Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his first speech to employees at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, echoing previous sentiments about how he was going to transform the federal agency to focus on issues like chronic disease. But it was Kennedy’s closing remarks on spirituality that point to an arguably underappreciated element of the health official’s plans to transform the work of CDC, FDA, and Medicare. Kennedy stressed that spirituality was important for health.
“If we’re really going to end the chronic disease epidemic, we need to recognize the connection between the physical decrepitude that now beleaguers our citizenry and the pervasive spiritual malaise that has left so many young people feeling alienated, dispossessed, disconnected, purposeless, and hopeless,” Kennedy said during the speech, which was livestreamed to HHS employees across the country.
“Spiritual and physical malaise thrive on one another,” Kennedy continued. “They feed on one another. Our overall wellness must begin with a spiritual question. How do we relate to ourselves, to each other, to our communities, and to the planet?”
Kennedy went on to say that “malignant political actors” will “profit and flourish when we are atomized and fragmented,” something that’s certainly true, but not for the reasons Kennedy believes them to be true.
“These forces prefer to have us in terror and anxiety which disable our capacity for critical thinking and make us more compliant and more credulous,” Kennedy said. It should be noted that this is a member of the Trump administration who’s worried about critical thinking and people being too compliant and credulous. The same administration whose most important voting bloc believes Trump’s every word; and an information environment where an AI video claiming the president erected a 200-foot statue of Jesus in front of the White House went viral on TikTok over the weekend. Needless to say, Trump did not erect a statue of Jesus at the White House.
“They want us hiding from ourselves to avoid our own shadows and dulling our pain and loneliness through sedation and distraction. Yet inside of us, we know that love and self-knowledge are the only true paths to good health,” Kennedy said, emphasizing that HHS should be “guiding our country” on new paths that will help us “to heal and to develop ourselves.”
This isn’t the first time Kennedy, who rejects modern scientific achievements like vaccines, has mentioned spirituality as an important force for health. The health secretary appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show on Feb. 13 to talk about his plans, emphasizing that a “spiritual realignment” was the key to treating addiction.
Kennedy made several other false assertions during his speech to HHS employees on Tuesday, including the claim that previous scientific studies had been altered to fit with a political agenda. Kennedy also suggested that vaccines were to blame for autism in the U.S., something he’s said repeatedly.
It’s going to get particularly rough as Kennedy works to dismantle systems that allow for the availability of things like vaccines. But the “spirituality” angle is something Americans shouldn’t ignore while he’s doing it. Everyone is free to believe whatever they like about the role of religious faith in their own lives. But if Kennedy is signaling that he’s going to abandon treating addiction with scientific methods for treatments emphasizing faith, that’s going to be very, very bad for the health of the nation.
