Since 2015, almost every year, a child in the faith-healing sect Followers of Christ in Idaho has died from a treatable condition. That’s according to new reporting from ProPublica.
In Oregon, where Followers of Christ are also present, lawmakers have previously removed faith-healing protections that Idaho has. Authorities in the state say this has led to a reduction of these kinds of incidents as parents are more likely to seek medical care for their children when needed.
Audrey Dutton is a reporter for ProPublica. She joins us to share more on her reporting.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. At least fifteen babies and children who were in a faith-healing sect in Idaho died between 2015 and 2025 from illnesses that doctors could have successfully treated. They never were given medical attention. This is according to a new analysis by ProPublica. The journalists looked into the group the Followers of Christ, and they found that this number – about one preventable death a year – is very likely an undercount. Audrey Dutton is a reporter for ProPublica, and she joins us now. Audrey, welcome to the show.
Audrey Dutton: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: So I want to start where you start, with a scene of a sheriff’s deputy going into the home of a couple whose newborn had just died. Can you describe that scene?
Dutton: Yeah, this was just a few years ago. We watched the bodycam footage, essentially, and what you see is the deputies, they’re opening the front door to the home, and it is an unusual scene compared with what they see in a typical house where a child has died. When they go in, there are dozens of people in the house. People are seated, they’re quiet, they’re not really making eye contact or talking. They don’t really acknowledge the deputies much and the deputies kind of make their way through the crowd, the house, and into the bedroom where the parents are holding the baby.
Miller: What did the baby die of?
Dutton: This is baby Malachi, and he died of pneumonia and bleeding lungs.
Miller: This is a little bit hard to talk about, but what did medical experts tell you about what Malachi’s death would have been like?
Dutton: Well, one pediatrician said that he would have been, for likely two or more hours, gasping for air. He would have had what’s called retractions, which is when the baby is breathing so hard that you can see the outline of their ribs. He would have been turning blue, gray, purple, trying to get enough air, and the other piece of this is that this was just the first time that deputies had come to this house to document the death of a newborn. The same parents 13 months later had another baby born and died within a few days of the same thing.
Miller: Can you explain how Idaho’s law works?
Dutton: Idaho, since the 1970s, has had an exemption from basically any kind of criminal or civil child abuse interventions or prosecutions related to faith healing. So if a parent practices spiritual means alone to heal their child – they pray, they call in elders to lay hands on the baby, things like that – then they cannot be prosecuted, and there’s also a civil child abuse exemption. So that is where child protection would kick in…
Miller: Meaning, so if a family had a baby who had pneumonia and was struggling to breathe for hours and died, but didn’t say, “This is my faith,” I just, you know, didn’t care…
Dutton: Wasn’t paying attention…
Miller: …or “I thought they would be fine,” then they could be prosecuted criminally.
Dutton: They could be, yes.
Miller: Given this exemption, though, that does exist in Idaho law for the last 50 or so years, why do sheriff’s deputies visit the homes? I mean, what are they actually doing there?
Dutton: It’s a great question. They go in with the coroner’s, deputies as well. And from what I’ve gathered from the detectives and patrol deputies that I’ve talked with, they kind of serve a dual purpose. They’re going in with the coroner to provide some sort of law enforcement accompaniment, but they’re also there to make sure that there’s nothing going on that would constitute a crime in Idaho, like children with bruises and physical evidence of child abuse, that there’s no crime being committed. Because as I said, this is not a crime in Idaho.
Miller: So you’ve just told us about two deaths of newborns, but you looked into a much fuller picture, basically 10 years of data. Can you describe the analysis that you did?
Dutton: Oh gosh. I gathered records of these deaths from coroners and law enforcement, and then asked healthcare professionals to look at them. And these are folks who didn’t have any obligation to do this, they were just being helpful. But pediatricians, a few specialists, including pediatric cardiologists, a labor and delivery nurse, and I asked them, can you tell me…the one question that we were asking is, could this death have been prevented with medical care? And that was it. So, they would give their perspective. In a few cases, it was unclear, like what had happened, really, and so they couldn’t necessarily say one way or the other. But in 15 of these cases, it was overwhelmingly clear that it could have been prevented.
Miller: But you do note that this is almost assuredly an undercount. What do you mean?
Dutton: Well, as I said, in some of the cases, it wasn’t clear what had happened. Some of the cases, the documentation was just not very thorough, so the pediatrician said, “Well, it sounds like maybe this or this was happening, but I can’t really make it out from these records, and parents didn’t respond to my inquiries and so I couldn’t ask them follow up questions.” The other issue is that in some of the cases, I did identify headstones in the cemetery that’s used by this religious group that we focused on in this story, and I wasn’t able to get records on what happened. So we have no idea what happened in those cases.
Miller: Most of the people who died that we’re talking about were newborns or babies. One that you looked into was 16 years old. Can you tell us what happened to a girl named Macy?
Dutton: Macy was 16 when she died but she was the size of a third grader, an average third grader. She was not quite four feet tall, she was 62 pounds, and she’d had a series of physical problems. She had thinning hair, she had severe anemia and stomach irritation, and within her body, this whole process had been happening for years and years and years. She had a benign pituitary tumor that a pathologist determined was the root cause of all of this, and it kept her from growing. It caused her artery to become blocked, her aorta to become thickened, and eventually just set off a hormonal chaos that wrecked her organs.
Miller: As you mentioned, none of the parents of children who’ve died in recent years agreed to talk with you, but you did have an interview with a church member from Caldwell, a man named Nathan Kangas. How did he describe the religious philosophy that prevents parents from seeking care that would save their kids’ lives?
Dutton: Yeah, Mr. Kangas was quite generous with his time. We talked for quite a while. I would ask him questions and he would cite scripture almost verbatim. He said this: “We believe in trusting only in God, and that, if that trust falters, that’s a sin.” According to that kind of doctrine, if you get medical care for yourself or you seek medical care for your child, you’re committing a sin by not relying on God, and children can’t make that decision for themselves, right? But his sense was that, well, if you bring up children the way that you want them to be as adults, you won’t take them in for medical care and give them the idea that that’s OK because then they will be cursed when they grow up.
Miller: If they get a chance to grow up at all, of course.
Dutton: Right.
Miller: It’s notable that for him, this is not an abstract concept. He has suffered serious loss, you report. Can you tell us his story?
Dutton: Yeah, he lost his wife and their last child in childbirth, and he also has 65 grandchildren, and three of them have died. It’s worth explaining, the 65 grandchildren sounds like an awful lot. These families, of course this is a generalization, but they tend to have a lot of children, so it’s not that unusual for them to have 10 to 13 births, but yeah, in his case, he had three grandchildren die.
Miller: You did talk to former members of this church. What did you hear from them about the pressure to not seek medical care, the social pressure?
Dutton: They described everything from being looked at differently to maybe not being invited to the potlucks anymore, to outright shunning. Kangas did say that he feels like, at least within his church, and it’s one of four that we know of in Idaho that belong to this type of religion, he said that the shunning, it’s not really as commonplace as people say. But former members said, “I was wanting to get medical care for my child,” or, “Once someone I knew got medical care for their child, it was like they were seen as sinners.”
Miller: And you do note, I mean, there’s a dramatic end to the article that even Kangas, who says, no, shunning is not as common as people might think. He does say something like, “I understand if you go to the doctor once, but don’t do it again.” So even he does echo what you heard from former members in terms of the messaging that people are getting.
I want to turn to the broader political picture here. In some ways, this is a tale of two states, because there are Followers of Christ communities in Oregon as well, communities that we’ve talked about a number of times, especially in 2008, 2010, 2012, when there were a number of cases brought against parents who had not sought medical attention for their kids. Can you explain how Oregon law changed in 1999 and then tightened it in 2011?
Dutton: So, I’m probably not the best historian there, but from what I understand from talking with folks in Oregon and just reading the news coverage from what was going on at that time, there were several deaths in the late ‘90s that received media attention. Folks were really upset about this, and the legislature changed the law in 1999 to start peeling back the same exemptions that Idaho has, and these were really common across the country, but not in every state do we have this actually as a really huge problem with children dying. At any rate, in 2011, the law was further changed so that it basically removed the exemptions entirely.
Miller: Now, to be clear, some preventable deaths are still happening in Followers of Christ communities in Oregon. Just last year, an Oregon City couple pleaded guilty to criminal mistreatment after they failed to seek medical care for their days-old child who ended up dying. But what did you hear from prosecutors about the difference that they think Oregon’s law change has made?
Dutton: Well, the change that we talked about in the story is, Idaho, we have not seen a drop in deaths. They’re still happening. In Oregon, there’s been, at least from what people know, there’s been a marked decline. What I heard from detectives and prosecutors there is that once the law began to change and prosecutions began to happen, parents began to get medical care for their kids.
Miller: Meanwhile, you know that instead of dialing back Idaho’s faith healing exemption, lawmakers in Boise have basically been going in the opposite direction in recent years. What’s been happening?
Dutton: Yeah, the Idaho legislature and just political trends in general, have fallen on the side of parental rights, religious freedom, medical freedom. That’s become like a really big thing in Idaho, medical freedom around vaccinations and things like that. The first time that it came up, a bill was introduced to remove the exemption in 2014. It’s happened several times since then, and every time it has been defeated before it can even get to the governor.
Miller: I’m curious about this because, I mean, I’m glad you brought up the broader nationwide political context here. During COVID and since then, the MAHA movement has absolutely called vaccines into question, has championed parental rights, as you’re saying; but it seems very fair to say that the Followers of Christ try to go well beyond what RFK Jr. is talking about, and mainstream conversations about parental rights or medical freedom. So I guess I’m still curious where the broad political support for a relatively small religious group, where you think it comes from?
Dutton: I would not be able to speculate on that. I mean, I think that there’s a really interesting thing to unpack here, which is children’s rights to be alive versus parents’ rights to make the decisions for them. And sincerely held religious beliefs versus other types of behaviors or other types of rights. I think what we’re seeing with this is obviously, like you said, it’s kind of an extreme version of that, but it’s a big thing that a lot of people are talking about, rightly so.
Miller: Audrey, thanks very much.
Dutton: Thank you.
Miller: Audrey Dutton is a reporter for ProPublica. There is a link to her article on our website, OPB.org/thinkoutloud.
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