Pastor to Church: I Won’t Get Vaccinated Because “I Can’t Let You All Down”

During his sermon on Sunday, Pastor Grayson Fritts of All Scripture Baptist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee (a New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church) told his congregation that he would never get the vaccine because he didn’t want to “let you all down.”

… Even if I wanted to be weak, I can’t be weak. Because you all can’t look at me and be like, “Man, Pastor Fritts just folded!”… I can’t… I don’t even have the luxury to fold even if I wanted to. Right? Even if I thought to myself, “You know what? I’m just gonna do it. I’m just gonna bite the bullet and get the vaccine,” you know, I can’t! Right?

I can’t do it, because I can’t let you all down. Right? And trust me, I’m never gonna get that vaccine. Never. They will never have my consent. I don’t care if the popo have me strapped down, okay? They have me strapped down and Dr. Kevorkian’s coming in there to inject me with it. They still don’t have my consent! I don’t want it, EVER! Ever. And I could go on and on and on. Right?

But I’m telling you, think about what the Mark of the Beast is…

It’s not that he leads a large church, but this kind of rhetoric strikes me as one of the reasons so many conservatives (political and religious) won’t get their shots. At this point, they don’t care about (or want to understand) the science. They just think it’s giving in to liberals. It’s the same ignorant argument they used against health care policy — even though the Affordable Care Act and universal health care would help them and a lot of their followers, saying as much would be seen as a betrayal to their loyal base.

For people who constantly talk up the importance of masculinity, it’s bizarre to see pastors like this brag about dying from a preventable disease in order to own the libs.

Fritts, by the way, is the same guy who used to be a Knox County Sheriff’s Office detective. He left that position in 2019 shortly after giving a sermon in which he said one of the jobs of police officers should be executing gay people. He claimed he was planning to leave before that sermon went viral.