How French clergy promoted the smallpox vaccine

In October 2013, a program entitled “Health Care from the Pulpit” was introduced by Enroll America, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to increase enrollment in services provided by the Affordable Care Act among the previously uninsured. They intend to bring churches of different faiths together to “be engaged in the education and outreach efforts around the Affordable Care Act open enrollment period.” This outreach program suggests a number of methods, including “tabling events” where religious leaders address the importance of health insurance, churches creating and training of “health outreach ministry teams” to educate their community at large, and hosting an “enrollment summit” comprised of religious leaders, health-care professionals, and civic organizations to discuss the issues related to the government health-care program.

After seeing the efforts of this program in her church in Jacksonville, Florida, one parishioner said, “Our pastor, he keeps us real informed and grounded in what's going on in the community, and he's always bringing stuff to help us, so I love him for that.” One of the organizers commented, “Pastors are trusted messengers.” The initiative responds to a need from within the health-care system to gain the cooperation of the nation’s churches in a matter where currently there is a lukewarm response, and they accomplish this through some of the thoroughly “modern” means of social media and the internet.

With some minor changes, programs like “Health Care from the Pulpit” have existed for centuries and in a number of national contexts. They engendered fewer conflicts than one might typically expect considering the field of church and state issues. The greatest example of a concerted effort on the part of public and private organizations to bring religious groups on board with advances in health care occurred during the spread of the smallpox vaccine in France in the early 19th century. Vaccination was discovered by the British physician Edward Jenner in the late 1790s and arrived in France in 1799 just as negotiations started over a “religious settlement” for the Christian churches dispersed during the French Revolution.