That collapse in logic gets to the true issue here, and the major reason so many invokers of the parable misunderstand their target: Many experts believe that Christian anti-vaxxers aren’t really thinking about their objections through a religious lens, even when they claim they are. According to Monique Deal Barlow, a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University who researches the intersection of politics and evangelical Chirstianity, the complaints more often have to do with concerns about a political or pharmaceutical elite trying to profit off the vaccine at their expense. “So they’re more paranoid about being microchipped and tracked than about the Mark of the Beast,” Deal Barlow said. Evans, too, said he doubts whether religion really has anything to do with it, especially given that no major faith leaders oppose the vaccine. “In conservative Protestantism, you’re supposed to have a religious justification for most of the things you do, so you’re going to come up with one,” he said. “It didn’t start with religion. It started with conservative Republican misinformation about the vaccines.”

So if vaccine indifference isn’t truly based on the idea that God will protect you, then what is it based on? The Christian faith leaders who preach against the vaccine often do so with more worldly warnings of government control and persecution. And this is the rub, said Curtis Chang, co-founder of the Christians and the Vaccine project. It’s all about reflexive distrust of secular institutions.

That’s the other major failing of the parable as a tool. The story points to the help of humans, but only in the form of individual people looking out for each other. The new version of the parable, when applied to COVID, is that God gave people brains capable of identifying precautions and inventing a vaccine. But of course the vaccine isn’t just about the medical researchers and their brains. It’s about the production of a scientifically complicated product and its mass distribution. “It’s actually a miracle of institutional cooperation and collaboration,” Chang said. “And this is where the Christian blind spot comes in, thinking God only works through individuals or a church.” Christians have not been taught to think of God working through secular institutions, he said. “We’re seeing the ramifications.”