Latest / She’s Smart / Dr. Kira Ganga Kieffer - Who Do We Trust—and Why?

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Dr. Kira Ganga Kieffer - Who Do We Trust—and Why? · She’s Smart

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to She's Smart. I'm your host, Maria Robotham.
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Today's conversation started with religion, but it quickly became a conversation
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about something much bigger, trust.
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Who do we trust to tell us what's true? Our doctors, our religious leaders,
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science, our own intuition, and what happens when the authority we've always
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trusted suddenly doesn't feel quite so certain?
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My guest today is Dr. Kira Kiefer, a scholar, writer, and visiting assistant
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professor at Fairfield University, where she studies religion,
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health, and medicine in the United States.
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Her first book, Unvaccinated Under God, Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern
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America, looks beyond the simple question of whether people vaccinate and asks
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something much more interesting.
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Why do we believe what we believe in the first place?
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Kira and I talk about religion and alternative spirituality,
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motherhood and the idea of trusting your gut,
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the power of personal stories, our complicated relationships with medical authority,
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and even why the word myth doesn't actually mean what most of us think it means.
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What I loved about this conversation is that it isn't about telling you what to believe.
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It's about understanding where our beliefs come from and maybe becoming a little
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more curious about our own.
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So get cozy as we connect, learn,
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and laugh together on She's Smart with today's guest, Dr. Kira Kiefer.
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Hi. Good morning. How are you?
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Good. Well, it's really wonderful to meet you.
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Yeah. Thank you for this invitation. Thank you so much for joining me on She's
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Smart today. I'm thrilled to have you on. So thank you for joining me today.
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Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to hear your questions.
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First off, before we dive into the meat of the conversation,
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I would love to know what brought you into this field of just religion in general or,
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traversing from like marketing background into this part of your life now?
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So I just a little background is that I went to college, I got a job right out
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of school in marketing, and spent six years doing marketing kind of in Westport and New York area.
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And a series of major life events happened. And it made me reassess what I was
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interested in doing and what I wanted to spend my life and my time on.
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And marketing wasn't it. And so I kind of dug deep and went back to
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an area that had really fascinated me and that I had fallen in love with during
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college, which was the study of religion, the academic study of religion,
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which seems rather obscure and strange to many. It was my favorite class in college.
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Good. World Religions, I took two semesters of it. Like you were supposed to
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take one, but I was so intrigued that I took a second. I love that.
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So it's so historical, too.
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It's all historical. It's all history, right? So it was exciting.
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So I feel you on that one. I do.
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Okay, great. So you were my dream student who wants to take a second class.
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So that's what happened to me was I started, I had taken a class in my freshman
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year, first semester, and I never stopped taking religion classes in college.
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And so I became a religion major and a history major.
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And then I left it all behind and it was 2008 and it was sparse times and I
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just kind of set out on my new professional path.
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But when I decided to rethink my career, I said the thing that I was so interested
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in that I thought was the most important.
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Mentally expansive intellectual kind of pursuits that I had had was studying
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why people are religious, how they're religious.
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And like you said, how is religion history? How is history religion?
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Like, why do they interact so much?
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How are they even different? I don't even think of them as different the way that I think about it.
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So I went and got a PhD in religious studies at Boston University, which took a long time.
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And now I am a visiting assistant professor in religious studies at Fairfield
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University, and I published my first book, and I study American religion.
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And that's my main area of interest is religion in the United States,
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history of the U.S., and especially health and medicine and religion and alternative spirituality.
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So lately, we've been hearing about religion used to be that people weren't
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as religious anymore, right? There was kind of like, at least in the media,
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there was a don't tick in religion.
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And now all of a sudden, there's like an uptick in religion.
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And you're seeing all these young people flooding Catholic churches and at least
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the media or the things that are being sent to me. And maybe it's because I'm researching this.
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I'm being targeted with whatever's out there.
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But from like a broader way of studying religion, do you think that's actually true?
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Or are we sometimes just putting our faith somewhere else?
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Like, are we actually going back to like structured religion?
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Or are we kind of looking at other places where we can find meaning,
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connection, things like that?
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So I think both are true. I think that there seems to be, and it's always hard
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with the dynamic statistics of what people are actually doing in terms of church
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attendance and being able to know that for the last year versus this year.
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Like that's something that has to shake out. And so people will be studying
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that for a while. And I've heard very conflicting opinions on what is actually
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happening in terms of church attendance and which churches and where and why.
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But we are certainly seeing a big tick up in terms of a very conservative Catholic theology from J.D.
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Vance and a lot of other particularly male politicians and people in that world, like the J.D.
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Vance world, and also very conservative, kind of highly traditionalist or almost
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like fundamentalist Protestantism or evangelicalism from those circles.
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And I think that that's absolutely...
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Trickling down to certain subsets of maybe younger men who are,
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if they're not attending church, maybe they are listening to things on YouTube or following.
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So that's like the difference between like church versus what did you do on
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the internet is kind of a diffuse space now because of how much content you
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can receive on the internet.
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On the other hand, we have over
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decades seen church attendance and temple attendance go down in the U.S.
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And the rise of what we as scholars see as alternative spirituality broadly.
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And that's an area that I find fascinating because of how,
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imbricated it is in so much of popular culture too, and then wellness culture,
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alternative medical culture, which has all just become so,
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multifaceted and actually fascinating to me, approachable to many different
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types of Americans with different backgrounds and ideologies that they've been raised in.
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So I think both are true. Like there's a decline in traditional church attendance.
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There's certainly a decline in like mainstream Protestant attendance that's
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been going on, not forever, but since like the 1950s.
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But in certain areas, there's huge upticks. And alternative spirituality is
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so diffuse and so personalized and so like individualistic that some folks would
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say, oh, well, that's not really religion.
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I don't agree with that at all. So I find that's reductive, but it's hard to
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put your finger on exactly what it is.
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So that's what I really do enjoy looking at, especially as it relates to health and medical,
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issues, which to most people on the outside seem to be totally separate from
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religion or spirituality, and I think are actually very related.
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I'm finding that in our area, which is affluent, there is more ability to make those decisions,
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because you can afford the alternative medicines and you can afford the different
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ways in which you want to raise your family, feed them, give them nutrients, guide them in that way.
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And in other areas of the United States or in Connecticut alone,
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like 15 minutes from here, I doubt there is a large following in that base.
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They see an alternative medicine doctor. They don't go to a regular doctor,
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but not in the sense that they're a general practitioner.
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But if you were to go 15 minutes from here where the only medicine you get is
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from that doctor who is at the clinic or someplace that you can afford or that
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you can get, you don't have an option to make that decision.
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Like, you have to do it that way in order to, like, keep your family safe and
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healthy and, you know, in school and everything else.
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Yes. So do you find that in your – is that the case as you've been researching
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this and looking into it?
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I mean, absolutely. Like from an economic perspective, yes, that has always been the
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case because of the way that our medical system is structured and the way that
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insurance works and what is paid for and what is approved as evidence-based
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and scientifically efficacious.
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And therefore, what exact types of treatments and forms and ways of training
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are the official ways of doing medicine.
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My husband's a doctor, I should note. He's a cardiologist in training. He's at Yale.
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A lot of the people that he treats and that walk through the door don't have
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those choices whatsoever. Those are the populations that he sees a lot of the time.
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Of course, there is huge stratification in terms of those types of choices.
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However, I think that a notable trend that we've seen in vaccine hesitancy that
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I studied over the past 50 years is that when there is perceived,
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high risk, whether there is high risk or not, according to traditional medical
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authorities, but when a person perceives high risk of a procedure
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or a vaccination in particular, because I think there's a particular weightiness
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to those who are vaccine hesitant about vaccines.
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I think we see that there's more willingness and kind of ability to scrape and
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to put resources into the world.
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Alternative practices. And sometimes those alternative practices are homeschooling.
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There's a division of labor and resources, or there's alternative practices of.
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Choosing to space out the vaccines as far apart as you possibly can,
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which means you maybe have a few more copays, but probably those are only $10.
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So like, there's a lot of range here.
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Then of course, The people that you and I probably both know who use functional
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medicine doctors, alternative medicine doctors, naturopaths,
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herbalists, the whole shebang, for the most part, they're really out of the system.
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And that's a whole like kind of worldview approach to like literally a holistic
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approach to your health that people dip in and dip out of as they see fit.
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And there's like all sorts of reasons why people do that. And again,
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I think it's, I just fear sometimes a little bit like that the economics argument is so easily,
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kind of thrown almost like an, or it's like it's a little dagger by people who
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want to say like, oh, well, only rich people do these sorts of crazy things or alternative stuff.
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And it's really just because they have nothing better to do or they just have
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so much money to throw around that they're like, and they get hyper-focused
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on their bodies and their, you know, selves.
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I think that's a reductive argument. I think that when people are suffering,
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with their health, it becomes quickly existential.
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And a huge threat to their ability to see who they are, to function,
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particularly people with chronic diseases.
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And those are a lot of folks that end up trying alternative medicine when they
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see that they don't necessarily get the care that works for them in a biomedical setting.
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So I just always want to, you know, I'm not really, I don't pick any sides.
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And that's really like the point of my work is I'm a historian.
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I study, I'm a sociologist. I'm a student and scholar of religion.
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So I just look where what's happening.
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I don't cast any judgment. And so I wanted to just kind of get out there right
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off the bat and say that I didn't want listeners to think that that was where
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I was necessarily coming from.
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Like, oh, if you're rich and you do this, you're just one kind of person and
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poor people are poorer people.
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Can't afford it, but they would otherwise. Or, you know, like we can't assume
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those things. I love that clarification. We all need that clarification.
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So I'm fascinated by this because you wrote in the book the DPT history and
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it is like this collision between statistics and personal testimony, right?
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So you have the doctor that says, statistically, the risk is extremely small,
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while a parent can say, but I watched something happen to my child.
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Right? So how do those two forms of knowledge ever have a productive conversation?
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And maybe if you can do like a cliff notes of the DPT history,
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because you touched on it so much in the book, but yes, it's small that the
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listeners can understand.
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For the question. Yeah. So the DPT controversy that you're talking about is
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the subject of chapter one in my book.
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But as you noted, it becomes really the framework that,
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people who feel or fear that they're a child or a loved one was harmed by a
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vaccine utilize the same framework decade after decade after decade, just in different ways.
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So what happened was in the early 80s, 1982, there was a documentary that came out.
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It was exposé on NBC asserting that the diphtheria pertussis tetanus combination
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vaccine that was used during the 70s and the 80s and even earlier was causing
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children who received it
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to have major neurological problems.
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Dysfunctions after they received it. Not everybody, but then you think.
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And that was really that more than you think, dot, dot, dot.
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Like, look into it. Here's like some statistics. Like, are they legit statistics?
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No, but maybe, but who knows? You can't know.
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We don't know. No viewer can understand or know that.
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And that documentary absolutely blows up. It just riles up a very parent-driven
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grassroots movement, which says, oh,
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this documentary really spoke my language because every doctor that I ever saw,
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one of my kids started to have these weird
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developmental regressions or started having seizures and high fevers or rolling
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around on the floor, not really knowing, having like being totally different
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than they were what seemed to be their developmental track.
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I'm now going to assume that that was because of the DPT shot.
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And, you know, I didn't know, but now I do. And so they have this conversion
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experience to this new understanding.
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Now, doctors and scientists were saying, like, no, no, no, like,
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that's not your, you're making the wrong conclusion.
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Then they would say, well, what conclusion should I draw?
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And that's where the void is. We don't know.
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So it's not this, but we don't actually know what did cause your child to have
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these regression or these changes in their entire medical outcomes.
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So it leaves when you have this void in explanation or explanatory knowledge that.
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That leaves people with the tools that they can find on their own, right?
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And so they find religion broadly, not necessarily like, oh,
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I'm going to become a Christian now because I need some guidance from God. Yes, sure, some people.
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But more like, I'm going to find an alternative community or I'm going to find
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people like me who seem to see the world the same way that I do based on the
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experiences that I've had.
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That does mirror like an evangelical Christian overall narrative of like,
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I was lost and then I had this major experience. I became a convert.
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Jesus is my Lord and Savior. I now see the world differently.
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I want to tell other people about it.
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Yes, and that's the framework that I saw happening over and over again after
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that documentary in 1982 with the parents groups that came about as a kind of response.
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So we see this rise of these parent-led groups saying, this happened to my child.
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They are not Christians. They are not in an organized religion.
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I want to be clear on that.
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But the way that they speak about it, the way they understand these experiences
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does resonate and refer to because we live in a culture.
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So we pick up how other people speak and what resonates and meaning-making skills.
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And they were like, this is what happened. And this shot was far more dangerous
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than I was led to believe.
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I never expected a problem. I always trusted doctors. Now I don't trust doctors because they.
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My child was hurt and the doctor said that it wasn't true. And so this causes
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kind of a hoopla, basically, goes to Congress.
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People become activists on this issue of vaccine safety and the kind of question
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of like, well, what vaccines are safe or what does it mean to be safe?
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What does it mean that we now want to question kind of like the basic foundations
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of what public health is about, which is that you risk harming a few to help the many.
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I think that historically, we kind of forgot that.
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And I mean, some people didn't forget that, but most people accepted that.
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And that is the primary promise of public health, period, is that there are
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compromises, but the overarching benefits so outweigh the potential problems.
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Or the downsides, whether it be individual autonomy or whether it be a risky side effect.
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And so people start to question like literally that platform,
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that framework of like, is this what we signed up for? We did not know that
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we were signing up for that.
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Now, that was maybe a little unfair too, but that's what happened.
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And as we go forward in the history with the measles, mumps,
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rubella shot, that becomes the exact same framework, except for it's focused
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more on autism as the kind of risky or bad side effect.
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And I should note that the formulation of the DPT shot was changed after this,
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like, kind of almost decade of scientific and,
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governmental and political kind of, like, debate that is...
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You know, that is part of the story. It is the truth of the story.
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Although different people from different kind of points of view would say,
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well, like that's not, we didn't change it because of that, you know,
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but I think it's fairly clear that they did.
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Yeah. That's a good segue because that was the Jenny McCarthy,
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right? Where she came out and was very vocal about it. Go ahead.
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She came out about the MMR shot. Yeah. The DPT shot was changed.
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The MMR shot is what she came out about about a decade or so later in 2008 so
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this gets my next one of my other questions was you write about this shift from
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like scientific motherhood where the doctor was the authority,
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toward intensive motherhood where a good mother is expected to research everything
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and trust her own intuition,
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so when did the trust your gut begin competing with the expert.
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Where you just kind of well, it doesn't feel right.
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And the doctor's saying to do this, but I just don't feel right.
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So I'll use myself as an example.
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My kids, my kids get everything. That's just how we do things.
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I don't give them the flu shot.
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And I was raised in the 80s. We were literally put in a room with everyone to get the chickenpox.
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And it was just how we did it. And for me personally, I'm like, well, they're healthy.
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They get the flu. We should be good.
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That is my gut instinct. Now, the doctor every time is like,
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here are all the things we're going to do. Do you want the flu shot?
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I'm like, I don't want it. Okay. I'm going to write down that you said no to
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the flu shot. Like I said, no.
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So that is where my gut instinct comes into it or whatever I've just decided
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in my mind is better or not.
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Whereas my scientist friends, not even doctors, but my scientist friends who
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actually create these vaccinations are like, why?
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Like they don't understand my gut instinct or whatever it is so when did this
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kind of like not competition but,
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It is competing with what the authorities or the doctors are saying versus what
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I'm just feeling. Yeah, so I think that's a very good question.
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And as a historian of this, I can say that those trends kind of go,
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you know, they're kind of polar opposites, right? Like it's like the deferential
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to the experts versus the trust yourself.
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You know, those kind of pull at each other over time. Like the peak of scientific
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motherhood was the 30s and 40s and into the 50s, where it was just like, oh, we didn't know.
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We don't know anything. Scientists know everything. Doctors know everything.
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Then you've got like Dr. Spock, who comes about in like the 60s and 70s.
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And he's more like a trust yourself, you know, like parents, like you can do this.
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And it's a little bit more laid back, actually. And then you have like this.
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Reverberation that comes back again in like the 90s saying, oh, no, no, no.
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Like, mothers better to get on their research. They need to,
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you know, like the kind of the cultural framing of intensive motherhood is not
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only about just research on what you put into your child or how you,
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you know, like what you feed them, although it was a huge component.
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Women in the United States, this is where kind of a feminist argument would come out.
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You've kind of been given a lot of latitude with getting into the workforce
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and everybody going to college and all of this. And this is kind of leaving
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the kind of traditional society, societal norms behind.
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And we want to remind you, this is coming from a more conservative viewpoint
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and religious viewpoint, that your primary duty is to be a good mother.
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Your primary duty in this world is to bear children and take care of them.
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And, you know, in the 90s and the 2000s, that means you've got so much more
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information to deal with.
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But you have this very, very high stakes feeling. You know, if you were.
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Somebody who was, you know, a young mother in the 90s who was trying to work
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and have kids the same way as we are now, like, you're trying to, quote, have it all.
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And you're hearing, like, well, you better be paying attention to,
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you know, these vaccines and what's in them because it could be really scary
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the same way that people were shamed about sending their kids to daycare, like, in the late 80s.
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It's a very similar story.
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And so that's what's so fascinating about these issues is that you've got so
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many issues that are coming together.
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Like we've got all this gender politics. We've got religious politics.
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We've got medical discoveries and technologies. We've got natural health and
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wellness exploding and saying like, this is just a better way for people who choose it.
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And so then that becomes a whole moral framework in itself.
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And also certainly socioeconomic status and resources plays in there as well.
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And background. So to get back to your question, I just wanted to give you more
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of that background, which is like we have these tugs of war.
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And by the time we get to the early 2000s, when MMR is in the spotlight for
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potentially this like mercury being a component in the formulation of the additive of the vaccine.
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It's a very specific thing, but it becomes seen as like, well,
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there's mercury in the vaccine, and mercury causes brain issues,
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so that could be the autism.
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So there's so much information, it gets distilled down into like mercury or MMR autism theory.
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And in the mass culture, then it becomes about, hey, what's your gut on this?
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Do you believe this or do you not believe this?
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We have all sorts of reasons for why we believe things. And a lot of them have
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to do with how we're brought up and how our friends are doing things and peer
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pressure and now social media.
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If what Jenny McCarthy said on Oprah resonated with you, that the MMR vaccine
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gave her child autism and you saw yourself in that, I would say that was huge.
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I mean, it was hugely influential and what a huge platform.
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And so it's all about what resonates with you in your heart.
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And then that goes into your gut too. So everybody's making a risk calculation
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and your friends who are scientists are saying, well, like, I know the risks
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and the risks are zero. Like, the risk is that it doesn't work at all.
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And you still made the choice to...
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Possibly protect others with, you know, like having that immunity.
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If it works this year, then great.
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And if it didn't, then no harm done.
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And you're sort of like, well, you're implicit in your thinking.
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You're like, it does something.
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And I don't necessarily think that the flu is bad enough that I'm willing to
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risk whatever it is. Because you know that your kid's going to get through the
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flu, right? That's where the resources come through.
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You have the resources. You know that you can take care of them.
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If they're sick, you know that you're going to make, you know,
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like, so that's where more of the kind of like economics of the thing come through.
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You know, your family's probably pretty healthy, but like if you had a ton of
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like high risk people right in your home.
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Oh, yeah. Parents were living with me for sure. Then you probably would.
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It changes the dynamics. So everybody's got their own risk assessments.
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Yeah. And I think people kind of are trying to manage that with what they see
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as the authoritative expertise, which seems to have no wiggle room for what
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people feel is like their own.
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Individual values or beliefs or just information they heard that they thought was true.
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Yeah, there's the authority of it is one of one of my bigger questions.
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And I want to I want to get to that. But first, I want to ask you about this
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word, the myth, the word myth. So we tend to hear myth and think something false,
27:52
right? It's not true. It's made up.
27:55
What does a religious, religion scholar mean by myth? And why are myths so powerful?
28:01
And are we capable of making decisions purely from facts?
28:05
Or do we inevitably need some sort of story around those facts in order for us to believe them?
28:11
Very good question. I appreciate this question. Good, good.
28:15
It absolutely drives me insane when I see headlines being like 10 myths about
28:20
X, Y, and Z, and they're just saying these things are wrong.
28:23
Like the things that people think that are actually incorrect factually.
28:26
Because myth is so much bigger. Myth doesn't have to do with fact.
28:31
Myth is like these major webs of historically created symbols and stories,
28:38
like you said, stories, that explain why things are the way that they are.
28:43
Before we had scientific facts, everything was myths in a way because we had to explain,
28:51
how the world operated, especially how power operates and why do some people
28:57
have more power and some people don't have any power.
29:01
People may have different mythologies around the ones who are on the top to
29:04
validate why they have power, which is that I'm, you know, the divine right of kings. Is that a fact?
29:11
Or, you know, the people like me are, you know, subjugated or in poverty or
29:17
we work for the better of this greater order or, you know, we will...
29:23
You know, if you're like, you know, slaves in the United States,
29:26
oftentimes they saw themselves as like, well, we will prevail morally when we go to heaven.
29:32
But that is not where we are now. And those our slaveholders will be punished.
29:37
And if we buy into a Christian mythology, so it could be very like overtly religious,
29:42
but with different interpretations. Or if you go back to like ancient Roman
29:46
or Greek mythology, which we probably, you know, learned a little bit of in in high school.
29:52
Those are just ways of explaining how we got to where we are.
29:55
What types of people are good? What types of people are bad?
29:58
Archetypes. Same thing with astrology.
30:01
If you're like, hey, I'm a Virgo, which I am, and I'm a proud Virgo,
30:05
and I see myself in the archetypes that I hear in many ways.
30:10
But does it all fit? No, but you find yourself there.
30:14
And so there's all sorts of mythologies that create our worlds,
30:18
and the kind of influence of.
30:22
Strict scientific empiricism and then biomedical expertise relatively new in
30:29
the span of human history.
30:31
And it's basically like, well, there's rational thinking and then there's rational philosophy.
30:37
So like all these rational things where it's like we have to have like X plus
30:41
Y equals this. And like, we know what the odds are.
30:44
But only very few people have access to that knowledge.
30:50
And so they have to translate it.
30:54
And even as they translate it, they are then actually invoking mythologies as well,
31:00
stories to help us understand why it's best for, you know, us to,
31:06
you know, give something of ourselves for the good of the many.
31:09
It's all to, you know, like, we have to see that these two,
31:13
like these, there are many different ways of knowing things,
31:16
including emotions, including religious stories, including scientific facts,
31:21
including like different versions of history
31:23
that we might learn in Westport or Weston in the public schools versus in like,
31:28
you know, Dallas public schools.
31:30
And so it's just like there's a lot of different nuance. There's a lot of nuance
31:37
to what we know and why we know it.
31:40
And values come into play. And I think the people who would say,
31:43
like, well, we know that we're right, that's, to me, a little suspicious.
31:50
I mean, at least, like, from a historical perspective, you can say that's definitely suspicious.
31:54
You can definitely say, like, hey, like, well, where's the, where's,
31:59
like, the intricacy and the complexity there?
32:03
I think a lot of people live worrying about complexities because they feel like
32:09
the people who are in the authoritative position, in whatever position it is, are wrong.
32:15
Actually being rather reductive and like kind of reducing down the level of
32:19
complexity for their benefit.
32:22
And that works when people trust it. But when they don't, when they're given
32:26
a reason to not trust it, then they want more complexity.
32:29
And so that to get to your kind of earlier question, that's like when you've
32:33
got moms being like, oh, like I've got to take care of my kid and it has to
32:37
be like a reflection of me and be like a sacred being.
32:40
And my doctors like don't believe in my intuition. And I have to now I've got
32:45
to really like drill down and like figure out what I believe to be real.
32:50
So then what happens when you can't trust the authority?
32:55
So I'm going to use an example because I was raised Catholic and there was a
33:00
huge issue in the Catholic Church with the Boston was what I think like where it all came out.
33:07
And at that point, you're questioning every I mean, I questioned all of my Catholicism.
33:13
I questioned all of it. And I'm like, how can this be?
33:16
How could this happen? And the big, horrible thing happens. And then you question all of it.
33:22
So what happens when a person is in this religion, whatever it might be?
33:28
You could be in a synagogue. You could be in the Catholic Church,
33:30
in the Episcopal Church, whatever it is.
33:32
What happens when you stop trusting the authority?
33:37
What do people do then? Well...
33:40
It depends on, like, if the more conservative the operation or the affiliation
33:46
or institutions that you're a part of usually means that they have more authority
33:50
over, in our modern era, let's say.
33:54
So, you know, like, Catholic churches, they have, like, very clear hierarchies
33:59
and kind of rules about, like, moral codes, like, exactly how to be.
34:03
So then if you have, like, questions or you have, then usually you get very,
34:08
like, rote answers. if those don't do it for you, then like the whole thing kind of falls apart.
34:14
So like famous sociological theorists or sociologists of religion would call
34:18
that like tears in the sacred canopy.
34:20
Like you had like this canopy of trees or, you know, something that kind of
34:24
just like held the sky up and it made sense.
34:27
And then the more little things that poke into it starts to,
34:31
you know, you've got some rain coming through and now you're like, oh, I'm just soaked.
34:36
So I'm going to get out of this canopy entirely.
34:39
Hence why a lot of people left Catholicism even before that period,
34:43
which was, you know, if you look at like.
34:46
Hippie youth in the 60s they were just like nope because we just don't agree with like.
34:52
X y and z opinions of the church and then you see like the sexual abuse scandals
34:57
and the cover-ups and it's just devastating and you can't reconcile
35:02
so many people they could not reconcile those two things being true how can
35:06
they be infallible and also this incredible like,
35:10
you know evil so,
35:13
and the same thing is true for very conservative Jews, say like modern Orthodox
35:18
or even ultra Orthodox Jews.
35:20
Like you have to have like 100% buy-in when there's enough things that say like,
35:26
maybe it isn't true that I will
35:29
be struck down if I were to eat a cheeseburger or something like that.
35:34
And like, I'm taking this exactly from research that has been done on these
35:38
communities and backed on studies that I've worked on.
35:41
So people really, when they have enough doubt, they start to test and they see
35:46
that, especially in that community, and they see like, oh no,
35:48
like there are things that just, there are logics that don't make sense for
35:52
me when I have this other information.
35:55
And some people choose to like, kind of just like, I don't want to see that
35:58
other information. I'm going to stay.
36:00
And then there's people who are like, I can't unsee it. I'm going to leave.
36:03
So So with the authority in, say, like a mainstream Protestant church, you're much more fluid.
36:12
They're not that differentiated from mainstream culture.
36:16
That's why they have lower attendance also, because they don't offer something
36:19
that's super different from mainstream culture.
36:23
So it's like just like a classic sociological argument and didn't like break
36:26
any news there on like what has happened.
36:28
But conservative, like very conservative, tight-knit groups,
36:32
they have to have enough like authority to hold people kind of accountable to
36:38
them. And that's not necessarily in a negative way. It's just, it is just the way.
36:43
If you look at biomedical authority, there's a lot of reasons why we have to
36:48
believe in biomedical authority, right?
36:51
That's the only thing that is covered by health insurance. You can't afford
36:56
any care if you don't have insurance.
36:59
There's so many reasons that don't even have anything to do with the medicine
37:03
of it that have been created as structures that,
37:07
make biomedicine or conventional medicine of today the default way of doing medicine.
37:14
That's actually something I've been very deeply studying for my next book.
37:18
So I'm just kind of parroting from that. All right. Well, we're going to talk
37:20
about that before we end. We'll talk about what's happening.
37:23
So after spending so much time in your career studying belief, distrust, authority?
37:30
Has it changed the way that you decide who to trust?
37:35
That's a good question. Does it change the way? Or I think that the main thing,
37:39
if I had to say, why do I believe the things that I do about the world?
37:43
A lot of that is based in how I grew up, where I grew up, my parents,
37:48
and then also higher education.
37:50
It is truly a different mindset, a mindset and building blocks of a way of thinking
37:55
that I learned as a PhD student in a humanities PhD program.
38:00
And that allows me to think about things in certain ways, gives me blind spots to other ways, right?
38:07
Because I study religion and so many different belief systems and kind of symbol
38:11
systems, I kind of just assume that everything is a little bit true.
38:16
And so that's my way of thinking about most things is that there's always some
38:20
truth in everything. Otherwise, it really wouldn't exist because no one would
38:24
put anything into it anymore.
38:27
So I like to just assume that there's some truth everywhere and then use my, you know.
38:34
Higher education discernment to decide on like, well, what's the evidence for it?
38:39
But when it comes to religious beliefs and spiritual beliefs,
38:42
I don't really give much credence to the official or the scientific. I just say, is it for me?
38:47
Or if it's not for me, it didn't resonate enough. That's because of all my experiences in life. Yeah.
38:54
So what is next for you? What are you going to do next?
38:57
I'm working on a second book project as a follow-up to this one.
39:01
So the first book is called Unvaccinated Under God, Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America.
39:08
In that book, which covers 1980s, like we talked about through COVID,
39:12
I found, as I was researching, I found a bunch of interesting.
39:18
Historical tidbits that I hadn't really known much about, which was a longer
39:23
history of conservatives, like political and theological conservatives,
39:27
who have been interested in
39:30
alternative medicine for a long time, like through most all the 20th century and have been kind of
39:35
dissidents against mainstream medicine for a longer period than even more of
39:40
the progressives or like the spiritual types that we usually think of as new
39:45
agers who got in on alternative medicine in the 60s and 70s.
39:48
So I got really interested in that.
39:51
So that's what my new book is on. I'm in the very early stages of that project,
39:55
but I am working on it. And that's going to be a fascinating read.
39:59
That's what I'm doing. That's going to be a fascinating read.
40:02
Some pretty wild stories, I will say. You know, it's funny because when my.
40:07
When my dad, my dad's older, he's 86, and my mom is younger.
40:10
So they grew up in literally two different generations, right?
40:13
And because they're like a 14-year split.
40:16
When my dad was growing up, he is Italian, 100%. My noni cooked everything,
40:21
right? It was all from scratch. It was all fresh.
40:23
That was like the way he grew up. And my mom was not dissimilar to that,
40:28
but she was born in the 50s. So she had a little bit of a different upbringing
40:32
with what they were starting to do preservatives. and things were changing in the diets, right?
40:38
And now my sister and I do everything we can to feed our kids,
40:43
like everything that's, you
40:45
know, not preservatives. Like we keep diets as much diet way as we can.
40:50
We are going back to how my dad grew up and that way of thinking.
40:57
And then my mom was just kind of in the middle and we were raised like kind
41:01
of in the middle of all of that.
41:03
But it's funny to watch how it's all kind of circled back to,
41:06
you know, the purest we can.
41:09
And there are a lot of who are looking at it like that. Well,
41:12
you can see it happening in the government and all of that.
41:15
So one of my questions that isn't even on here, but I just thought about was
41:19
like the religion in politics.
41:22
So there's so much overlap when I'm watching this, not as a historian,
41:28
but just as a human, like, you know, American looking at things happening.
41:33
But you've got this separation of church and state, which has always been incredibly
41:38
important so that everyone can choose their own religion. Right.
41:40
I mean, that's a very this is a very like mediocre, like breakdown.
41:46
Right. It's like your basic First Amendment. That's right. Basic First Amendment.
41:50
So you've got that. And then you have, and you wrote about this in the book,
41:55
you have the HPV vaccine, which the government has mandated.
42:00
It prevents cancer.
42:03
It is recommended that kids take it.
42:07
I think that some states have actually, it's mandatory in some places and it's
42:12
not in others. We're in Connecticut. It's not mandatory in our state.
42:15
It's actually not mandatory anywhere. It's not. Is it highly recommended?
42:20
It's highly recommended, but mandated and highly recommended are different.
42:23
Yep. Okay. And so, like, I just wanted to quickly correct you because your key
42:27
point is actually, the nut of it is that it is not mandated.
42:32
It is not. Yes, correct. Because of all of the moral questioning of the morality
42:40
of a vaccine that protects against sexually transmitted infections that then
42:45
can cause certain cancers.
42:47
And so that became a huge thing when it came out. And conservative Christians.
43:02
Yeah. This I mean, there's so many in my mind.
43:06
There's so much to talk about in regards to just that one aspect of it.
43:11
I had the CEO of this really cool pharmaceuticals called Cadence OTC,
43:15
and they do the morning after pill and it's online and they've put it in all
43:22
the convenience stores where there are no pharmacies.
43:26
So people who are, something happens, they had underprotected sex or the condom
43:32
break, something like that, they could literally go to 7-Eleven or a convenience
43:37
store and pick up the morning after pill,
43:39
to protect from an unwanted pregnancy.
43:42
And I found that to be like absolutely fascinating but then it brings up the
43:48
discussion of well then people who shouldn't be having or you know quote unquote,
43:53
shouldn't be having sex or having sex or you know we're just allowing people
43:57
to willy-nilly have sex everywhere and we're allowing them to just pick up a
44:00
medication to stop it yeah.
44:03
And again it goes to that belief system right because you You believe that your
44:09
religion tells you not to have sex before you're married.
44:12
Your belief system tells you certain things.
44:15
So then you're it's like a collision of authority and belief and your own autonomy.
44:23
Yeah. For what you want to do.
44:26
Yes. It's fascinating. It's all very fascinating. The most fascinating part
44:29
of it is the politics of it all, which is the attempts to decide for other people.
44:36
Yeah. Because anybody can decide not to buy or take the morning after bill,
44:40
right? Anybody can decide that.
44:43
But the politics of it is, should it be available to anybody?
44:49
Or some people say it is morally correct that it be available to anybody because
44:53
that is the utmost of rights is that be available and others would say it shouldn't,
45:00
and there should be you know whether it should be,
45:03
just behind the pharmaceutical counter or it should be outlawed entirely or
45:07
like there's all different levels of protections but that's people deciding
45:11
what is morally correct for others.
45:14
And that's the politics of it, which is more interesting because it affects everybody, right?
45:21
And then there's the question of like, well, can we decide on,
45:24
like, how do we decide on what is our country about?
45:27
And so we have constant fights over who's really in charge of this country and
45:31
like, what are our real fundamental values? And we're really,
45:33
really having a hard time with that right now. Yeah, absolutely.
45:37
And we have been for a long time, not just now.
45:39
So if you were to recommend end.
45:42
To the listeners a couple of books that you find really interesting that are,
45:49
religious reads, historic reads, things that can be eye-opening,
45:54
we could learn from, because this podcast is really about learning.
45:57
It's why I started in the first place. I'm like, I'm not going to go back to
45:59
school, but let me get really cool, awesome, smart women, and we can learn from them.
46:04
So do you have any book recommendations that you would make?
46:08
Well, I would say if you're interested in the progression or the changes in
46:13
American religious culture and church affiliation and disaffiliation.
46:17
There's a good book called Strange Rights, R-I-T-E-S, by Tara Isabella Burton,
46:24
which gives you a really nice and very concise history and then some examples
46:28
of alternative spirituality.
46:30
What I love about it and what I teach from it is how did things change over,
46:34
say, the 1950s and through the boomers and up till today. So I'd say that one.
46:40
If you're interested in like a meaty ethnographic study, like an on-the-ground
46:47
study of just cultural collisions when it comes to medicine,
46:51
there is a really classic book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.
46:55
And that is about a Hmong community in California in the 80s and 90s dealing
47:02
with a particular child who has epilepsy, but their culture views it totally
47:07
differently than the doctors who want to treat her.
47:10
And it is a fascinating book. I'm actually going to be reading it with my students
47:15
this semester. Okay, very cool.
47:19
And I have your book too. Yes, it's going to be backwards. Sorry guys,
47:22
but I'm going to put this up there too, Unvaccinated Under God.
47:26
It's fascinating. This I found really fascinating and I'm really grateful that
47:30
you came on today. Thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with me
47:34
and talk to me and teach me a little bit.
47:37
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was a great conversation.
47:40
Good. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
47:41
All right. Well, be well. Thank you. Take care. Bye.
47:46
Thank you so much for joining me today on She's Smart. New episodes drop every other Thursday.
47:51
Don't forget to subscribe, like, and share. Stay cozy.