Stetzer and Church Influence of Vaccinations

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

For those not familiar with Stetzer, he’s not just a religious liberal arts professor and this wasn’t just another dime-a-dozen pastorly podcast. To name just a few of his past and present titles in the evangelical world, Stetzer is also the executive director of the Billy Graham Center and the editor-in-chief of Outreach media group. He was previously an editor at Christianity Today and an executive director at LifeWay, one of the largest religious publishers in the world. That’s to say nothing of the dozen-plus books on missions and church planting he’s authored.

In short, when it comes to leveraging high evangelical offices to influence everyday Christians, arguably no one is better positioned than Ed Stetzer. You may not know his name, but if you’re a church-going Protestant, it’s almost guaranteed your pastor does.

During their discussion, Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants. “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work,” Collins said. Stetzer replied that he sometimes hears from ministers who don’t feel comfortable preaching about Covid vaccines, and he advises them, in those cases, to simply promote the jab through social media.

“I just tell them, when you get vaccinated, post a picture and say, ‘So thankful I was able to get vaccinated,’” Stetzer said. “People need to see that it is the reasonable view.”

The most crucial question Stetzer never asked Collins, however, was why convincing church members to get vaccinated or disseminating certain administration talking points should be the business of pastors at all.

Stetzer’s efforts to help further the NIH’s preferred coronavirus narratives went beyond simply giving Collins a softball venue to rally pastors to his cause. He ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center would be formally partnering with the Biden administration. Together with the NIH and the CDC, it would launch a website, coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide clergy Covid resources they could then convey to their congregations.

Only two days before Stetzer published his essay, Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by CT. The outlet introduced him as a “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life” despite the fact that Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies.

But the pro-life Christian framing was sure to win Collins a hearing among an audience with deep religious convictions about the evil of abortion. Many likely felt reassured to hear that a like-minded medical expert was representing them in the administration.

…but Collins was specifically tapped to carry the message to the faithful. As Time Magazine reported in Feb. 2021, “While Fauci has been medicine’s public face, Collins has been hitting the faith-based circuit…and preaching science to believers.”

Stetzer, CT, and The Gospel Coalition were hardly alone in uncritically lending their sway over rank-and-file evangelicals to Collins. The list of Christian leaders who passed the NIH director their mics to preach messages about getting jabs, wearing masks, and accepting the official line on Covid is as long as it is esteemed.

One of the most noteworthy was the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), an organization funded by churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

Former megachurch pastor Tim Keller’s joint interview with Collins included a digression where the pair agreed that churches like John MacArthur’s, which continued to meet in-person despite Covid lockdowns, represented the “bad and ugly” of good, bad, and ugly Christian responses to the virus.

During Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren’s special broadcast with Collins on behalf of Health and Human Services, he mentioned that he and Collins first met when both were speakers for the billionaires and heads of state who gather annually in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. They reconnected recently, Warren revealed, at an “off-the-record” meeting between Collins and “key faith leaders.”

Throughout all of it, Collins brought the message to the faithful through their preachers and leaders: “God is calling [Christians] to do the right thing.”

And none of those leaders thought to question whether Collins’ “right thing” and God’s “right thing” must necessarily be the same thing.

Why not? As Warren said of Collins during their interview: “He’s a man you can trust.”

He [Collins] has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures.

To the most holy of progressive sacred cows — LGBTQ orthodoxy — Collins has been happy to genuflect. Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Other than his assertions of his personal Christian faith, there is almost no public stance Collins has taken that would mark him out as someone of like mind with the everyday believers to whom he was appealing.

Francis Collins has been an especially successful envoy for the Biden administration, delivering messages to a mostly-Republican Christian populace who would otherwise be reluctant to hear them. In their presentation of Collins’ expertise, these pastors and leaders suggested that questioning his explanations as to the origins of the virus or the efficacy of masks was not simply a point of disagreement but sinful. This was a charge likely to have a great deal of impact on churchgoers who strive to live lives in accordance with godly standards. Perhaps no other argument could’ve been more persuasive to this demographic.

While these evangelical leaders were warning about conspiracy theories, Collins was waging a misinformation campaign himself — one these Christian megaphones helped further.

There’s an instructive moment at the end of Warren‘s interview with Collins. The pastor misquotes Proverbs 4, saying, “Get the facts at any price.”

That, of course, is not what the verse says. It says get wisdom at any price. And it was wisdom that was severely lacking when so many pastors and ministry heads recklessly turned over their platforms, influence, and credibility to a government official who had done little to demonstrate he deserved it.