An Attack of Mormon Mania
Embarrassing blunder by WaPo and Benjamin Park on vaccine hesitancy among LDS Church members and what it reveals about our ruling class
Update: The Washington Post did issue a correction, but the correction was worse than the original mistake. See Democracy Dies in Deceptive Data for a full discussion.
In August, rising academic star Benjamin Park, a Cambridge-educated historian and assistant professor of early American and Mormon history at Sam Houston State University, penned an op-ed for The Washington Post on the roots of vaccine hesitancy among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). In his piece, Park argues that following World War II, Church leadership intertwined conservative political ideology with theology, so much so that it has become difficult to see the differences between conservative ideas and Church policies. Park explains that while in the past these two influences may have served as complementary forces for Church cohesion, in the face of a global pandemic where Church leadership is strongly encouraging vaccination, conservative politics that used to buttress leadership’s legitimacy are now undermining Church authority.
Park says that vaccine hesitancy in members “stems from Latter-day Saints’ embrace of political and religious conservatism in the wake of World War II,” and he holds past Church leadership heavily responsible for current Mormon opposition to vaccination.
He’s wrong.
Park bases much of his argument on Utah vaccination rates, which he misreads so egregiously that he undermines his major points. In addition, his analysis of both current and historical forces driving skepticism of the government’s Covid response is stupefyingly simplistic. These weaknesses are worth examining, not just to push back against Park’s analysis, but because Park’s opinion piece is a wonderful case study that illustrates why a portion of the general Church membership is skeptical of academics, mainstream media, and the current ruling class.
Bad Data Reading
Park makes the following assertion: “Less than half of eligible residents of Utah, where members constitute a majority of the population, are fully vaccinated, placing the state in the lower half of the nation.” I clicked on the website Park linked to, which sends you to the Utah government’s coronavirus dashboard. Because this website is updated daily, I used the Wayback Machine to consult the page on August 18th, a week before Park’s Op-ed was published, to make sure I was looking at the same data he would have been consulting.
The archived page shows that as of August 18th, 47.6 percent of Utahns were fully vaccinated, which is likely where Park got the idea that “less than half of eligible residents of Utah” had been fully vaccinated. The problem with this number is that it includes all children in Utah under 12 years of age. Children under 12 are not eligible for the vaccine, and they make up a significant portion of Utah’s population. When children are included, it lowers Utah’s overall vaccination percentage significantly. The real number of eligible Utahns fully vaccinated is found two boxes to the right: 58.9 percent of those older than 12 are fully vaccinated. The data does[1] not support Park’s description of “less than half of eligible residents.”
The second part of Park’s claim, that Utah was in the “lower half of the nation,” also proves to be wrong. I consulted the Mayo Clinic’s vaccine tracker (also from August 18th) to compare fully vaccinated rates for each state in the three demographic categories provided: under 18, 18-64, and 65+. In the under 18 fully vaccinated rates, Utah is at 14.2% vaccinated, tied for 25th place. For the 18-64 demographic, Utah’s fully vaxxed percentage comes in at 62.3%, at 17th place. And for the 65+ demographic, Utah is at 90.4%, at 20th place.
In all categories, Utah clearly punches well above where Park indicated. If anything, it appears that Utah is outperforming other states of similar ideological backgrounds and regional cultures.[2]
Where were the Washington Post’s fact checkers?
Beyond incompetence, I can think of other reasons why such embarrassing mistakes slipped through the cracks. The first reason is that the numbers were too good to question, especially since they confirmed negative opinions of the general Church membership. The conclusion was simply just too good to scrutinize.
Park’s piece suffers from what I like to call Mormon mania—being so eager to bash Mormons that it compromises intellectual honesty. It’s easy to essentialize and denigrate Mormons, and there are great financial and personal rewards for doing so. You can bring a show to Broadway rife with racist tropes and a musical score of questionable lyrical quality, but it will run to great success because it makes fun of the Mormons. You can cherry pick the most egregious examples of Mormons abusing public lands, blame it on their membership in the Church, and then use such characterizations to essentialize the whole Church membership. Or you can write extra lazy punditry during Mitt Romney’s presidential bid and pass it off as serious political analysis. You won’t receive much pushback because we all know Mormons are bad. (This is by no means an exhaustive list.)
Work attacking those of the LDS faith often doesn’t receive much needed scrutiny. Since Park’s patently false statistical claims portray Mormons in a negative light—something that most of the country’s intelligentsia is already eager to believe—it’s very likely these mistakes made it through without the rigorous journalistic standards reserved for other subjects.
Simplistic Reasoning for Vaccine Doubt
It would be one thing if Park had only gotten his statistics wrong, but the overall piece suffers from an approach that seeks to confirm his priors, namely that recent historical conservative and evangelical influences embraced by the Church are to blame for vaccine skepticism. Park makes a bold claim when he says that members’ Covid-19 vaccine hesitation “stems from Latter-day Saints’ embrace of political and religious conservatism.” (Emphasis mine.) He provides no qualifier. He leaves no other avenue of inquiry. I understand that most op-eds are meant to be provocative, but such reductive framing is unbecoming of serious academics and sets the piece up for failure.
For the sake of argument, let’s grant Park some grace that although the Utah vaccination rates are not as dismal as he contends, there remains a fair amount of skepticism among Church membership about the efficacy and safety of Covid-19 vaccines as well as the government response to Covid. We can also accept that Park’s ideas have some merit, that a past alignment between conservative politics and religious teachings has fed some of this doubt. Even so, Park ignores many other reasons driving the current skepticism that are more influential than the historical currents he points to as causative.
Of particular interest is the fact that Park does not mention other aspects of Church history and historical memory that help explain members’ general distrust of the federal government, including the federal government’s inability to stop angry mobs from driving the Saints from their homes and land at gunpoint, and an order signed by the governor of Missouri authorizing the extermination and expulsion of Mormons. He also failed to mention anything about the deployment of federal troops to Utah or the federal persecution of families practicing polygamy. These events still loom large in Church members’ consciousness, much greater than anything more recent that Park mentions. Had Park included this history, he would have contextualized members for a national audience that is less familiar with this difficult history, but mentioning this history would significantly weaken his argument. The fact that Park did not give any of these events a passing mention is surprising and disappointing.
Beyond such obvious omissions of Church history, there are many other factors influencing Covid vaccine skepticism among Mormons. It really shouldn’t be surprising that in the fallout of Covid-19, many people don’t trust the government, public health officials, or the experts. From the beginning, officials have given conflicting and contradictory recommendations, at first downplaying the danger and then reversing course. The high-profile mask debates began with officials saying not to buy masks because they didn’t work, only to turn around and come down hard in favor of them. The very murky nature of the virus’s origin, including questions about NIH funding for gain-of-function research in Wuhan and Fauci’s apparent duplicitous testimony in front of Congress, does not require a frenzied mind to conclude that not only are our technocrats not equipped to handle the virus, but they very well might be responsible for it.
At every stage, our ruling class has provided feckless and incompetent examples for the whole world to see. While political leaders (most of them on the left) strictly locked down their citizenry, they were caught breaking those rules themselves, often in fairly gratuitous ways, while small business owners watched their life’s work crumble to pieces, redounding to the benefit of large multinational corporations. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see something concerning here.
The media’s incompetence, greed, and blatant political framing since the election of Trump has only further exacerbated this climate of distrust. Sure, Trump may have played a role in this credibility crisis by denigrating journalists, but the media burned up much of its remaining reputation by chasing every possible Trump scandal only to come up with nothing or something significantly less than what was promised. This conspiracy-theory mongering by erstwhile reputable journalists is all the more infuriating to conservatives when they see the media turning a blind eye to similar egregious situations under President Biden. (Nowhere is this reality more evident than in the current tragic situation for migrants at the border, whom the Democratic establishment and media establishment only seem to care about when there is an elephant in the oval office.) And finally, the hagiographic media coverage of leaders like Governor Cuomo, even when it was clear from very early on that he made decisions that led to the deaths of a lot of grandmas and grandpas, has done little to instill confidence than coverage of the pandemic hasn’t been driven by ideological considerations.
All of this hypocrisy, dishonesty, and incompetency has been on full display on social media, and our ruling class has come away looking feckless, venal, and conspiring. For the average Joe on the street with no personal incentive in maintaining the prestige of the “experts,” this dishonesty is easy to see. To make matters worse, social media and the internet have fanned the flames of epistemic anxiety and nihilism, serving as vectors for disenchantment and paranoid conspiracies. These destructive technological forces have become even more powerful because our ruling elites have decided to serve such egregious incompetency on a platter, making social media a veritable bonfire at the base of the ruling class’s reputation.
Wrapping Up
I could go on, especially about the very dismal record of the expert class over the past century, but the main point here is that Park’s reasoning doesn’t even make the top five or even top ten reasons to explain Church membership’s Covid vaccine skepticism. Park does make some interesting points, and surely the intertwined nature of certain conservative rhetoric and Church decisions has helped nudge certain members along this more adversarial path, but Park’s reasons are by no means deterministic as he makes them out to be.
My most charitable explanation for Park’s reductive framing is that he has been thick in the weeds studying late 20th-century Mormon history; he looked up and drew a straight line from these decades to today, and said, “Voilà, causation!” But the piece’s framing is just too blatantly negative to believe its weaknesses are solely the result of the thintelligence perpetuated by the intellectual silos of academia.
Park’s discussion of the past creates a Manichean world in which knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, evolution deniers hold the Church back from embracing Progress, Reason, and Enlightenment. Although it purports to be historical analysis, his piece is an appeal (however poorly researched and framed) for the Church to change and embrace the world that Park believes it must follow. It’s meant to embarrass the Church and cast aspersions on past leadership stoking “far-right culture.” It’s clear that Park’s palpable disdain for Church leadership drives his analysis. Unfortunately for him, it drives his analysis off a cliff.
Ultimately, Park’s mistakes, and the failure of the Washington Post to catch them, only lend greater credence to the skepticism Park believes he is fighting against. If a Cambridge-educated scholar can’t read some basic charts correctly, and if a preeminent pillar of journalism can’t catch simple statistical errors, why would people trust these secular authorities on anything else?
(Written by A)
[1] “Do,” if you don’t follow colloquial usage but insist on the scientific shibboleth.
[2] I understand there are limitations to this dataset, and the rankings for the under 18 are likely to be more volatile given that the states are closer in vaccination percentages for this demographic. However, it would be disingenuous to place Utah in the lower half of the country in the under-18 ranking. A more apt description would be to say it is solidly in the middle. Again, given Utah’s younger demographic profile, it is likely that the estimate is artificially deflated due to a higher number of children under 12 years old (i.e. those ineligible for the vaccine) being included in those numbers. I would love for someone with greater quantitative skills to take a closer look at everything.