According to the Baylor Religion Survey, those most likely to distrust the Covid-19 vaccine are Christians, however, according to the results, the majority of those who distrust the vaccine rarely, if ever, attend church.

Every year Baylor University has been conducting studies since 2005 seeking to find long-term connections to Americans, religion, and immediate topics of interest. This year one of their focuses was on Americans who think “a Covid-19 vaccine should not be trusted”. From the results, 13.1% of Americans do not trust the Covid-19 vaccine, and found you’re more likely to distrust the vaccine if you consider yourself “Very Religious” and believe that the Bible should be taken literally.

However, one of the more fascinating findings of this study is that if you attend church “never” or “less than once a year”, you are more likely to distrust the vaccine than your counterparts who attend church more often.

If we take a look at all of the traits of the people most likely to distrust the Covid-19 vaccine according to this research, it starts to paint a picture: Someone who believes the Bible is literal, considers themselves “very religious”, yet attends church less than once a year.

The same research also looked at groups that believe top Democrats are involved in an elite child sex-trafficking ring, and those that believe the 2020 election was rigged and is not the will of the people. In all of these, the most likely to believe in these topics were Bible Literalists.

In an interview with the Waco Tribune-Herald, Survey director and Baylor sociology professor Paul Froese mentioned that “Bible Literalists often don’t read the Bible”, and continued:

The relationship between politics and religion is getting closer. It’s harder for us to distinguish between the two. That may be a consequence of how people get their information.

Belief is a network phenomenon. You tend to defer to the people around you, that’s your go-to for belief, to your information bubble. In the modern age, that now continues to the internet.

In this study, 54.5% of those polled were female and 45.5% male, 49.3% were married and 33% had at least a college degree. 29.8%, reported never attending church while 41.7% attend at least once a month. Politically, those considering themselves leaning conservative to extremely conservative represented 32.4% of the people surveyed, 38.2% consider themselves moderate and 29.2% lean liberal to extremely liberal.