Republicans, Black Americans, Latinos, and predominantly white rural residents have two surprising things in common: They are more distrustful of the Covid-19 vaccine than other Americans, and they are also more religious. At this critical moment for battling the coronavirus, we need to leverage the second attribute to help address the first.
Large philanthropic organizations have rarely taken full advantage of the nation’s vast network of religious institutions to meet their goals. Faith-based nonprofits receive just 2 percent of all grant dollars from the top 15 private foundations, according to a recent report by the Bridgespan Group. It’s time to break that pattern.
As vaccine supplies catch up with demand, the biggest threat to reaching herd immunity will be getting them off shelves and into willing arms. During this narrow window of opportunity, philanthropy needs to get over its hesitancy to support religious organizations and work with health care institutions, local congregations, and faith-based nonprofits to build trust in the vaccine and create safe spaces for the most hesitant to receive shots.
The data make a strong case for this approach. The country overall is roughly divided between those who would like to get the vaccine as soon as possible and those who are hesitant or resistant, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Covid-19 Vaccine Monitor. But majorities of Republicans (67 percent), African Americans (65 percent), Latinos (57 percent), and rural Americans (56 percent), express hesitancy or resistance to taking the vaccine.
A range of factors account for this distrust. Republicans and white rural Americans, who are more likely to identify as Republican, are heavily influenced by partisanship. Ahead of the 2020 election, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute (led by one of us, Robert P. Jones), found that only 39 percent of Republicans, compared with 60 percent of the country overall, considered the pandemic a critical issue. Less than four in 10 Republicans said they had a lot of trust in any key sources of information about the pandemic, including political leaders, public-health organizations, and university research centers.
Distrust in the Medical Establishment
African Americans’ concerns about the vaccine have little to do with politics and much to do with distrust in a medical establishment rooted in historic discrimination, including the horrific Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in Black men. Mistrust among many Latinos, who make up the majority of the nation’s 16.2 million people in mixed immigration status families, may stem from reluctance to receive the vaccine at government-connected sites. Additionally, many new immigrants lack connection to a trusted physician.
At the same time, these disparate groups are more likely to be affiliated with religious organizations and place trust in them to provide a range of social services. According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 American Values Atlas, just 13 percent of Republicans overall claim no religious affiliation — compared with 23 percent of the population as a whole. The number is even lower (8 percent) for Republicans age 65 and older, who are at the highest risk of dying from the coronavirus. Similarly, just 8 percent of older rural Americans and older Latinos and 10 percent of older African Americans claim no religious affiliation.
Churches serve as a civic gathering space and a trusted source of social services and personal counsel in Black and Latino communities. “I know people in the African American community, people of color, who will not feel as comfortable going to a medical center as they will feel coming to a place of worship to receive their vaccine,” says Father Martini Shaw, rector at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia, which is partnering with the city’s Lankenau Medical Center to offer Covid-19 vaccinations.
In a state that has had a sluggish vaccine rollout, this local partnership has improved vaccine uptake by reaching out to congregation members and addressing their concerns, including assuring them that Black scientists were involved in developing the vaccine.
The same is true in rural counties, which have 80 percent more religious congregations per capita than other geographic areas. Rural residents are accustomed to seeing their congregations as sites of civic and social-service engagement. During the pandemic, for example, local religious congregations have served as hubs for distributing food relief across the country. In an analysis of six cities, including two smaller ones in rural areas, Bridgespan found that religious congregations and other faith-based nonprofits accounted for about 40 percent of the social safety net.
This creates a remarkable opportunity for the larger philanthropic world to support a critical but untapped piece of a successful pandemic response. Philanthropy should embrace a three-pronged strategy that both meets the immediate need during the health crisis and commits to sustained support for these institutions in its aftermath.
Fund health and religion partnerships. Grant makers can start by funding local partnerships between religious communities and health care institutions. An effort run by Interfaith Youth Core (the organization led by one of us, Eboo Patel) offers a good model. Along with partners at Rush University Medical Center, the organization reached out to the Chicago Community Trust and proposed a program that would train the leaders of 15 racially and religiously diverse congregations and faith-based nonprofits as Faith in the Vaccine ambassadors. Such models are easily replicable and could be expanded to hundreds of congregations and nonprofits in the Chicago area alone.
Most existing programs, such as the Philadelphia church and hospital partnership, were initiated by local leaders with little or no external funding. Given the urgency of the problem, large philanthropic institutions should immediately make funds available for these projects. They can do this by working with national interfaith organizations, including campus groups and university religion departments, to distribute grants to their networks of faith-based organizations.
One innovative effort, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and coordinated in part by the Public Religion Research Institute, tapped an existing network of religion scholars at more than a dozen universities, seminaries, and other organizations to make grants to over 130 local groups and religious organizations providing emergency services to vulnerable populations in the past year. These networks and programs could be replicated to create a robust, nationwide Faith in the Vaccine program.
Support research on religion and vaccine hesitancy. Philanthropy can fund research that illuminates the role religious institutions can play in addressing the needs of particular populations. For example, significant funding has gone toward research on vaccine hesitancy among racial and ethnic minorities, but little is targeted to understanding the religious dimensions of vaccine hesitancy.
Such research could address a range of issues, including concerns about whether the vaccine is Halal among Muslims, the influence of pastors in African American churches and rabbis in Orthodox Jewish communities, and the role of QAnon conspiracy theories in vaccine hesitancy among white evangelical Protestants. The findings could provide a basis for education and training for health care workers across the country.
Incorporate religion into broader giving. The philanthropic world should commit to sustainable giving by incorporating faith-based funding into every social safety-net portfolio and recognizing the key role these organizations play in promoting general well-being.
The lack of broad engagement with religious groups stems in part from a limited knowledge and comfort level among professionals in philanthropy. Noorain Khan, director of the Ford Foundation’s office of the president and a member of the Muslim Philanthropic Initiative, noted in the Bridgespan report that she observed a persistent “discomfort” among her peers “when it comes to faith‑inspired organizations.”
To help solve vaccine hesitancy, philanthropy needs to get past its own religion hesitancy. It needs to marshal one of our nation’s most important resources for addressing emergencies — our bountiful and trusted religious organizations.
