Whatever happened to "Love Thy Neighbor?"

Vaccinations and mask-wearing could have been a matter of being kind, courteous, patriotic, and Christian.  

Instead, COVID vaccination and mask-wearing came down to an argument about rights. 

You can't make me!  Yes we can!

It is not crazy or utopian to think that the whole COVID response could have played out very differently--even in Texas.  In fact, Texas is a model for how it is possible for government to ask people to do the public-spirited thing, even at the expense of personal inconvenience. Texas positions not littering as a matter of respect and pride of place. 

Bumper strip

The "Don't Mess with Texas" campaign deals with a simple reality that from the point of view of any one individual riding in a car with fast food wrappers, the easy self-interested thing to do is toss it out the window. Litter is an economist's "externality." Littering offloads a cost to someone else, in this case the general public. Littering can be rationalized as a drop in the bucket. There are laws prohibiting littering but people can litter when unseen and almost always get away with it. An anti-littering campaign needs to get people to do the public-spirited thing, against their own personal interests, voluntarily.

Texas has a campaign of TV ads, billboards, special events, and road signs urging people to do the right thing out of love for Texas. In one of dozens of TV ads produced over the past almost-four decades, Willie Nelson sings:

"You can travel on beautiful highways

Where the beautiful bluebonnets grow,

And you're still in beautiful Texas,

The most beautiful place that I know."

Narrator: "Seventy percent of litter on Texas highways is made up of small trash. Small trash makes a big mess. Don't mess with Texas."

https://youtu.be/ys7KMAj9o-U

It is not a quixotic, Pollyanna approach. Americans volunteer to do public spirited, considerate things all the time. People give blood. People support good causes with their time, energy, and money, from church work to scouting to 4-H to soccer leagues. Democrats and Republicans volunteer. People find their own rewards for doing this but it generally includes self-satisfaction in thinking one is doing some tiny bit to make the world better by helping others. 

The original positioning of vaccinations was to protect the vaccinated person. In hindsight, this was a bad start. The emphasis was on getting the oldest seniors protected because they were most at risk of hospitalization or death from the disease, and health care workers because they were most at risk of catching the disease. Throughout the rollout of the vaccine many people finagled to get to the front of the line--in hindsight another bad message. Vaccination was a privilege for oneself. The vaccine was positioned as a "lifeboat" amid an accident at sea. There was very little messaging about the idea that vaccinated people were much less likely to spread the disease. In that context religious leaders put their attention on whether or not there was any use of fetal tissue in the vaccines and on the ethics of who "should" get vaccinated first.  

Meanwhile, team red, which connects Trump's leadership, GOP media, and evangelical ministers, settled into a public stance of skepticism or outright opposition to masking, social distancing, and vaccinations. Since vaccinations were a matter of self-protection, deciding whether or not to get vaccinated was a matter of personal choice, and therefore a way to signal opposition to Democrats and COVID mitigation techniques. Christian conservative clergy backed their team. Trust Jesus, not Fauci. Pressure to get vaccinated was analogized as opposition to religious conscience. Evangelical Christians are among the least vaccinated segment of the population and the most dug-in in opposition to vaccination.

At this point in the COVID pandemic, most people acknowledge that the worst disease outcomes are among the unvaccinated--the red team--and that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the disease since they are less likely to get COVID and are less contagious for a shorter period.  And in parallel, mask-wearing is primarily a matter of respect for others, since masks diminish spread of the disease outward, and give little protection to the mask wearer.

The religious community has an opportunity to urge people to do onto others as they might wish to be done to themselves. Don't spread COVID. They could make a widespread, public appeal that Christians show love for one's neighbor by getting vaccinated and wearing a mask in public. It isn't too late and it isn't a crazy suggestion.

If there had been a vaccine to stop the spread of leprosy, what would Jesus have done?