Last year, more than 25,000 Illinois students -- from both public and private schools -- received a religious exemption for the measles vaccine. That’s up about 90% from a decade before, according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education.
Other states, like Texas, allow for exemptions based on a “reason of conscience,” like a religious belief. Those exemptions led to lower vaccination rates in Texas' Gaines County, where the state’s largest measles outbreak in 30 years began and spread among the county’s Mennonite Christian community.
In Illinois, religious exemptions are the only non-medical exemption families can seek.
Back in 2015, Illinois made it more difficult to receive religious exemptions. The state passed a law that made parents and guardians submit an exemption form that both details the “specific religious beliefs” that conflict with immunization and requires them to get the form signed by the child’s health care provider. It’s then up to the school to decide if the objection is valid or not.
It’s probably not a surprise that the Illinois schools with the most religious exemptions are religious schools. Many of those schools have seen significant increases in the percentage of students who received religious exemptions.
A private, Christian school in suburban Cook County had the most objections last year. In the past five years, they’ve gone from 11% to 30% of students receiving them. Others have gone from 10% to 25% or 1% to 10% in that same span.
It’s important to note that, as those numbers indicate, it’s still a minority of families at these schools who are seeking these waivers. But why exactly are they seeking them so much more now, as opposed to five or 10 years ago?
Max Perry Mueller is an associate professor of religious studies and history at the University of Nebraska. He says just think about what’s happened in the last five years.
“I do think," he said, "COVID is the obvious and clear catalyst to the increase in these exception exemptions."
But COVID doesn’t explain everything. For one, Mueller says, it doesn’t explain why the politicization of the COVID vaccine would spill over into denial of other vaccines like MMR for Measles.
“COVID was the catalyst that drove up the exemptions for vaccines," he said, "but it was a movement within these communities, especially on the evangelical religious right, of skepticism, if not hostility, to institutions and their expertise, especially bureaucratic expertise."
Mueller says that distrust of government institutions and, by extension, public schools, had been building since Reagan and the so-called “Moral Majority.” Then COVID became a perfect catalyst to weave mistrust of vaccines more clearly into their worldview that the government exerts too much control over their lives and the lives of their kids.
But the religious exemption form families submit does ask people to detail “specific religious beliefs” that conflict with immunization. Is there a particular set of Bible verses commonly cited by those seeking an exemption?
A 2021 post from the Christian think-tank the Family Research Council outlines how families can justify religious exemptions, by citing a verse from the book of Romans that says, “for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin,” so Christians shouldn’t willfully act against their conscience.
Mueller says this is an example of what theologians call “proof texting.”
“The Bible is such a complex text," he said, "that you can make it say anything you want, and people have, for millennia."
But Mueller says that’s not to say these anti-vaccine beliefs are insincere.
“These folks are coming from a genuine place of care for their children," he said. "They think that they're doing what's best for their children."
And, again, this is still a minority view. Most people do see the value of vaccines.
But Mueller doesn’t think anti-vaccine sentiment is a short term, COVID-era phenomena either. He thinks this is a generational shift that was a long time coming. Mueller thinks there’s only one thing that could change that.
“What will change it — and I do believe eventually it will change — is, unfortunately, mass outbreaks and mass suffering," said Mueller. "When a lot of these same families find that their children and the children in their communities are suffering horribly from these communicable diseases.”
When measles vaccination rates dip below 95% in a community, that’s when the risk of an outbreak begins to climb. In Gaines County, Texas, where the current outbreak started, the measles vaccination rate was 82%.
In Illinois, there are only two counties, both at the southern tip of the state, with rates below 90%.
