Supreme Court Sends New York Amish School Vaccine Fine Case Back to District Court

The U.S. Supreme Court recently vacated *Miller v. McDonald* and remanded it to district court for further review, a step that Cory Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher in population health and demography at Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute, describes as signaling support for several New York Amish families. The named families, as administrators of private rural Amish schools, are challenging $118,000 in state fines for not enforcing New York’s 2019 requirement that all schoolchildren, public or private, receive vaccinations regardless of parents’ religious convictions. Anderson notes that some Amish selectively vaccinate, while others pursue no vaccinations.

According to Anderson, there is little evidence that New York legislators had the Amish in mind when they passed the 2019 law. Instead, he writes, travelers from Israel had brought measles into ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in New York, where a segment of the community had adopted religiously informed teaching against vaccination.

Anderson argues that the more recent Amish focus is no less relevant. He writes that Amish populations are growing rapidly through high fertility, that they periodically experience outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as rubella and pertussis, and that Amish vaccination rates likely declined in recent years. While the *Miller* case was moving through the courts, Amish measles cases arose in several states. He says these likely came from contact with similarly under-vaccinated “Low German” or “colony” Mennonite populations, found in west Texas, rural Canada and Latin America.

Anderson writes that he is a social scientist of population health and that he identifies with the broader “plain Anabaptist” tradition, which includes the Amish. As religious exemptions to vaccines are debated amid a measles outbreak, most recently in South Carolina, he says it is valuable to examine how Amish have responded at the intersection of vaccination and faith. He poses the question of whether religious motives might mask cultural or political motives, personal rationalizations or misinformation. He argues that the answer matters both because the Constitution protects religious free exercise and because understanding others’ perspectives helps people engage productively with those they disagree with (Romans 12:18).

Anderson states that for many religious objectors, including the Amish, rejecting vaccination is a situational interpretation of religious doctrine rather than a direct theological mandate. He writes that the Amish are doctrinally conventional by Western Christian standards and that no central Amish teaching governs health practices directly. He describes an Amish belief that when individuals highly esteem certain innovations, religious purity may erode. In his account, accepting one change, such as vaccination, can lead to other changes and a slippery slope toward apostasy, which he describes as de-prioritizing matters the church has vetted. He says that whether a given innovation triggers this effect varies by community. For some Amish, he writes, vaccination is a private matter, while for others the community decides together, because it has never vaccinated.

Anderson also describes a second Amish mindset: discomfort with unfamiliar contexts. He writes that the disagreeable opinions of a neighbor in the same church can feel more comfortable than trusting a distant institution with a medical intervention. He recounts attending an Amish church where whooping cough was circulating, and says the group preferred that risk over the unknowns of vaccination. He adds that other Amish reasons for hesitancy include trust in in-group advice, respect for generational precedent, and repeating what neighbors and co-workers say, which he says makes it difficult to determine whether such objections are religious.

Anderson reports findings from a recent study he co-authored, which found that the presence of evangelical Protestants in a county was associated with lower Covid-19 vaccination, while the presence of mainline Protestants and Catholics was associated with higher rates. He writes that the associations run in opposite directions across traditions, which suggests there is no single religious position on vaccines. He adds that opinions also vary among the Amish, and that two people in the same local assembly may share doctrines yet disagree about the efficacy of modern medicine, especially vaccines.

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