Alabama’s State Health Officer, Dr. Scott Harris, has a new plan to rebuild public trust: partner with churches. He calls faith communities “natural allies,” especially in a rural Southern state where the church is still the heart of a lot of towns. (1819 News, Daniel Taylor)
He also said something I agree with completely: in public health, “you only do as much health as the public lets you.”
Exactly. And the public remembers.
During COVID, when the CDC recommended shots for children as young as five, a group of Alabama physicians called the Concerned Doctors of Alabama questioned that guidance and asked to sit down with Dr. Harris. These weren’t bloggers in bathrobes like me. They were doctors. Licensed ones. With stethoscopes and everything.
So here’s a modest suggestion before the Health Department starts booking fellowship halls: the fastest way to rebuild trust is to sit down with the people who asked hard questions the first time. Natural allies don’t need to be recruited. Sometimes they’ve been knocking on the door for years.
To be fair, the areas Dr. Harris named are good ones: good nutrition, healthy kids for school, and helping mothers deliver babies safely. Churches have been doing that for about two thousand years, mostly with casseroles. Nobody in my Sunday school class is against babies.
But the church isn’t a distribution channel. It’s a body. It prays, it listens, and it tests what it hears. Pastors are trusted precisely because they don’t pass along whatever comes down from Montgomery. If the state wants the church’s trust, it’ll have to earn it the old-fashioned way: by telling the truth, admitting mistakes, and hearing out the other side.
As a man who has been on both ends of a prayer chain, I can tell you church folks spread information fast. Accuracy is a separate ministry.
“He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him.”
— Proverbs 18:17 (KJV)
— JC
