The Evangelical Pastor Who Introduced Vaccination to America

And what it means for today

Photo by me. Copyright Shawn Brace.

(A five-minute read)

Lost amidst all the controversy surrounding the apparent aversion among evangelicals in America to get the COVID vaccine is an incredible irony: historians of American history are pretty well agreed that it was an evangelical pastor who first introduced and doggedly pushed the idea of vaccination in America.

In 1721, the city of Boston faced a major crisis. Smallpox came to this influential hub, striking over half of its population of 11,000 and killing some eight percent of its citizens. It was one of the deadliest epidemics in colonial America.

Enter: Cotton Mather.

Living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Mather was the most famous preacher in his day in America, and one of the most famous of any day in American history. During “the height of his energetic career,” Mark Noll notes in America’s God, Mather “accounted for a quarter to a third of all religious works published annually in the colonies.” The son of Increase Mather, who was the president of Harvard College for two decades, and the grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather, Cotton was no liberal, coming from Puritan royalty, and infamously taking an active role in the Salem witch trials.

Puritans were blue-blooded religious conservatives, of course, notoriously enacting strict Sabbath (Sunday) laws, for example, which among other things, resulted in one Boston man being placed in the stocks for two hours for the “lewd and unseemly behavior” of kissing his wife publicly on the “Sabbath Day” (other examples of these types of punishments are legion). These Puritans could give any fundamentalist of our day a run for their money when it comes to their commitment to conservatism and the Bible.

Yet Cotton Mather was also enamored with science, beginning when he was a student at Harvard as a twelve-year-old boy. He pushed Newtonian physics at every turn, and wrote great tomes on science, trying to reconcile it with the Bible. He frequently submitted scientific reports to the Royal Society of London, which, for his efforts, made him a fellow in 1723.

When the smallpox epidemic hit his native Boston, he sprung into action, imploring the medical community to utilize inoculation methods he had become aware of—ironically, from one of his slaves from West Africa named Onesimus (which is a part of the story that deserves its own post altogether, and which Ibram X. Kendi details in his book Stamped From the Beginning). Much to his chagrin, most physicians in Boston, including one of the only ones who actually held a medical degree, balked at his suggestion. Their objections were both medical and religious, with some maintaining, according to Matthew Niederhuber, due to their commitment to a strict Calvinist orthodoxy, that inoculation “violated divine law, by either inflicting harm on innocent people or by attempting to counter God’s specific will.”

Mather had plenty of critics outside the medical community as well, receiving the ire of many. At one point he was even the recipient of a homemade bomb, which came smashing through his window with an attached note, which read, “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam you! I’ll inoculate you with this; with a Pox to you.” Fortunately, the bomb didn’t go off.

Not surprisingly, while Mather had some supporters within the religious community, including his father Increase, he had many detractors. One of those was the Reverend John Williams, a Puritan minister and uncle of the famous Jonathan Edwards, who wrote a tract in response to Mather’s inoculation scheme.

Published by the brother of Ben Franklin, Williams expressed great consternation about Mather’s agenda and argued passionately from the Bible against inoculation. Those who were willingly inoculated brought “death” into their homes, Williams insisted, and were “guilty of the Breach of the Moral and the Evangelical Law of God.” Indeed, “they have not done by their Neighbor as they would that their Neighbor should do to them,” he said, comparing it to an imaginary person in Boston who would try to burn down a stump in their yard but end up burning down their neighbors’ houses as well. “Oh! What a Fountain of Blood are the Promoters guilty of!” he wrote. “God grant them repentance unto life. May it not be said of you, You lay aside the Commands [of] God, and ye have learned the Traditions of Men.”

Despite the pushback from all quarters, Mather was not deterred, finally finding an ally in Zabdiel Boylston, a physician and great-uncle of John Adams who, beginning with his six-year-old son and two of his enslaved Africans, began a program of inoculation. This eventually totaled nearly 300 people and proved to be a very effective method. “As the epidemic began to diminish in early 1722,” Niederhuber writes, “Mather and Boylston had collected surprisingly thorough data that made a clear argument for the effectiveness of inoculation.” Boylston demonstrated that only about two percent of those who’d been inoculated had died, compared to some 15 percent who hadn’t been.

Niederhuber further explains: “Mather and Boylston’s advocacy and observations resulted in what was actually one of the earliest clinical trials on record, and the use of both experimental and control groups to demonstrate the effectiveness of inoculation significantly aided the adoption of the practice.” Indeed, Niederhuber insists that “Cotton Mather is largely credited with introducing inoculation to the colonies and doing a great deal to promote the use of this method.”

Bridging Contexts

It would be tempting to make a simple apples-to-apples comparison to today and insist that since it was a conservative, Bible-believing evangelical pastor, and the most famous one of his day at that, who was the one who introduced inoculation (a precursor to vaccination) to America, that all evangelicals today should just get the COVID vaccine. That would be too reductionist, of course, since there are many points of departure between Mather’s day and ours.

And yet there are many relevant lessons, including the most obvious and ironic one, mentioned above, that if it wasn’t for an evangelical pastor introducing the practice of vaccination to America, there may not even be vaccines for evangelicals to object to today in the first place. Simply put, it is not godless scientists who have often made the greatest contributions to and been the loudest proponents of science, but Bible-believing Christians.

It also underscores the fact, which I will further develop next week, that there needn’t be a fissure between faith and science. Indeed, such a fissure is a relatively recent phenomenon, as people of faith have historically made significant and important contributions to science, with arguably some of its greatest contributions coming from people like Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, who, to one degree or another, had biblical commitments. It wasn’t until the last hundred years or so that a chasm started developing between science and those of a particular brand of religious faith.

Just as significantly, reading John Williams’s critique of Mather’s agenda reminds me that I need to be humble in what I perceive the Bible to be saying or not saying about the current cultural moment. I remain fully committed to and passionate about the authority of the God who stands behind Scripture. I believe the Bible speaks to our day, and will continue to do so. I just want to remain open-handed about my conclusions because my interpretations can have literal life-or-death repercussions.

Of course, the call for humility cuts both ways, since science is also an incomplete and fallible pursuit, ever evolving and changing. It’s not as though religion is pure opinion and speculation, while science has the corner market on objectivity. Indeed, John Williams’s concerns were not entirely without merit, as inoculation in those days was a bit of a tenuous venture.

This is illustrated, quite tragically and ironically, by the story of Williams’s own nephew, Jonathan Edwards, considered by many to be the greatest theologian in American history. Some 35 years later, and just months into Edwards’s tenure as the president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), his life came to a premature end. The cause of death? Smallpox inoculation.

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A few matters of house-keeping business: I wanted to thank all of you who responded to last week’s post by offering to donate to my Oxford doctoral pursuits. Because of that, it looks as though I have secured all the money I need! So thank you so much for helping.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also about to embark on a DPhil at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.