It goes back a long time.
It’s interesting that the 18th Century Puritan leader, Cotton Mather, was the first notable advocate of smallpox inoculation in the Colonies. Cotton Mather is normally more associated with the Salem witch trials.
However, another Puritan leader, John Williams, opposed inoculation based on his interpretation of the Bible.
FWIW, I’ve attended “Evangelical” Christian churches all of my life (I put that in quotes because, while the denomination of my current church — I’ve attended this one for the last 18+ years — is classified as Evangelical, it grants individual pastors a lot of autonomy and based on my own research of the history of the Christian church, my pastor’s teachings are remarkably in line with Orthodoxy). In 40+ years of attending “Evangelical” churches, I’ve never heard a single word against vaccination. At least not from the pulpit or from any teacher. Of course, I can’t speak for my fellow attendees. I imagine they’re as varied as any large group of people.
While I agree with this post generally – there is a lot of interesting convergence in such things as homesteading/back to the landism – having homeschooled for a bit I also note that in part it is separate parallelism. The homeschooling ethos and materials on the far left are far more “Waldorfian” – engagement with nature and the senses, learning old crafts, following your bliss sorts of things, while on the far right there is a lot of back to the basics, spare the rod and spoil the child, sitting square at your desk with your feet on the floor.
They don’t agree about child rearing except that mainstream culture is doing it wrong.
Evangelical church attender since childhood (Christian & Missionary Alliance, then Assemblies of God)- never heard a word against vaccinations (or dinosaurs, for that matter.) I first encountered anti-vax ideas in Christian Identity lit which usually made the points that it violated the command against ingesting blood or that it was derived from non-kosher animals.
Here’s at least one example of the tie the OP is talking about: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/08/theres_a_measles_outbreak_at_v.php?page=all.
IMO this alone doesn’t seem to cover it. Vaccination is as old as, say, lightning rods, another technological innovation which was opposed by religious authorities when introduced. But you’d be hard-pressed to find any religious figure decrying lightning protection from the pulpit today.
And until somewhat recently, I think vaccination fell in this same category. The difference, I think, is that mass vaccination produces side effects in a few individuals that can occasionally be quite severe. It may reduce the spread of disease overall, but that’s not much comfort to the few unlucky kids (or their parents) who end up suffering for it. If their loud enough, they can make the problem seem worse than it is, and lead a statistically-challenged population to believe mass vaccination ain’t all that great. Throw in that vaccination is administered or required by the government (for the right wing) or that it seems like a deliberate intrusion against nature (for the left), and I can understand why a not-insignificant minority would oppose it. That doesn’t justify opposition, but it’s at least understandable.
IIRC in the 50’s and even into the 60’s there was a lingering “if God wanted man to fly we’d have wings…” attitude by the oldsters. Best retort, “if God had meant us to eat cooked food we’d have ovens in our throats…”
Push back on progress - lightning rods, vaccines, or anything modern (the Amish)- is nothing new, nor is using the old orthodoxy to oppose it. We just have a plethora of new-age nutbars with the same agenda…
According to the Center for Disease Control, a major health problem will be the evangelicals on mission-trips, with their unvaccinated kids, bringing back major diseases from 3rd world countries.
“oh Lord, please let my little Jimmy get polio.”
Kids have to be vaccinated to attend public schools in New York state. Is this a private school, or are they somehow skirting the law?
There are fundamentalist elements in all major religions that resist modern medical practices, just as there are rational folks. There’s a canard that the Amish don’t vaccinate their kids, but many do. While there’s a nutty fringe of Christians who preach the antivax faith, at least they’re not running around assassinating vaccination workers because they believe vaccines are a plot to sterilize the faithful.
Well, Park Slope, so I’m guessing private school, though if you can afford to send your kid to private school, the law probably doesn’t apply to you anyway.