“Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation. These debates have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality.” — Kira Ganga Kieffer

Are anti-vaxxers simply bizarre anti-science crazies egged on by conspiracists like RFK Jr? For Kira Ganga Kieffer, author of Unvaccinated Under God, what she calls “vaccine hesitancy” in America is actually a more complicated and prescient affair.

The prevailing narrative — that vaccine-hesitant people lack scientific facts or serve their own individual agendas — misunderstands what’s actually happening. Kieffer’s argument is that vaccine hesitancy is best understood as a kind of religiosity. Not in the narrow context of church doctrine, but in the broader sense of meaning-making, moral reasoning, and an intensely individualist relationship with the body that is deeply rooted in American evangelical and alternative-spiritual tradition.

This hesitancy, Kieffer shows, is not new. It has been present since the smallpox vaccine in the eighteenth century. What recurs across very different eras and very different communities is a set of metaphysical rather than scientific concerns expressed in the language of wellness, purity, and bodily sovereignty.

The most interesting political implication of Kieffer’s argument is that the same hyperindividualistic anti-modern instinct behind vaccine hesitancy also drives the wellness movement, the rejection of AI, and the political coalition that coalesced around RFK Jr. She sees this as a broad and growing constituency that neither party has fully understood nor spoken to. Rather than crazies, today’s anti-vaxxers might offer a window onto tomorrow’s American politics.

Five Takeaways

• Vaccine Hesitancy Is Moral Meaning-Making, Not Ignorance. The hesitant parent is not asking a scientific question. They’re asking: if I consent and my child is harmed, am I responsible? That’s a theological question about guilt, intention, and moral agency, dressed in the language of health.

• Evangelical Hyperindividualism Is the Root. American evangelical Christianity is an individualist proposition: saved by personal choices. Wellness culture applies the same logic to the body. Bodily salvation through personal choices about diet, supplements, and vaccines. Very American. Very old.

• Vaccine Hesitancy Has Been Present Since the Eighteenth Century. Not a COVID phenomenon. Not a 1990s phenomenon. Present since the smallpox inoculations of colonial Massachusetts. The same core concerns recur: bodily purity, parental moral responsibility, distrust of external authority.

• RFK Jr.: Crusader or Influencer? He channels the same instincts Kieffer traces throughout the book. His coalition is showing signs of disillusionment. Followers who believed in his purity are finding that political power complicates it. They’re looking for someone else.

• The Anti-Modern Instinct Will Grow. The same impulse drives vaccine hesitancy, wellness, and AI skepticism. A broad constituency that packages distrust of modernity in spiritual terms. Neither party has fully understood it. As hypertechnology expands, it will become more significant, not less.

About the Guest

Kira Ganga Kieffer is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University and the author of Unvaccinated Under God (Princeton University Press, May 19, 2026).

References

Unvaccinated Under God by Kira Ganga Kieffer (Princeton University Press, May 19, 2026): press.princeton.edu
Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 Matthew Avery Sutton and American religion
00:03:03 Vaccine hesitancy as religious expression
00:06:40 Is Kieffer vaccine-hesitant?
00:08:14 Hesitancy since the eighteenth century
00:09:21 Why it angers progressives
00:20:00 RFK Jr. as a case study
00:35:00 Is RFK Jr. an evangelical crusader?
00:38:33 A new politics of wellness?
00:40:24 AI skepticism and the anti-modern instinct
00:42:43 Evangelical hyperindividualism and its political implicatio