UC Press Blog

By Eileen Luhr, author of Golden States: How California Religion Went from Cautionary Tale to Global Brand

In the past few months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has transformed himself from an anti-vaccine activist to the secretary of Health and Human Services who oversees an enormous infrastructure relating to public health. He has vowed, adapting the sloganeering parlance of President Trump, to “Make America Healthy Again.” His pronouncements both reflect and reinforce understandings of health as a sign of individual morality and discipline and point to the larger American conundrum of trying to solve social problems through individual action. 

My new book, Golden States: How California Religion Went from Cautionary Tale to Global Brand, examines how commitment to the emotional and therapeutic needs and desires of individual Americans often came at the expense of broader efforts and obligations to achieve collective well-being. Across five historical case studies, I document the intersection of therapeutic and spiritual practices, including those related to perspectives of public and personal health, as they overlapped with the search for individual fulfillment. But what happens when ideas of health and wellness differ in a community, when one understanding asks members of a community to avail themselves of recent scientific advancements in health measures to protect the vulnerable while another understanding defines it as the absolute freedom of personal choice at the potential loss of life in a community? 

Kennedy’s public statements about health and wellness offer an opportunity to assess the ongoing tensions between individualism and community in American culture. During Kennedy’s confirmation hearings, Senator Bernie Sanders agreed “we’re a very unhealthy society” but then stressed structural causes—lack of access to preventive care and access to doctors, the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, and the lack of paid family and medical leave—for poor health outcomes. Kennedy, in contrast, suggested that the solution to “Make America Healthy Again” rested in personal responsibility. Pointing to the “MAHA moms” whom he counts as followers, Kennedy lamented the “epidemic” of childhood obesity and chronic disease and the ways that the pharmaceutical, medical, and food industries have contributed to sickness. Recounting the chronic disease in American society, Kennedy concluded, “This is not just a[n] economic issue, it's not just a national security issue. It is a spiritual issue, and it is a moral issue.” He asserted that the federal government should focus efforts “more on outcome- based medicine, on putting people in charge of their own healthcare, of making them accountable for their own healthcare so they understand the relationship between eating and getting sick.” This emphasis on individual wellness aligns with what critic Robert Crawford calls “healthism,” which elevates health above other values and obscures the goals of broader social projects premised on cooperation. 

Kennedy’s emphasis on personal choice surfaced again during the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in February and March 2025. Gaines County, the center of the outbreak, had a below-average vaccination rate for school-age children. By early March, an unvaccinated child had died in the first known measles death in the United States since 2015. The debates surrounding childhood vaccines—despite widespread scientific evidence endorsing the existing vaccination schedule—highlight the struggle to define social good beyond individual or family metrics. For nearly two centuries, American municipalities and states have implemented vaccine mandates on schoolchildren. Scientists have credited the advancements in vaccines, alongside improved sanitation and nutrition and the discovery of antibiotics, with higher life expectancy and a steep decline in infant mortality in the United States and Western Europe. Despite these advancements, public health advocates have had to confront assertions about “medical freedom” as the individual body became the site for realizing a perfected health space. Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization named vaccine hesitancy and vaccine-related conspiracy beliefs one of the top global health threats. When Kennedy’s name was floated as a potential appointee after the November 2024 election, public health advocates raised the alarm given the position advocated by the Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy’s advocacy group, and his connection to a measles epidemic in Samoa in 2019. In response to the outbreak, Kennedy published an op-ed on the Fox News website that, while acknowledging that vaccines “contribute to community immunity,” emphasized, “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”

News stories about the outbreak highlighted the tendency among parents who refused to vaccinate their children to confine their sense of risk to themselves and their family without considering a broader social impact on those who were not empowered to choose or who lacked access to resources. For example, one mother explained her decision by referring to her self-guided research on the issue and concluding, “We’re not going to harm our children or [risk] the potential to harm our children so that we can save yours.”  Parents also advanced arguments about purity and natural remedies. These beliefs aligned to assertions made by Kennedy in an interview on Fox News—and met with skepticism by public health scientists—that hailed the usefulness of Vitamin A and cod liver oil for treating measles. One local doctor and podcaster, Ben Edwards, touted natural immunity. In an interview with the Washington Post, he explained that he told his patients, “you’re not severely malnourished. You’ve got an immune system…you need to be feeding it real food. You need to nourish it, steward it, get some sunshine, get some good oxygen.” When marketed to parents making decisions about vaccinating children, these beliefs asserted an ability to achieve health solely from the inside out by taking vitamin supplements, avoiding genetically modified foods, and maintaining an active lifestyle. It also assumed that disease exists outside one’s social network. These values centered the concept of health to personal responsibility and autonomy as exercised by a collection of individuals, not as a society. 

The “Make America Healthy Again” movement asserts that health and wellness can be achieved as a society by valorizing individual choice over collective responsibility. Public figures like RFK Jr. and the MAHA parents who support him invoke a spiritual and “natural” obligation worthy of protection from state-mandated public health precautions. In embracing these beliefs, however, the movement shows how health and wellness has become deeply engrained in practices that exist only as a personal action.