When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law [Hardcover]

When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law, by Shawn Francis Peters, looks at the legal limits of religious freedom in the United States when applied to faith healing in relation to children. While the right to refuse medical treatment due to devout religious beliefs is acceptable in adults, what happens when the children of those who practice these beliefs are also denied medical treatment? The answer is hundreds of unnecessary casualties. Peters' book looks at the origin and history of faith healing, its many young victims and how the law and juries have struggled for centuries trying to advocate a child's right to medical care.
The right to religious freedom has long been a cherished value in the United States, but the first amendment has been used since its creation as justification for the intentional withholding of medical treatment from children. Peters shows the many religious sects and their followers that have come on trial, both in court and public opinion, for the hundreds of deaths of children who were treated with prayer, anointment, and the laying of hands alone. Peters takes the reader through the history of faith healing and the resulting court cases of neglect and manslaughter that accompany it.
Starting with the Peculiar People, a religious group based in Britain in the mid 1800s, the reader is shown dozens of different gruesome child deaths and court cases. Most memorable is the Wagstaffe case of 1868, in which a couple was charged with manslaughter after their 14 month old daughter died of a lung infection after being treated with only prayer and anointment. While the common-law of the time did not encompass medical negligence for the charge of manslaughter and the couple was acquitted, the result was the first law pertaining specifically to the rights of children in the form of provided food, shelter, clothing, and medical aid from their parents. It would take another decade for this law to be upheld in court cases against the Peculiar People, and many of the members continued to come on trial for the deaths of their children despite the known legal consequences. This law would be later used in US courts as precedent in similar cases.
Next Peters takes a look at the migration of faith healing to the United States and the reform in laws protecting children that took place during the mid to late 1800s, such as the beginning of government intervention in cases of neglect and abuse. John Alexander Dowie is one of the main figures responsible for the dramatic rise in faith healing in the United States. Migrating to Chicago from Sydney, Australia, Dowie and his ministry vehemently refuted medicine and practiced healing strictly from a narrow interpretation of the Epistle of James. Dowie and his followers were in and out of the US courts throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, with courts struggling to hold any type of conviction. Public opinion, however, condemned Dowie as a fraud and he was eventually forced to leave Chicago. It was one of his followers' cases, Peirson v. United States, which was one of the first charges of manslaughter due to medical neglect to hold up in court.
The book also looks at other and more current faith healing religions, such as Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, Pentecostals, and Jehovah's Witnesses who specifically eschew blood transfusions and inoculations. In one of the most famous cases, Prince v. Massachusetts, the law established limitations between religious liberty and the duties and rights of parents in regard to their children. Many other revolutionary cases are shown along the way. A common thread in the trials seen throughout the book is the defense of those charged. In almost every trial, the defendants either claim ignorance of laws pertaining to medical negligence of children, religious persecution, or the right of a parent to govern their child as they see fit. Another common trend is the sincerity of the many defendants' beliefs, which has resulted in lenient sentences and sympathetic juries. This has led to unenforced laws and more violators. Furthermore, the tendency for the defendants to appeal guilty verdicts has caused many cases to be dropped or reversed.
The book both begins and ends with cases that occurred less than 30 years ago and while legislatures have come a long way, one thing remains: the needless suffering and dying of children due to their parents' credulity to faith healing and denial of modern medicine. Today there are still many young victims who are dying for a belief system that they are too young to understand. As of 2008, when the book was written, there were still several states that had yet to reform or pass laws preventing these needless faith healing casualties in children.
This book is incredibly informative, but it is certainly not for the weak of heart. The entire book recounts hundreds of deaths of children, which are both gruesome and incredibly painful. The frustration of the author with the parents of these child victims is tangible and is easily understood and transferred to the reader. It is hard to believe that parents would deny their children medicine and consequently watch them die of diseases that could most likely be cured with modern or even early medicine. Furthermore, there are numerous examples and court cases that show parents who have lost multiple children to diseases treated with faith healing, and yet they cling to their narrow interpretation of faith. These parents not only have caused the deaths of their children, but have exposed entire communities to highly contagious diseases by not following quarantine regulations or notifying the proper authorities. Their apparent ignorance or refusal to comprehend and follow necessary laws that protect not only their children but the surrounding community is exasperating and distressing. The book is incredibly well-written and thoroughly researched on a topic that has not received enough attention in recent years.

This book discusses the practice of religious healing in various forms, focusing mainly on those practices that deprive children of medical treatment. It covers not only Christian Science, but also several lesser known churches, nearly all of which exist in some form today. It contains a wealth of historical information on faith healing, including its theological foundation in Christianity, the legal conflict between faith healing and child abuse, and efforts to remove religious exemptions from child neglect laws. For me, the most interesting part discusses modern attempts to prove the efficacy of prayer in medicine.

The potential buyer is warned that the subject matter can be quite disturbing. The author presents a long series of grisly examples in which children suffered horrible deaths for lack of basic medical treatment. They span approximately the last 150 years and include some very recent cases.

The book is very well written, though at times it gets a little repetitive. For example, after the first few mentions, the reader no longer needs to be reminded about the healing techniques mentioned in the epistle of James or that CHILD is an advocacy group. It is a very quick, but also gut-wrenching, read that presents numerous intellectual challenges.

In When Prayer Fails, Shawn Francis Peters sheds light on an important but little known aspect of American religiosity. The theme of this book as well as the scope of the issues examined are spelled out in the first chapter: "Harrowing incidents of religion-based medical neglect - in which parents, adhering to the doctrines of their faiths, refuse to furnish 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 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...in agony, and aided by little more than the ardent bedside prayers of their parents and fellow church members."

Peters does an excellent job compiling case histories of faith healing and children and placing them in a socio-historical-legal perspective. In the tenth and final chapter, "We Need to Change the Statute - The Promise (and Limits) of Statutory Reform," he provides a detailed view of the legal issues and battles fought between those who would increase the legal protections for children against religion-based medical neglect, and the religious forces that would maintain the status quo.

When Prayer Fails is a thoroughly researched, well written book on an important subject that has received far too little attention from both social scientists and the media. For anyone interested in faith healing and children it's a must read.