The Lord Taketh Away -- Sightings

I do believe in prayer and I pray for those who are sick and are injured. I believe that healing can come from this, although I can't tell you how. At the same time, I also believe that when sick or injured we should go to the doctor and follow our doctor's orders. So, it pains me to acknowledge that there are many people who mistakenly believe that they should forgo medical treatment in favor of prayer, that some how God would have them or their spouse or their children suffer needlessly so God can be glorified. No, I don't believe that God is glorified by this.

Shawn Peters has written a sad and distressing piece about child abuse in the name of God -- that child abuse being the withholding of needed medical care. Is it our First Amendment right to make a loved one suffer? I don't believe this is true.

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Sightings 12/13/07

The Lord Taketh Away
-- Shawn F. Peters

In 1980, a four-year-old Indiana girl named Natali Joy Mudd fell victim to a fast-growing, highly malignant tumor called rhabdomyosarcoma. Even after the growth sprouted from near the girl's right eye and "eventually grew to the size of her head," as one press account later put it, Natali's parents did not to take her to a doctor for medical treatment. Instead, adhering to the tenets of their church, the Faith Assembly, they chose to treat her malady with prayer alone – unsuccessfully, as it turned out. After Natali died and her parents called the police to report her passing, investigators discovered trails of blood along the walls of the Mudd home. They surmised that the crimson stains had been left where the nearly blind Natali, groping her way through the house, had dragged her grotesquely disfigured head.

Harrowing incidents of religion-based medical neglect – in which devout parents like the Mudds, following the doctrines of their faiths, refuse to furnish conventional medical care to their ailing children – are not unique to a single church or a particular geographical area. Since the late nineteenth century, this phenomenon has imperiled the youngest and most vulnerable members of a variety of religious faiths in every region of the United States. From Massachusetts to California, hundreds of children have died as Natali Joy Mudd did – in agony, and aided by little more than the ardent bedside prayers of their parents and fellow church members.

It is difficult to determine precisely how many children have lost their lives in such tragic circumstances. But even the limited evidence that has been compiled on religion-based medical neglect of children is unsettling. A wide-ranging 1995 study funded by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect investigated whether lesser-known forms of religion-related child abuse, such as the faith-based medical neglect that proved so deadly in the case of Natali Joy Mudd, posed a greater risk to children than other, more widely publicized threats, such as ritual satanic abuse. By surveying thousands of psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, the study's authors identified dozens of instances in which parents had withheld medical care from their children for religious reasons. The prevalence of such cases led the authors of the study to conclude that "there are more children actually being abused in the name of God than in the name of Satan."

Many such cases of abuse have resulted in criminal prosecutions of parents under manslaughter and neglect statutes. The defendants in these cases typically have claimed that the First Amendment safeguards their decision to adhere to their faiths' religious traditions and treat their ailing children solely by spiritual means, as they believe the scriptures mandate. They also claim that they possess a fundamental right as parents to direct the upbringing of their children without interference from the state. Prosecutors, however, generally have balked at the notion that constitutional protections for religious liberty provide an absolute bar to state regulation of religious conduct, particularly when that behavior puts the safety of children at risk. They also have disputed the claim that the state has no right to limit the authority of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.

Many parents who spurn medicine for prayer would agree with the assessment of John Alexander Dowie, the great Chicago-area spiritual healer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who argued that Christians should "forget about the law" as it relates to furnishing medical treatment to their children because they "are Christians first, citizens afterward." Dowie's comment cuts to the heart of the dilemma that still confronts devoutly religious parents who choose to treat their sick or injured children with prayer rather than medicine. Not only must they endeavor to safeguard the flagging health of their sons and daughters; they also must try to reconcile their devotion to God with their duties as citizens in a society that, while ostensibly honoring the principles of tolerance articulated in the First Amendment, boasts a long and sometimes checkered history of regulating the religious conduct of adherents to uncommon faiths. For spiritual healers, balancing those sacred and secular responsibilities – weighty obligations that often dramatically conflict with one another – remains no less vexing a task today than it was in Dowie's time.

Shawn Francis Peters' latest book, When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law, was published this month by Oxford University Press. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


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This month's Religion and Culture Web Forum features James K. A. Smith of Calvin College on "The Gospel of Freedom, or Another Gospel? Augustinian Reflections on American Foreign Policy." Throughout the month, commentary by Eric Gregory ( Princeton University ), David Schindler (Villanova University), and Paul Williams (Regent College) will be posted on the forum's discussion board. Access this month's forum at: http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/index.shtml.

Access the discussion board at:https://cforum.uchicago.edu/viewforum.php?f=1

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.