That’s nothing compared to what many others have put up with for much longer, she said.
But, the epidemiologist added, “Every time I would talk about faith over fear and masking as a way to show our freedom and allegiance to Jesus, they would come.”
At first, Smith was answering questions on Facebook about whether face masks work and whether churches should continue to meet in person.
Over the summer, though, she saw some Christians begin to shift the narrative in ways that were alarmingly racist, blaming the spread of COVID-19 on Black Lives Matter protests, immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border and Asian Americans. None of the data supported that, she posted on the Friendly Neighbor Epidemiologist page.
She heard arguments that masking was a sign of fear and not of faith. She kept pointing back to Galatians 5, which says while Christians are called to be free, they are to use that freedom to “serve one another humbly in love.”
“I think wearing a mask and getting a vaccine, full of faith, displays my lack of fear more than going to an unmasked church service just to prove something,” she said.
Especially troubling to her were people who refused to wear masks, especially at large gatherings hosted by evangelical Christian leaders, like Franklin Graham’s Prayer March 2020 in Washington, D.C., and services at John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church in California.
“I was hearing all of this stuff, and I was uncomfortable, because that’s just not Jesus to me or ‘love thy neighbor,’” she said.
These days, Smith is posting a lot about the COVID-19 vaccines, as polling by the Pew Research Center shows 45% of white evangelicals say they definitely or probably will not get vaccinated against COVID-19, a higher number than any other religious group.
She’s not the only Christian urging evangelicals to get vaccinated.
Curtis Chang, a faculty member at Duke Divinity School and senior fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary, has launched ChristiansAndTheVaccine.com in partnership with the National Association of Evangelicals to help pastors and other Christian leaders talk about the COVID-19 vaccines.
