The Guardian:
The Followers of Christ is a religious sect that preaches faith healing in states such as Idaho, which offers a faith-based shield for felony crimes despite alarming child mortality rates among these groups
Mariah Waltons voice is quiet her lungs have been wrecked by her illness, and her respirator doesnt help. But her tone is resolute.
Yes, I would like to see my parents prosecuted.
Why?
They deserve it. She pauses. And it might stop others.
Mariah is 20 but shes frail and permanently disabled. She has pulmonary hypertension and when shes not bedridden, she has to carry an oxygen tank that allows her to breathe. At times, she has had screws in her bones to anchor her breathing device. She may soon have no option for a cure except a heart and lung transplant an extremely risky procedure.
All this could have been prevented in her infancy by closing a small congenital hole in her heart. It could even have been successfully treated in later years, before irreversible damage was done. But Mariahs parents were fundamentalist Mormons who went off the grid in northern Idaho in the 1990s and refused to take their children to doctors, believing that illnesses could be healed through faith and the power of prayer.
As she grew sicker and sicker, Mariahs parents would pray over her and use alternative medicine. Until she finally left home two years ago, she did not have a social security number or a birth certificate.
Had they been in neighboring Oregon, her parents could have been booked for medical neglect. In Mariahs case, as in scores of others of instances of preventible death among children in Idaho since the 1970s, laws exempt dogmatic faith healers from prosecution, and she and her sister recently took part in a panel discussion with lawmakers at the state capitol about the issue. Idaho is one of only six states that offer a faith-based shield for felony crimes such as manslaughter.
The shield laws that prevent prosecutions in Idaho are an artifact of the Nixon administration. High-profile child abuse cases in the 1960s led pediatricians and activists to push for laws that combatted it. In order to help states fund such programs, Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (Capta), which Richard Nixon signed in 1974.
But there was a fateful catch due to the influence of Nixon advisers John Erlichman and J R Haldeman, both lifelong Christian Scientists.
Boston College history professor Alan Rogers explains how the men later jailed for their role in the Watergate scandal were themselves members of a faith-healing sect, and acted to prevent their co-religionists being charged with crimes of neglect.
Because Erlichman and Haldeman were Christian Scientists, they had inserted into the law a provision that said those who believe that prayer is the only way to cure illness are exempted from this law, he said.
They also ensure that states had to pass similar exemptions in order to access Capta funds. The federal requirement was later relaxed, but the resultant state laws have had to be painstakingly repealed one by one.
Next door, Idaho presents a polar opposition to Oregon. Republicans, who enjoy an effective permanent majority in the state house, are surprisingly reluctant to even consider reform. Last year, the governors Task Force on Children at Risk recommended change: Religious freedoms must be protected; but vulnerable children must also be appropriately protected from unnecessary harm and death. Democratic legislator John Gannon proposed a repeal bill which he never thought would really be that controversial.
The chairman of the senate health and welfare committee, Lee Heider, refused to even grant it a hearing, effectively killing it.
Brian Hoyt, who lives in Boise, grew up in the Followers of Christ church.
Hoyt is a fit 43, and lives in a well-scrubbed suburban neighborhood. He runs a successful window cleaning business that started with a squeegee mop and a bucket after his teenage escape from home left him with no cash and few educational opportunities. When I visited him, his house was being renovated what was once a barebones bachelor pad now accommodates his partner and step-children. Slowly, Hoyt has developed the capacity for family life, after a life in the sect left him unable to relate to families for a long time. I didnt understand the concept, he said.
He lost his faith around the age of five, when a baby died in his arms in the course of a failed healing. While elders prayed, Hoyt was in charge of removing its mucus with a suction device. He was told that the child died because of his own lack of faith. Something snapped, and he remembers thinking: How can this possibly be Gods work? His apostasy set up lifelong conflicts with his parents and church elders.
In just one incident, when he was 12, Hoyt broke his ankle during a wrestling tryout. I ended up shattering two bones in my foot, he said. His parents approached the situation with the usual Followers remedies rubbing the injury with rancid olive oil and having him swig on Kosher wine.
Intermittently, they would have him attempt to walk. Each time, my body would just go into shock and I would pass out.
I would wake up to my step-dad, my uncles and the other elders of the church kicking me and beating me, calling me a fag, because I didnt have enough faith to let God come in and heal me, while my mom and my aunts were sitting there watching. And thats called faith healing.
He had so much time off with the untreated fracture that his school demanded a medical certificate to cover the absence. Forced to take him to a doctor, his mother spent most of the consultation accusing the doctor of being a pedophile.
He was given a cast and medication but immediately upon returning home, the medication was flushed down the toilet, leaving him with no pain relief. His second walking cast was cut off by male relatives at home with a circular saw.
More in the link.Martin and Hoyt have both lobbied to change the laws, with Martin in particular devoting years of patient research to documenting deaths and other church activities. Hoyt has faced harassment online and at his home, and church members have even tried to undermine his business.
So far, their testimonies of abuse have not convinced Idahos Republican legislators. Senator Heider, for one, describes the Followers of Christ as very nice people.
Child advocate and author Janet Heimlich, who has campaigned against exemptions around the country, says that Heider told her before the legislative session began that he would carry the bill and helped with the production of a draft, but by the time the session began in October he indicated that no bill would be passed or even heard.
Heiders repeated response to these claims was a welter of contradictions and bluster.
After telling the Guardian that no bill was lodged (John Gannon confirmed that he did, as was reported in local media in February) and that he had been told by the attorney general and the Canyon County prosecuting attorney that the laws did not need to change (both men deny saying this), Heider took refuge in the US constitution.
Republicans didnt feel the need to change the laws. We believe in the first amendment to the constitution. I dont think that states have a right to interfere in religions.
When pressed on the fact that children are dying unnecessarily as a result of exemptions, Heider makes an odd comparison.
Are we going to stop Methodists from reading the New Testament? Are we going to stop Catholics receiving the sacraments? Thats what these people believe in. They spoke to me and pointed to a tremendous number of examples where Christ healed people in the New Testament.
Heider blamed outsiders for stirring the pot on this issue, even challenging the Guardians right to take an interest in the story, asking what difference does it make to you? and adding is the United States coming in and trying to change Idahos laws? He confirmed that he attended a Followers of Christ service last year a rare privilege for an outsider from a group that refuses to speak to reporters.
