Children in a faith-healing sect keep dying. Idaho laws let it happen
A sheriff’s deputy opens the door of an Idaho farmhouse where a newborn baby has just died. It’s almost 10 p.m., but the house is filled with adults and children seated anywhere they can find a spot: in reclining chairs, on the wood-stove hearth, on a chest of drawers. Some of the women hold babies in their laps.
Malachi died from pneumonia and bleeding lungs, according to an autopsy.
It would have been treatable with antibiotics and newborn care in a hospital, said doctors who reviewed his death records for ProPublica.
But Malachi’s parents belong to a faith-healing sect that doesn’t believe in medical care, based on a literal interpretation of several Bible verses. The Followers of Christ sect believes that God heals the faithful and that life and death must be left to God’s divine will.
A pediatrician who reviewed Malachi’s death records said a baby in his condition would have been gasping for air, turning blue from lack of oxygen and breathing so hard that the outline of his rib cage was visible.
It was the first time the coroner and sheriff sent their deputies out to that house, to interview those parents and document the slow suffocation of a newborn boy.
The next time was 13 months later, when their next newborn, Liam, died from the same treatable condition that killed his brother Malachi.
In any Idaho household not steeped in faith-healing, those two deaths would be investigated as crimes. Idaho law says parents can’t endanger, injure or neglect their children or let them suffer. To do so is a crime, and if the child dies as a result, the parent could be charged with manslaughter.
But those laws do not apply to children like Malachi and Liam. Since the 1970s, Idaho’s criminal and civil laws have allowed parents who belong to Followers of Christ and the state’s other faith-healing sects to pray rather than seek medical care as their children die.
Since 2014, they have rejected repeated efforts to dial back Idaho’s faith-healing exemption, instead crafting legislation to further limit the role of anyone but a parent when it comes to children’s health and safety. The state has codified “parental rights,” banned vaccine requirements in schools and childcare centers, and made parental consent a prerequisite for medical care of minors. Legislators also have tried to narrow the definition of “medical neglect” for all families to only the most life-threatening situations, but those attempts have failed.
Local and national media outlets have reported on deaths among Followers of Christ families in Idaho. ProPublica went further, enlisting the help of experts to determine which of those deaths could have been prevented.
ProPublica gathered death records from coroners and police in five Idaho counties and shared them with more than a dozen pediatricians and birthing specialists.
At least 15 babies and children from the faith-healing sect died between 2015 and 2025 from illnesses that doctors could have successfully treated, the experts concluded.
The estimate of preventable deaths is almost certainly an undercount. The experts could not evaluate six more deaths because coroner records were incomplete or unavailable. In another four cases, they couldn’t say with confidence whether medical care would have changed the outcome.
Separately, the experts identified numerous preventable losses of babies who died during birth or in utero very close to their due dates, cases that coroners labeled as stillbirths.
For some families like Liam and Malachi’s, the death of a child wasn’t a one-time tragedy: Records show at least five sets of parents have lost multiple children, a phenomenon that has not previously been reported.
Nathan Kangas, a patriarch in the sect’s Caldwell, Idaho, church, defended faith healing and its legal protection during an interview with ProPublica.
Children and babies can’t make their own decision to rely on faith healing. Kangas said their parents must keep them away from the doctor to set an example, so the young ones won’t be cursed later in life by turning to medicine.
Kangas lost his own wife and their last child during labor 23 years ago. Three of his 65 grandchildren also have died.
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-north...appen.html
A sheriff’s deputy opens the door of an Idaho farmhouse where a newborn baby has just died. It’s almost 10 p.m., but the house is filled with adults and children seated anywhere they can find a spot: in reclining chairs, on the wood-stove hearth, on a chest of drawers. Some of the women hold babies in their laps.
Malachi died from pneumonia and bleeding lungs, according to an autopsy.
It would have been treatable with antibiotics and newborn care in a hospital, said doctors who reviewed his death records for ProPublica.
But Malachi’s parents belong to a faith-healing sect that doesn’t believe in medical care, based on a literal interpretation of several Bible verses. The Followers of Christ sect believes that God heals the faithful and that life and death must be left to God’s divine will.
A pediatrician who reviewed Malachi’s death records said a baby in his condition would have been gasping for air, turning blue from lack of oxygen and breathing so hard that the outline of his rib cage was visible.
It was the first time the coroner and sheriff sent their deputies out to that house, to interview those parents and document the slow suffocation of a newborn boy.
The next time was 13 months later, when their next newborn, Liam, died from the same treatable condition that killed his brother Malachi.
In any Idaho household not steeped in faith-healing, those two deaths would be investigated as crimes. Idaho law says parents can’t endanger, injure or neglect their children or let them suffer. To do so is a crime, and if the child dies as a result, the parent could be charged with manslaughter.
But those laws do not apply to children like Malachi and Liam. Since the 1970s, Idaho’s criminal and civil laws have allowed parents who belong to Followers of Christ and the state’s other faith-healing sects to pray rather than seek medical care as their children die.
Since 2014, they have rejected repeated efforts to dial back Idaho’s faith-healing exemption, instead crafting legislation to further limit the role of anyone but a parent when it comes to children’s health and safety. The state has codified “parental rights,” banned vaccine requirements in schools and childcare centers, and made parental consent a prerequisite for medical care of minors. Legislators also have tried to narrow the definition of “medical neglect” for all families to only the most life-threatening situations, but those attempts have failed.
Local and national media outlets have reported on deaths among Followers of Christ families in Idaho. ProPublica went further, enlisting the help of experts to determine which of those deaths could have been prevented.
ProPublica gathered death records from coroners and police in five Idaho counties and shared them with more than a dozen pediatricians and birthing specialists.
At least 15 babies and children from the faith-healing sect died between 2015 and 2025 from illnesses that doctors could have successfully treated, the experts concluded.
The estimate of preventable deaths is almost certainly an undercount. The experts could not evaluate six more deaths because coroner records were incomplete or unavailable. In another four cases, they couldn’t say with confidence whether medical care would have changed the outcome.
Separately, the experts identified numerous preventable losses of babies who died during birth or in utero very close to their due dates, cases that coroners labeled as stillbirths.
For some families like Liam and Malachi’s, the death of a child wasn’t a one-time tragedy: Records show at least five sets of parents have lost multiple children, a phenomenon that has not previously been reported.
Nathan Kangas, a patriarch in the sect’s Caldwell, Idaho, church, defended faith healing and its legal protection during an interview with ProPublica.
Children and babies can’t make their own decision to rely on faith healing. Kangas said their parents must keep them away from the doctor to set an example, so the young ones won’t be cursed later in life by turning to medicine.
Kangas lost his own wife and their last child during labor 23 years ago. Three of his 65 grandchildren also have died.
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-north...appen.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
