also fueled by the opiate epidemic. People watched their family members become addicts and die from medication given to them by their doctor. 
Also critics of the low-fat Federal dietary guidelines argue that the Seventh-day Adventist Church with Ellen B White and the Kellogg Brothers contributed to the current epidemic of metabolic syndrome and diseases... What today are considered low carb diets were normal nutrition before the big push in the 70s and '80s to reduce saturated fat
You can read thousands upon thousands of 'anecdata' comments on social media - dating back decades as well because the Internet is forever - of people's testimonies of how the medical establishment has harmed them. Any gut health group is going to have so many stories of people despairing because they finally got a diagnosis 10 doctors, several surgeries, and a decade later. Many finally took their health into their own hands and started healing with more holistic, find the root cause and heal it, methods. And on vaccines, for many, who should they trust? A doctor that had a three hour lecture once on vaccines (and the curriculum was either manufactured or paid for by pharma) or well educated people that had a terrible experience with loved ones harmed and then deep dived for hundreds if not thousands of hours over decades into the research and then started summarizing that research for those willing to listen. I've also spent over a thousand hours reading everything - on all sides - for two decades. The attacks on social media have also changed a lot over the years. The most vitriolic against non-vaxxers was actually in 2015/6, and ever since then I see more and more people state a distrust in vaccines. I think pharma's plan backfired. Mandating anything backfires in America. Spending multimillions on lobbyists and focus study groups, and paid bots and ai posts on the Internet, does not necessarily mean they are going to persuade everyone. I tell my political friends it's a miracle how much has changed in ten years. The comments are so different now than 10 years ago. Sometimes they despair about how much there's still left to do, but I say, look at the past ten years and how much it's changed. Keep fighting, the truth will come into the light.
I'm not religious, not an American. I don't trust any medical professional, we don't vax. The vast majority of the US seem to trust the medical system and the FDA and yet your kids are getting sicker and sicker
Hit me up I'm mobile mechanic and available
Not sure why "balance" is superstitious. As a historian myself, I find great value in those systems of older thought. We're beginning to see not some political or religious rejection of science but the philosophical breakdown of modernity brought on by the 17th century until our present time. The influence that the Enlightenment has had over all parts of our culture, from everything including science to education, has begun to develop holes. I was a classical educator until I realized that it wasn't ancient education I was supporting but a modernized reversion which purported to be ancient. It was still highly logical and very "unbalanced". I also grew up in the trust science with everything culture. The baby boomer generation has a much greater trust and my parents rush to the ER for everything. They also tried every health fad while I was young. Now they both have diabetes (and many other things) and my father's pancreas is nearly defunct. I've seen my entire family on both sides trust the medical community implicitly and get sicker and sicker. That doesn't mean there isn't room for western medicine. However, well meaning doctors have made my life a living hell for nearly 26 yrs. Misdiagnosed at age 25, they got me physically dependent on medication for nearly 20 yrs now. It's hard to hold a job. We can support Western medicine but also listen to others who may have very good reasons to bring balance back into our medical system. Our belief in the superiority of our current age is an illness and we'd do well to relearn those "superstitions" as they might prove to be something far more curious and truthful than we formerly thought.
We are the sickest country in the world and the most medicated and vaccinated by far. I think this article fails to take too many issues into account. As a medical professional I would actually say the American public doesn’t have enough healthy distrust of the modern U.S. medical system….. But taking a pill is sometimes much easier than working to get health back
Well, train got delayed because of heat, but I finally got back to my people and we ate burgers and got a jump on the Fourth. In our own way!
5 days ago
LOL, that's our Saturday night movie! 😂😂😂😂
YASSSS!! Our traditional movie, too, but we’re holding out til Saturday…maybe. 🤣
Burgers Susan style...let the fireworks begin!
Will never stop having a crush on Jeff Goldblum in this movie. 🥵
This scene made my Dad tear up lololol !
My favorite presidential speech by a wide margin.
Still my favorite president 🤣🤣
