CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/3/2022 (Bhakti Marga, Swami Vishwananda, Podcast, Germany, Islamic Marriage Laws, Conspiracy Theories)

Legionaries of Christ,Clergy Sexual Abuse, Pope Benedict XVI, Podcast, Transcendental Meditation (TM), Christian Science, Spirit Life Bible College, Prosperity Gospel, Mormonism, Conversion Therapies, NXIVM, Hare Krishna

Globe and Mail: Former Pope Benedict denies knowing about Legionaries of Christ abuse when cardinal

"Former Pope Benedict XVI denied that he was given information about child abuse in the Legionaries of Christ religious order when he was a top Vatican official, in a case that has tarnished the reputation of his predecessor, John Paul II.

Founded by Mexican cleric Marcial Maciel in 1941, the Legionaries of Christ order was heavily favored during the conservative papacy of John Paul II, who praised Maciel's work in reaching out to and evangelizing young people.

Maciel turned out to be one of the Catholic Church's most notorious pedophiles, even abusing children he had fathered secretly with at least two women while living a double life and being feted by the Vatican and Church conservatives.

The former pope's denial was made to Germany's Die Zeit newspaper in response to allegations it had published from filmmaker Christoph Roehl, who said he had found evidence that two Chilean priests had presented the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger with a dossier listing abuse victims in the order.

At the time, Ratzinger was head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and John Paul II's right-hand man, the Polish pope's ideological and doctrinal enforcer."

IndoctriNation: Parental Paradox w/ Jon Sawyer

"Jon Sawyer was raised in two homes influenced by both high-demand religion and secular worldviews. Prior to his parent's divorce at the age of four, his family was involved with both Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Christian Science. Shortly after his parent's divorce, his mother took a secular route, while his father converted to Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. While Jon's father sprinkled elements of TM and Christian Science into his childhood, his dad's newfound evangelical Christian faith fixated on the end of the world, divine healing, speaking in tongues, and the "prosperity gospel." When Jon was fifteen, he converted to Mormonism. From the age of fifteen to thirty-five, Jon was involved with various high-demand religious groups that were associated with both charismatic Christianity and Mormonism. As a teen who was deeply conflicted about his attraction to the same sex, Jon attended the now-defunct Spirit Life Bible College (SLBC)-associated with Roberts Liardon Ministries-in Orange County, CA. While at SLBC, Jon experienced multiple sessions of exorcism and conversion therapies that were aimed at "healing" his sexual identity. When Jon was twenty-six, he became involved with Sovereign Grace Churches: a group that began during the charismatic Jesus Movement of the 1970s and eventually adopted a neo-Calvinist theology that emphasized strict gender roles and courtship practices. Jon separated from organized religion six years ago, at the age of 35. Since that time, Jon has benefited from somatic therapy, completed both a BA and MA in education, and is currently a doctoral student and researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. Partly due to the influence of his experiences with high-demand religious groups, Jon now studies the intersection of education policy and anti-discrimination law.

A Little Bit Culty: SEASON 3 EPISODE 2: Silver Fox: Mark Vicente Part 2

"It sure is good to see Mark Vicente back in the saddle again. In Part 2, he shares what happened during his last conversation with Keith Raniere, how he's defragged his brain since he helped burn ol' Dead Eyes' playhouse down, and what the bleep he's working on next. Oh, and there is bountiful ass-chapping."

The Cult Vault: ISKCON - The Hare Krishna Movement

"In this episode we have our first interview with someone who has experienced The International Society for Krishna Consciousness with Michael giving us a deep look into many types of Religion and Spirituality and a particularly problematic place to partake in the Hare Krishna Group called "The Mantra Lounge"."

News, Education, Intervention, Recovery

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Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.

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CultNEWS101.com news, links, resources.

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Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

Please forward articles that you think we should add to cultintervention@gmail.com.

Parental Paradox w/ Jon Sawyer

Rachel Bernstein

IndoctriNation

January 26, 2022

Listen to Parental Paradox w/ Jon Sawyer

Jon Sawyer was raised in two homes influenced by both high-demand religion and secular worldviews. Prior to his parent's divorce at the age of four, his family was involved with both Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Christian Science. Shortly after his parent's divorce, his mother took a secular route, while his father converted to Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. While Jon's father sprinkled elements of TM and Christian Science into his childhood, his dad's newfound evangelical Christian faith fixated on the end of the world, divine healing, speaking in tongues, and the "prosperity gospel." When Jon was fifteen, he converted to Mormonism. From the age of fifteen to thirty-five, Jon was involved with various high-demand religious groups that were associated with both charismatic Christianity and Mormonism. As a teen who was deeply conflicted about his attraction to the same sex, Jon attended the now-defunct Spirit Life Bible College (SLBC)-associated with Roberts Liardon Ministries-in Orange County, CA. While at SLBC, Jon experienced multiple sessions of exorcism and conversion therapies that were aimed at "healing" his sexual identity. When Jon was twenty-six, he became involved with Sovereign Grace Churches: a group that began during the charismatic Jesus Movement of the 1970s and eventually adopted a neo-Calvinist theology that emphasized strict gender roles and courtship practices. Jon separated from organized religion six years ago, at the age of 35. Since that time, Jon has benefited from somatic therapy, completed both a BA and MA in education, and is currently a doctoral student and researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. Partly due to the influence of his experiences with high-demand religious groups, Jon now studies the intersection of education policy and anti-discrimination law.

In this first half of Jon's two-part conversation with Rachel, He shares an intimate portrait of his childhood as he was pulled in the many different and extreme religious directions his divorced parents took. Throughout the conversation, Rachel gives insights into the religious trauma Jon likely experienced as a child by being exposed to graphic demonic imagery. Jon explains how his varied and controlling religious upbringing caused him to internalize homophobia as he examined his own sexuality and place on the LGBTQ spectrum.

Before You Go: Rachel warns about the dangers of parental alienation which often occurs in separated families, explaining how this can be exacerbated within families involved in high control groups and relationships.

You can contact Jon here:
jonesawyer@gmail.com

Find Rachel's book "Now I Know, Kids Talking To Kids About Divorce..." here:
www.amazon.com/Now-I-Know-Rachel…ein/dp/1620867893

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Christian Science fending off obituaries through worldly adaptations

Religion Watch
Volume 36 No. 3

Increased financial capital and growth in the global South (mostly in several African countries) have allowed the Church of Christian Science to cope with a declining number of churches, societies and practitioners, ensuring its continuing existence in the foreseeable future, writes independent scholar Elise Wolff in the Journal of Contemporary Religion (October 2020). In a 1998 article, Rodney Stark, applying his influential model of the causes of religions’ success or failure to the case of Christian Science, had concluded that a variety of factors might even lead to its disappearance within a generation. Wolff’s article attempts to identify factors that have slowed or countered this predicted decline. Membership is difficult to assess, since the church refuses to publish such figures due to some of its principles. Moreover, a number of participants identifying as Christian Scientists are not formal members. After reaching a peak at some point between the 1930s and the 1950s, membership has declined, and various estimates put it somewhere between more than 400,000 and less than 100,000 worldwide. Church officials themselves claim that membership has stabilized in the twenty-first century. In contrast to this uncertainty, the listings in Christian Science literature provide clear figures on declining numbers of churches, societies and practitioners. In the U.S., the 1,300 churches that still existed in 1995 were down to 800 by 2015. In 2017, there were some 1,440 Scientist churches and societies around the world.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the church had been on the verge of bankruptcy after huge losses that followed an attempt to create a TV network. Subsequently, after shutting down and selling its radio stations (1997), turning its reputable newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, into an online news site and weekly magazine (2009), reducing spending and selling real estate (namely disbanded church buildings), the church has become more financially sound than it has been in a long time, with over $1 billion in assets. It has made attempts to present its message to a wider audience, publishing a trade edition of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health, and presenting Christian Science healing as “value-added healthcare.” Wolff adds, however, that some members have not been pleased with what they see as a watered-down version of Christian Science and expressions of laxness. The factors of decline identified by Stark have not disappeared, and Wolff sees indications that the church is attempting to encourage its members to do more to spread Christian Science. For now, however, it seems to have at least succeeded in creating the conditions for continued existence.”

(Journal of Contemporary Religion, https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjcr20/current)



http://www.religionwatch.com/christian-science-fending-off-obituaries-through-worldly-adaptations/

Event: Health and Healing in Minority Religions.

Inform Seminar – Saturday 24th November 2018.

This seminar will explore a range of religious models of health and healing, and to what extent these are related to what practitioners actually do with the aim of preventing and curing diseases of the body and the mind. Many minority religions provide their members with a comprehensive worldview in which beliefs and practices concerning health and healing are incorporated in religious beliefs. Perceptions of body, mind and soul, and their relationships are intricately entwined with a supernatural or transcendent realm.

At one end of a spectrum, there are religious traditions that consider the body a temple and who consider maintaining its health through lifestyle and diet a form of worship. At the other end, there are those who consider the body inferior to the spiritual or cognitive realm, and not of primary importance. Then there are those who believe in possession of the body by evil spirits to be a source of illness, and there are those who believe in ‘faith healing’ and associated practices.

Some of these positions will be explored at this seminar, which will include presentations by academics, academic researchers, and members of Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Sarah Harvey
Senior Research Officer
Inform
Inform@kcl.ac.uk
020 7848 1132
c/o Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London
Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London WC2B 6LE.

The Book of Mormon Gets the Literary Treatment

Grant Shreve

RELIGION & POLITICS

May 23, 2017

The Book of Mormon is a wholly American Scripture. It is the sacred text for the 15 million-strong Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s the calling card for thousands of missionaries, and part of the inspiration for a Tony award-winning Broadway musical. But rarely has the book, on its own merits, been considered a genuine work of art. That’s changing, as American literary scholars embrace it as worthy of attention. In 2012, during the waning days of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and the nation’s so-called “Mormon moment,” literature professors were on the cusp of their own “Book of Mormon moment.” For the first time, studies of the Book of Mormon’s literary qualities were appearing in major journals of American literary studies. Literature courses that prominently featured the Book of Mormon started to appear with more frequency in secular university course catalogues. Now the text, first published in 1830 and once derided as “a fiction of hob-goblins and bugbears,” is being parsed by non-Mormon students across the country, with literature scholars breaking more than a century of professional silence on the book.

Seth Perry is an assistant professor of religious studies at Princeton University whose “American Scriptures” course begins with the Book of Mormon and proceeds through scriptural touchstones like Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. The aim is to ascertain how these works use rhetoric to present themselves as Scripture. For him, the Book of Mormon is the quintessential example of this kind of text, but he is the first to admit that it’s not easy to teach, especially in the early weeks of a semester. The single “biggest barrier” to this, he says, is that the Book of Mormon “has historically been marked as not artistic.” Perry has students read passages from the book aloud in order to experience it as an oral work first and a text second, which enables them to grasp those aspects of book most often sneered at—its repetitious style and use of mnemonics—and arrive at a more sophisticated sense of its style, shape, and origins.

Someone outside the field of literary studies might not be surprised to learn of the Book of Mormon’s historical exclusion from secular literature classrooms. After all, as a sacred text, its proper home would seem to be on the preacher’s pulpit rather than the professor’s lectern. But literary studies is an omnivorous and often indiscriminate discipline. The sacredness or profaneness of any given text has never been an obstacle to literary-critical appropriation.

Take the Bible, for instance. When the renowned literary critic Northrop Frye began teaching “The Bible and English Literature” at the University of Toronto in the 1970s, he, along with luminaries like Robert Alter, helped usher in a curricular revolution that would transform how universities taught the Bible. The Bible-as-literature movement was so successful that by the fall of 1982, when the notoriously shy Frye—bedecked in an ill-fitting powder blue suit that made him look like an unkempt televangelist—stood in front of a gaggle of undergraduates and two video cameras to recount the history of his most famous course for posterity, literature classes on the Bible had become a staple of English departments across North America.

This same period also saw the ramping up of what would come to be called the “canon wars,” as scholars busily recovered authors and texts that had been excluded from the literary pantheons of earlier generations of critics. In this heady period of scriptural appropriation and literary recovery, it would have made sense for the Book of Mormon to find a home in the expanding canon of American literature, given that it has remained one of the most popular, influential, and historically significant texts from the nineteenth century, not to mention one of the only published works of the period that continues to be read and studied outside of lecture halls. That it never did wasn’t because calls for its study as literature weren’t being made, either.

In her groundbreaking biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie—a Mormon apostate—expressed bafflement that “scholars of American literary history have remained persistently uninterested in the Book of Mormon.” Brodie wrote that sentence in 1945, but it could as easily have been written in 2005, when the total number of articles on the Book of Mormon that had ever been published in academic journals specializing in American literature was one.

Throughout most of the discipline’s history, the virtually universal neglect of the Book of Mormon by professional literary critics was never debated and rarely even questioned. As a case in point, one non-Mormon scholar I spoke to recalls having an essay on the Book of Mormon rejected from a prominent journal of American literary studies because the book, her anonymous reviewer wrote, “wasn’t a valid object of literary study.” Although the religious bias lurking behind a remark like this is obvious, it is interesting for how it couches prejudice in the language of aesthetics. This strategy is particular to anti-Mormon discourse going back to the nineteenth century, and one that helps to explain literary studies’ unreasonable distaste for the book, as well as the significance of its recent recovery.

At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, English professor Jared Hickman celebrates the “audacity” of the Book of Mormon’s style in his “American Bibles” course. He teaches the Book of Mormon alongside Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, and Lew Wallace’s epic Ben-Hur. To Hickman’s mind, placing these weighty tomes together makes perfect sense given their stylistic excesses and common obsession with the problem of how to interpret signs, symbols, texts, and the natural world. Given that the Book of Mormon is also a text that purports to be a history of ancient Israelities who crossed the Atlantic to become American Indians, Hickman prods his students towards creative interpretations of the Book of Mormon’s treatment of indigenous peoples, asking them why, during the era of Indian removal, an American Scripture would also be “a history of Indians.” Although he deliberately brackets discussions of how LDS Church members typically read the Book of Mormon, Hickman does invite students to consider the strange power the text has in our culture by asking them to carry the book around conspicuously for several days and observe how people react. Every time, he says, students report numerous sidelong glances at the library and double takes on the quad.

For the Book of Mormon’s earliest critics, deriding its style was as important as dismantling its truth claims, a way of undercutting the possibility that even if the book was not true Scripture, it might still be good fiction. In his lively 1830 pamphlet Delusions (the first polemic directed against the Book of Mormon) the Christian Restorationist Alexander Campbell concluded that, besides being fraudulent, the Book of Mormon also had “not one good sentence in it.” (It has several.) By the time Mark Twain referred to it as “chloroform in print” in 1872, the aesthetic delegitimation of the book was complete. Twain found the book “slow,” and wrote, “If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.”

Even as eloquent a defender of the book as Terryl Givens—a professor of religion and literature at the University of Richmond who has since the 1990s been an emissary of Mormon culture and theology to non-Mormon intellectuals—felt compelled to admit that “searching for literary wonders in the Book of Mormon is a bit like seeking lyrical inspiration in the books of Chronicles or Judges.” In the absence of full-throated arguments on behalf of its literary merits, an (un)critical consensus about the Book of Mormon congealed within professional literary studies that besides being patently false, it was also tedious, risible, caricaturish, artless, vulgar, and transparently proselytic. Why would anyone read such a book?

In recent years, however, American literary studies has undergone a paradigm shift as it has turned attention to the blindspots and limits embedded in its secular identity. In the midst of this institutional self-examination, and nudged on by the work of Mormon scholars like Grant Hardy who have begun applying narrative theory to it, the Book of Mormon was primed for a reevaluation. These factors, in addition to the wide availability of attractive reader’s editions of the Book of Mormon armed with immaculate scholarly introductions framing it for non-Mormon audiences—notably Hardy’s 2005 University of Illinois Press edition and Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s 2008 Penguin edition—have made the Book of Mormon’s inclusion on American literature syllabi that much easier. Thus, Mormon and non-Mormon students alike are being asked to confront this most strange and difficult American text in a pedagogical setting nineteenth-century Americans (and many contemporary ones) wouldn’t have dreamed of. In these post-secular classrooms, it is not the Book of Mormon’s truthfulness that is being put under the analytic microscope, but its rhetoric, its form, and its historical import.

Perhaps the most conspicuous academic embrace of the Book of Mormon is occurring in—of all places—liberal secular Vermont, where Elizabeth Fenton is currently teaching a graduate seminar at the University of Vermont called “The Book of Mormon and its World,” which all available evidence suggests is the first literature course outside of Utah to focus exclusively on the Book of Mormon. After requiring students to spend three weeks reading the Book of Mormon in its entirety, Fenton is devoting the remainder of her course to a series of “meditations” on potential historical and theological contexts for the book. Because it is a living religious text, Fenton acknowledges that the book must be taught “with a certain generosity,” but she emphasizes that her course is focused exclusively on intellectual questions rather than questions of faith. Given the multitude of preconceptions students have about the book, distinctions like this are paramount. “Truth in advertising is important with the Book of Mormon,” she says.

In the short time she’s been teaching the course, Fenton says that her students have come to appreciate the Book of Mormon as an artistic achievement even as many of them openly balk at its supernatural origin story. One of the fruits of this openness to the book is that certain episodes have organically emerged as focal points of discussion, the most frequent of which is an episode from the second chapter of the book of Mosiah wherein the aging King Benjamin, after a transformative visit from an angel, attempts to deliver a valedictory gospel to his subjects. In the story, the teeming masses gathered outside Benjamin’s palace inspire him to build a tower from which to proclaim his good news so that all might hear him. When some of his listeners are still too far-flung to hear his voice, he instructs his scribes to mass-produce and distribute pamphlets of his speech in order to ensure a universal access to his words. Beginning with a revelation and ending with the production of a text, this borderline comic episode of ancient American media strategy would seem to be the Book of Mormon reflecting on its own emergence as an oral text.

Whereas King Benjamin’s pamphlets incited mass conversions, Joseph Smith’s written words moved more slowly, but did eventually inspire millions of followers. Today Smith’s most important literary production is being received in ever more complex, subtle, and unexpected ways. The LDS Church founder once remarked that his writing suffered from a “lack of fluency according to the literati of the age.” But for the literati of our own age, the Book of Mormon may be finally getting its due.

Grant Shreve has a PhD in American Literature from Johns Hopkins University. He is currently at work on a book about secularity, religious diversity, and the rise of the American novel.


http://religionandpolitics.org/2017/05/23/the-book-of-mormon-gets-the-literary-treatment/

Why Val Kilmer's Faith Probably Won't Help Him If He Has Oral Cancer

Mark Woods
CHRISTIAN TODAY
November 1,  2016

Val Kilmer has been "outed" as suffering from oral cancer by fellow actor Michael Douglas, who suffered from the disease himself.

Speaking about the film The Ghost and The Darkness, in which the two appeared together, Douglas said that "things don't look too good" for Kilmer. Kilmer's only response was a Facebook post that reports of his death had been "greatly exaggerated".

But Kilmer's treatment may be complicated by the fact that he's a Christian Scientist, and Christian Scientists' views of medicine are decidedly ambivalent.

The movement was founded in the 19th century by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who taught in her book Science and Health that all reality is spiritual and that disease is an illusion. It is to be dealt with by prayer rather than medicine.

She came to this revelation after slipping on ice and injuring herself. Eddy said in Science and Health that she had read a Bible passage and "the healing Truth dawned upon my sense". She later wrote that "Dr Cushing of this city pronounced my injury incurable and that I could not survive three days because of it", though Cushing flatly denied it.

Eddy taught that sickness was a mental error, and that a right attitude could heal anything including cancer, diphtheria and tuberculosis. Disease was an illusion.

Christian Scientists say this healing is "not faith healing, positive thinking, or self-hypnosis. It calls for Christian faith in and understanding of God as unconditionally and dependably good, to whom nothing is impossible."

They also say that "Christian Scientists are always free to choose for themselves and their families the kind of health care that meets their needs. However, by practising Christian Science, many have lived happy and healthy lives free of drugs and other systems of physical care."

In practice, Christian Scientists are happy to have broken bones set and to wear glasses, but they believe prayer is most effective when it's not combined with medicine. Christian Scientists have been prosecuted for not providing medical care for their sick children.

What approach Kilmer is taking to his illness is not known. However, Christian Science has long been described by orthodox believers as "neither Christian, nor scientific". It doesn't work, in terms of curing people, and Eddy's rejection of the material world and belief that suffering is an illusion reflect early Christian heresies. It departs from orthodox Christianity at every significant point in its doctrines.

On the other hand, in terms of his own faith, Kilmer has said: "I am a religious person. I do pray for specific needs. I do read the Bible every Sunday. I've read the Bible all of my life. I also pray for things that are going on in the world; it has given me a deeper sense of responsibility as a person." And we shouldn't assume someone has to believe exactly the right things before God will hear their prayers.

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/why.val.kilmers.faith.probably.wont.help.him.if.he.has.oral.cancer/99509.htm

When 'Religious Freedom' Leaves Children Dead

Many states don’t consider it “abuse” to rely on faith healings when kids get sick. Why isn’t this a bigger issue?

The Atlantic
EMMA GREEN

October 6, 2016

Jessica Crank had a swollen shoulder. Not just swollen: In May 2002, when the teenager’s mother, Jacqueline, finally took her to a walk-in clinic in Lenoir City, Tennessee, the nurse practitioner found signs of bone disintegration and “other indications of a serious medical condition” on the x-ray. She called the University of Tennessee emergency room and had them prepare for Jessica’s arrival and urgent treatment.

But Jessica never made it to the E.R., just as she and her mother didn’t show up at the hospital when a chiropractor had urged them to seek medical care earlier in February. Instead, as Jaqueline Crank later testified in court, she chose to turn to “Jesus Christ, my Lord and my Savior, my Healer, Defender, for [Jessica’s] healing.”

Crank “knew there was a problem” with the “grapefruit-sized tumor” on her daughter’s shoulder. But she believed Jesus “was the only Healer,” she said, “and through that belief we took it in our hands to pray for her, to heal her with prayer.”

It did not work. After the walk-in-clinic nurse called the police and Jessica was taken to the hospital, she was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Getting medical care sooner likely wouldn’t have saved her, but it would have helped manage her symptoms and “positively impacted the quality of her life,” her pediatric oncologist testified. Jessica died in state custody at the age of 15.

Crank was found guilty of misdemeanor child neglect, along with the man she was living with, Ariel Ben Sherman, who had founded a small prayer group called the Universal Life Church a year earlier in Lenoir City. Their defense, they argued, was right in the Tennessee Code Annotated: Under state law, it wasn’t considered abuse or neglect for parents to seek “treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone” in lieu of medical care for their kids.

The case made it all the way up to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Sherman died while the case was on appeal, but Crank’s conviction was upheld: Because she wasn’t part of a “recognized church or religious denomination,” the Court held, she wasn’t entitled to the faith-healing defense. Her sentence was affirmed: Eleven months and 29 days, to be served on unsupervised probation.

The Court didn’t strike down the law, but one year later, the Tennessee legislature acted. This spring, it quietly repealed the faith-healing exemption in its child-neglect law, becoming one of just a handful of states that don’t provide any religious exemptions to civil or criminal charges of child neglect or abuse.

Religious-freedom fights often focus on issues of speech and prayer, of worship spaces and safe observance. Exemptions to charges of child abuse, however, rarely get that kind of attention. The laws are just there, sitting on the books, waiting for a kid to die before they get repealed.

* * *

Of all the people governments act to protect, children are perhaps the most vulnerable. Despite federal laws that seek to protect kids under 18 from neglect and abuse, there is no one definition across states of what “abuse” actually means, especially when it comes to families who rely on prayer and faith healings in place of medical care. In some places, if a child is injured, or dies, parents can use their state’s religious exemption as a defense against criminal charges.

The federal government started pushing states to pass these laws starting in 1974 under Richard Nixon’s administration. Largely because of lobbying efforts by Christian Scientists, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which later became the Department of Health and Human Services, determined that parents who don’t seek traditional medical care for their kids for religious reasons should not be held negligent. The agency threatened to withhold federal funding from states that didn’t allow similar accommodations. One by one, states codified religious defenses into their child abuse, endangerment, and neglect laws. Even as federal law has changed over the years, most of these laws have stayed on the books, equally distributed across states red and blue.

A few legislatures have changed their laws; like Tennessee, most states only take action after hearing harrowing reports. A few months after the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled in the Crank case, a lobbyist named Chris Ford, who had been hired by the American Academy of Pediatrics and an advocacy group called Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, or CHILD, approached Senator Richard Briggs about the possibility of sponsoring a repeal bill. The Knoxville surgeon and legislator said yes, although he was wary of potential attacks from religious-freedom advocates and those who oppose “big government.”

In this deeply conservative state—which, in its last legislative session, very nearly declared the Bible its official book, and passed a controversial religious-conscience exemption for counselors who don’t want to treat LGBT patients—this bill could have triggered an intense fight. “People were asking me, ‘Why do you want to take this on?’” Briggs said.

Some of the state’s conservative groups came to see him with potential concerns, including Bobbie Patray, the head of the Tennessee Eagle Forum—the late Phyllis Schlafly’s organization—and David Fowler, whose group, the Family Action Council of Tennessee, routinely pushes legislation on conservative social issues in the state. (Patray and Fowler both declined to comment on their involvement in the repeal process.)

Neither group ended up taking on the issue; Briggs said he persuaded them by comparing the exemption to supporting abortion—because life matters before and after birth—and allowing “fundamental Muslims [to practice] sharia law.” (All observant Muslims would likely say they’re following sharia law; Briggs was specifically referring to some non-American Muslims’ practice of stoning women, he said.) It’s also possible that, following a sad and controversial court case over a teenage girl’s death, Tennessee conservatives simply thought the child-neglect issue was a political loser.

Others who expressed concerns were Christian Scientists. When Tennessee added a religious exemption to its child-welfare laws in 1994, according to court documents of the hearing records, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee noted that it “was offered by the Christian Scientists, and it ensures that they are protected.”

Over the past four decades, Christian Scientists have often been involved in efforts to add religious-exemption language into child-welfare laws. The denomination, founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, emphasizes the importance of spiritual healing, which can include the physical body. When faced with medical challenges, including an on-going health issue or emergency, individual Christian Scientists can choose to seek traditional medical help, or they can rely on prayer and guidance from Christian Science practitioners who are trained in the art of faith healing.

The group has lobbyists in each state to watch for legislation affecting their faith, said Debbie Chew, the Christian Science contact in Tennessee. The “Church really doesn’t get into the legislative process,” including drafting or pushing for specific bills, she claimed. But “if there’s something that really is going to affect Christian Scientists, we might jump in there and ask for an accommodation.” Ultimately, the Christian Scientists decided not to take a position on the Tennessee repeal bill. The law was “never [intended] to shield reckless parents or to leave children unprotected,” Chew said.

When Tennessee’s repeal bill came to a vote at the very end of the term, it passed nearly unanimously, with no floor debate. What could have been a major legislative fight went through with little note. Other states haven’t had such smooth experiences: In Idaho, children who are part of a group called the Followers of Christ have reportedly been dying of treatable and preventable illnesses at rates much higher than the national average. In next-door Oregon, outcry over the practices of the same group eventually led legislators to repeal the state’s child-welfare exemptions for faith healing and prayer. So far, the Idaho legislature has refused to change its child-welfare laws along those lines.

Meanwhile, religious defenses against child-abuse charges have recently been in the news. This summer, an Indiana woman used the state’s newly passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, as an argument against felony child-abuse charges. Prosecutors allege she beat her son with a coat hanger, leaving 36 bruises; she justified her actions via scripture, arguing that “[sparing] the rod spoils the child.”

Cases like this can seem like liberal catastrophizing come to life: Some opponents of RFRAs have claimed such laws give religious parents cover for abusing and neglecting their children. In reality, legal experts say, it’s unlikely that the Indiana statute will actually shield the mother from charges. “Literally nobody believes that general religious-liberty provisions like RFRA create a defense for injuring a child, or injuring an adult, for that matter,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

Specific, state-level exemptions, like the former law in Tennessee, focus on faith healing, prayer, and parents’ obligation to seek formal medical care. Different laws protect parents against charges ranging from misdemeanor neglect to capital murder, which is the case in Arkansas. One reason why many states haven’t revisited their religious exemptions to child-welfare laws is that they’re not used that often in criminal cases, according to the heads of a half dozen chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in the states that have the most permissive laws. But when the relatively rare cases of faith healings do come up, “there [those statutes] are, and they protect conduct that probably should not have been protected,” Laycock said.

The case of the coat-hanger beating in Indiana, along with Jessica Crank’s death in Tennessee, offer an interesting study in contrasts. News of gruesome child deaths or injuries that are justified by religious freedom seems to get selective coverage, depending on the laws at hand. In a place like Indiana, where the law in question is already politically charged and associated with fights over LGBT rights, an alleged child-abuse case might get a lot of attention. In Tennessee, however, repeal of the law’s faith-healing exemption brought barely a whisper of conversation.

Thanks to uneven state laws, charges might not even be brought in similar cases in other places: Before Oregon’s child-welfare laws were revised, for example, prosecutors declined to bring cases against Followers of Christ whose children died from treatable or preventable ailments—technically, their behavior wasn’t illegal. In most states, these provisions remain tucked in the depths of codebooks, dusty and forgotten. By the time they do get used in court, the worst has often already happened—it can take an intervention by child services or reports of a severe injury for these kinds of parental choices to become public.

It may take a case like Jessica Crank’s to get legislators to act. It’s change, at the price of a child’s life.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/child-abuse-religious-exemptions-tennessee/503063/

The pros and cons of including faith-based healing in benefits plans

Sara Tatelman
Benefits

Visits to Christian Science practitioners aren’t an expensive benefit for plans to cover. In the past three years, the University of Manitoba spent exactly zero dollars on it, according to Dave Muir, director of compensation and benefits. In the past six years, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., has seen six claims totalling $1,800 throughout its 11 collective agreements, says Wanda McKenna, assistant vice-president and chief human resources officer. But affordability aside, should benefits plans cover visits to Christian Science practitioners at all?

A relatively new religious movement, Christian Science was founded in New England in the late 19th century. Scientists, as adherents are called, believe prayer, rather than pharmaceuticals or surgery, is the best treatment for diseases and injuries they consider to be illusions. “They’re praying to realize that they’re not actually sick but they’re not necessarily praying to God to heal them,” says Terra Manca, a sociology doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta who has researched Canadian Christian Scientists’ attitudes towards health care.

When Scientists get sick, they may hire a Christian Science practitioner to help them heal through prayer. They may also spend time in faith-based nursing facilities, where Christian Science nurses feed, bathe and pray with patients but administer no mainstream medical care.Religion-Stats

There are 29 Christian Scientist practitioners and 10 nurses working in Canada, says Wendy Margolese, the legislative and media representative for Christian Science in Ontario. They charge in the range of $20 to $40 per day, and a 24-hour stay in a Christian Science nursing facility with round-the-clock care costs in the area of $200 to $375, according to Margolese.

No group benefits provider offers Christian Science faith healing in its standard policies, says Joan Weir, director of health and dental policy at the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association. “Plan sponsors do tend to make all kinds of interesting requests, and it’s up to the insurer to see if they can accommodate it and if it can be built into the pricing. If it could be, then the insurer would do it.”

Coverage considerations

Users can’t submit fees paid to Christian Science practitioners as a medical expense tax credit because no province or territory authorizes them to practise any form of medicine, the Canada Revenue Agency told Benefits Canada in an email. Accordingly, says Weir, plan members can’t use their health spending accounts for services from Christian Science practitioners but they can use coverage from an insured part of their plan. An exception is a private health services plan that allows 10 per cent of account spending to not be eligible for the medical expense tax credit.

The University of Manitoba added Christian Science practitioner treatments to its benefits plan in April 2002, along with many other paramedical services, says Muir. Earlier that year, the university had polled staff and faculty on available benefits, including paramedicals. The benefits had included unlimited coverage for physiotherapy, chiropractic and podiatry.

“The survey results suggested that people wanted a broader range of services than the limit of three that had existed at the time,” says Muir. As a result, the university introduced a $500 limit that staff can spend on any of 12 paramedical services, including Christian Science practitioners.

Nobody at McMaster can pinpoint when the university introduced Christian Science benefits, says McKenna. But since claims have been so low, the issue isn’t a concern for McMaster, she notes.

Debating the medical benefits

While supporting employee choice and targeting ballooning costs are commendable, what medical evidence exists to support Christian Science health treatments?

“From the perspective of my academic interests, the most I can say on the topic . . . is that there is absolutely no evidence, scientific or otherwise, that Christian Science faith healing provides any medical or health-related benefit or that it is even a verified form of healing,” says Ubaka Ogbogu, an assistant professor of law and pharmacy at the University of Alberta. “But that, of course, does not mean it cannot be offered as an employee benefit for other reasons.”

For one thing, visiting a Christian Science practitioner may trigger the placebo effect, which can produce positive short-term results, says Manca. “Sometimes, short term is really helpful but sometimes it’s coming at financial costs or [causing patients to refuse] treatments that are more effective in the long term.”

Read: How to deal with religious preferences in making DC investments

In response to the questions about the effectiveness of Christian Science healing, Margolese acknowledges the criticisms but she notes the practice’s long tradition of helping people live healthier lives. “In a highly technological culture where conventional medicine is the norm, many ask why reasonable people would continue to turn to this practice at all.

“Christian Scientists are conscientious, reasonable people on the whole and they aren’t driven by dogmatic religious belief. The real reason for our commitment to spiritual healing is in the actual healing we’ve experienced. We can’t claim to be perfect, and often this spiritual approach to healing is itself a learning process, but what we’ve witnessed and experienced of healing — sometimes of quite serious conditions — in our own lives and families has been significant.”

Not all employees, however, are on board. “I think it’s ridiculous to include any non-scientifically proven procedures in any extended health benefits plan,” says Philippa Carter, a teaching professor in McMaster’s department of religious studies. Since McMaster bills itself as a research-intensive university with a top-notch health sciences faculty, she argues it shouldn’t provide $500 per year for Christian Science healing or any other alternative therapy. That coverage is especially galling, Carter says, since the university only provides $250 every two years for vision care—a quarter of the money they’ll pay for faith healing—and many staff members need glasses to do their jobs.

What about other religions?

Carter also argues that since the plan covers Christian Science therapy, it should also do so for healers from other religions. “If I were Catholic, I might want to offer my priest a fee to pray for healing for my arthritis or to exorcise the demon of depression and cynicism that has possessed me for years, but McMaster and [its insurer] won’t cover any of that, apparently.”

Arguing an employer discriminates against some staff by covering Christian Science therapy but not Catholic exorcisms has a stronger legal case than suggesting coverage should move from faith healing to vision care, says Eric Adams, an associate law professor at the University of Alberta. “Is it discrimination on the employer’s basis not to pay for exorcisms under the guise of medical treatments?” he asks, noting he ultimately thinks an employer would still prevail in a legal case.

Read: Accenture makes ‘bold move’ in publishing diversity stats

“I think the argument would be that the employer is not under a positive obligation to do so. They can choose to extend benefits as they see fit, but I don’t think that obligates them to extend it to all manner of non-medical benefits that might be sheltered under some religious heading.”

No employee has complained about the McMaster benefits plan’s exclusion of faith-based healing practices from other religions, says McKenna. And Carter admits she’d never raise the issue. “I think there are flaws in it, but it’s still a pretty good package compared to what a lot of people have,” she says of the benefits plan.

Risks for plan sponsors

Nevertheless, Adams cautions that employers could face adverse effects if an employee chooses plan-sponsored faith healing instead of mainstream medicine. “Would the estate of that family have a claim in negligence against the employer? Again, that’s pretty speculative, but what about media coverage in that scenario?”

He points to the recent court case and media attention around the 2012 death of Alberta toddler Ezekiel Stephan, whose parents treated his meningitis with hot peppers, onions and horseradish. If “an employer plan led to the prayer treatment of meningitis that resulted in the death of a child, you might imagine it would expose that employer to, if not a legal case, then certainly media scrutiny,” says Adams.

Sara Tatelman is an associate editor at Benefits Canada.

http://www.benefitscanada.com/benefits/health-benefits/the-pros-and-cons-of-including-faith-based-healing-in-benefits-plans-88141

'Religious' objections to vaccinations? There really aren't any

DESERET NEWS
Mark A. Kellner
February 7, 2015

In the national debate over immunizing children, much has been said about "religious objections" to vaccines claimed by parents. Finding a religion whose tenets object to the practice, however, is difficult.

The number of students receiving vaccination exemptions for any reason is relatively small, the Federal Centers for Disease Control reported. Surveying the 2012-13 school year, the agency reported, "an estimated 91,453 exemptions were reported among a total estimated population of 4,242,558 kindergartners, roughly 2 percent of the nation's newest students.

But many of these exemptions, the CDC reports, are for philosophical reasons. California, for example, reported 14,921 philosophical exemptions in 2012 and zero religious ones, while Illinois reported 8,082 religious exemptions and none on philosophical grounds.

And while the question of personal objections to vaccinations remains a hot topic, one aspect seems to be indisputable: No major religion explicitly objects to immunization. The Deseret News identified one faith, with approximately 12,000 members, that has a tenet explicitly rejecting injections or vaccines of any kind.

But the world's major faiths — Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam — have no explicit prohibitions against oral or injected vaccines. At times, some followers or preachers within a given religion or sect may have spoken against vaccination, but researcher John D. Grabenstein of Merck Vaccines, writing in the scientific journal Vaccine in April 2013, could find no sustained teaching against the practice in any major faith community.

In fact, Grabenstein wrote, "multiple religious doctrines or imperatives call for preservation of life, caring for others, and duty to community (e.g., parent to child, neighbors to each other)."

In an interview, Grabenstein said many religious objections were "about safety concerns, not about theology, (even though) people who went to a church, or mosque or synagogue, said 'I'm not going to get a vaccine because of my religion.'"

Mark S. Movsesian, a law professor at St. John's University in Queens, New York, who specializes in religious liberty issues, agrees.

"The people who are claiming these exemptions, it's not religious exemption, but 'personal belief,'" he said. "My impression is, that's what most of the objection is about."

Writing on the website for First Things magazine, Movsesian also denied that conscience exemptions could be blamed on the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, he noted, the Hobby Lobby majority opinion specifically excluded vaccines from such conscience protections.

Not Christian Scientists

While members of the Christian Science Church are noted for relying on spiritual healing, the organization does not list a formal policy against immunizations on its website.

Church founder Mary Baker Eddy said in 1901 that members should comply with vaccination mandates, according to Boston College history professor Alan Rogers, whose 2014 book "The Child Cases: How America’s Religious Exemption Laws Harm Children," examined legal cases involving children in the movement.

Because Eddy, who died in 1910, has spoken on the subject, Rogers said, "the (Christian Science) Church took no official position against vaccination. But, since the central belief of the Scientists was that there was no material reality, that the human body was a manifestation of God's perfect spiritual world, there was no need for vaccination. Indeed, to choose vaccination would be to deny that religious 'reality.'"

A spokesperson for The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was not immediately available for comment.

One religious group that explicitly forbids vaccinations, surgeries, medicine and anything invasive is the New Jersey-based Congregation of Universal Wisdom, founded by 71-year-old chiropractor Walter P. Schilling. He said the group has "11,600 members in 48 states and a couple of foreign countries." On its website, the group classifies as "sacrilege" the "injection into the body of medication or other matter of substances that defy natural law."

"The immunization thing isn't the driving force, it's about keeping the body pure," Schilling said. "We're looking for the natural, innate ability of the body to heal itself."

The group's beliefs have withstood legal challenge. In 2002, Kelly Turner, a Congregation of Universal Wisdom adherent, had her objections to immunizing her daughter recognized as religious by the federal District Court in Syracuse, New York, despite school authorities' contention that it wasn't a bona fide religious belief.

Exemption repeal pondered

While 20 states allow some measure of personal belief exemption, continuing instances of disease outbreaks related to unvaccinated children have caused legislators to re-examine the doctrine.

California state Sen. Richard Pan, a pediatrician and Democrat from Sacramento, introduced a bill this week that would repeal that state's personal belief exemption, the one used by nearly 15,000 kindergartner's parents in 2012.



"As a pediatrician, I’ve been worried about the anti-vaccination trend for a long time," Pan said in a statement. "I’ve personally witnessed the suffering caused by these preventable diseases, and I am very grateful to the many parents that are now speaking up and letting us know that our current laws don’t protect their kids."



In 2012, Pan sponsored, and the Legislature passed, a bill requiring those who claim a vaccination exemption to talk with a "licensed health care practitioner" about potential impacts in their communities. That bill cut personal exemptions by 20 percent in its first year, Pan said, but some California communities still have opt-out rates of more than 10 percent, which endangers others at risk for infection.



Health advocates stress the issue is one of community protection and not a religious rights conflict.



"There's not two sides of the story," said Diane Peterson, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition in St. Paul, Minnesota. "There's the side that 95 percent of the nation support and then there's the hardcore (of people who) never met a vaccine they liked."



Email: mkellner@deseretnews.com Twitter: @Mark_Kellner


http://national.deseretnews.com/article/3483/religious-objections-to-vaccinations-there-really-arent-any.html

A Child's Death And a Crisis for Faith

Suzanne Sataline
Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2008

The recent death from untreated diabetes of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl has invigorated opposition to obscure laws in many states that let parents rely on prayer, rather than medicine, to heal sick children.

Dale and Leilani Neumann of Weston, Wis., are facing charges of second-degree reckless homicide after their child, Madeline Kara Neumann, died on Easter after slipping into a coma. The death, likely preventable with insulin, has renewed calls for Wisconsin and dozens of other states to strike laws that protect parents who choose prayer alone in lieu of medical treatment.

The case also has frustrated the Church of Christ, Scientist, the main promoter of prayer as therapy, which says a few tragic cases have unfairly tarred a practice that can restore health. The Neumanns, a Christian couple who run a prayer group out of their coffee shop, are not Christian Scientists. The National Center for Health Statistics, a federal agency,
estimated in 2004 that more than 2% of the population uses prayer rituals.  "No one should be presumed to be guilty or innocent ... because they've chosen spiritual care," says Phil Davis, a Christian Science church spokesman.

Lawyers nationwide say they are eager to see if the Neumann case sparks more changes in state laws. It raises a "national discourse as to whether children can be medically neglected legally," says Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who writes about children's rights. In another recent case, a 15-month-old child in Oregon died in March from a form of pneumonia and a blood infection after her parents opted to try to heal her with prayer. Oregon law provides no defense for parents charged with causing the death of a child through neglect or maltreatment, and the couple has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminal
mistreatment.

There's been a small, steady pushback against state provisions protecting spiritual healing. A Massachusetts bill that would have protected parents who used prayer in lieu of medical treatment stalled in committee last year, despite the measure's broad sponsorship by 33 lawmakers.

In Maryland, lawmakers in 2005 repealed part of a law that had protected parents from losing custody if they withheld medical treatment because of religious belief. And in Maine that year, legislators amended several laws regarding religious treatment, and repealed part of its family law that stated that children couldn't automatically be considered abused
solely because they were treated "by spiritual means by an accredited practitioner." Evert Fowle, the district attorney in Augusta, Maine, said the amendments would now allow him to bring charges against guardians should a child be harmed after being treated with prayer alone.

The Wisconsin case against the Neumanns also highlights an obscure area of child-protection law that will force judges to weigh seemingly conflicting laws: If a state permits people to employ prayers for healing, can it then hold a parent criminally liable if those prayers fail?

The recent deaths of children have spotlighted the little-known lobbying work of the Church of Christ, Scientist, a denomination with anywhere from 60,000 to a half-million members, according to various estimates. The group believes that health can be restored through a stronger connection with God -- in effect, willing the body to be healthy. The
church is the largest that supports relying on prayer for healing, though other small sects do, as well. Of course, many religious denominations advocate prayer in conjunction with medical treatment.

The Christian Science church doesn't provide guidance on whether members may seek medical care, says Mr. Davis, the church spokesman. He says the church does not bar members from getting medical care, nor does it advise members when they should do so.

Church founder Mary Baker Eddy believed it was "fear that creates the image of disease and its consequent manifestation in the body." Spiritual practitioners, who are trained by the church to heal through prayer, get patients to think differently about their relationship with God, says Mr. Davis, who also is a spiritual practitioner. "It's an affirmation [of truth],"
Mr. Davis says. "It's that understanding that restores harmony."

The church's Christian Science Journal prints monthly testimonies that prayer has wiped away prostate cancer, a breast lump, leukemia and other illnesses. Brian Talcott, a practitioner in Berkeley, Calif., says he has seen cases of glaucoma and cataracts disappear.

But a 2006 study in the American Heart Journal concluded that prayers for patients recovering from bypass surgery had no effect. The study was led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Every state forbids child abuse and requires parents to provide health care. But in the 1970s and 1980s, many states added provisions offering legal protections to parents who used prayer treatment. Many of these statutes were passed after Congress in 1974 began offering money to bolster child-protection agencies. But there were strings. Federal health
and welfare officials, pressed by Christian Scientists, made the funding contingent upon the requesting state legislating legal safeguards for those opting to treat with prayer.

In all, 45 states offer some legal accommodations in child-protection laws for parents who use spiritual healing, according to the Christian Science church. The laws vary widely, with some states protecting parents or guardians from felony abuse or murder prosecutions, while others exempt prayer practice only in misdemeanor cases, according to Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty Inc., a nonprofit group based in Sioux City, Iowa, that opposes such laws.

Wisconsin has three statutes providing religious healing exceptions: one in the child-abuse laws, one in the laws concerning crimes against children, and one that bars the state from forcing medical care on someone who chooses Christian Science prayer. The state's child-abuse laws were amended in 1987 to say: "A person is not guilty of an
offense ... solely because he or she provides a child with treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone for healing." The wording was requested by the local Christian Science government-relations office, according to the Wisconsin Legislative Council, a state agency.

A 1998 study in the journal Pediatrics, by Rita Swan, president of Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, and Seth Asser, a Rhode Island pediatrician, reported that 172 children died with no medical care because of religious reasons in the two decades after states began exempting faith healing. Of those, 140 children had a greater than 90% chance of survival
if they had been treated medically, the researchers found. "Some of the religious defenses to felonies are a chilling betrayal of children," says Ms. Swan, a former Christian Scientist who lost a child to spinal meningitis in 1977 after initially relying on church practitioners before finally seeking medical help.

Although many states allow medical personnel to seek court orders to provide emergency care if a sick child is denied treatment, parents who rely on religious healing often don't inform doctors and hospitals of their children's condition.

Since 1982, states have filed criminal charges in the deaths of 65 children whose parents practiced faith healing, according to Ms. Swan's count. The prosecutions have had mixed results.

In California, the state Supreme Court in 1988 upheld the conviction of a mother found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and felony child endangerment after she used a Christian Science healer to care for her 4-year-old daughter. The child died of meningitis. The justices found that the religious-healing clause in the state child-neglect statute was not a defense in a felony death case.

But three years later, Minnesota's Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion. The court dismissed second-degree-manslaughter charges against Christian Scientists William and Kathleen McKown. Her son, Ian Lundman, died at age 11 of diabetic ketoacidosis, or severe, untreated diabetes. The justices ruled that the government couldn't allow someone
to "depend upon" Christian Science healing methods "then attempt to prosecute them for
exercising that right."

The court will have to wrestle with a similar legal dilemma in Wisconsin. The judge will have to decide if the Neumanns believed they were acting lawfully in choosing to treat their child with prayer. The district attorney's office declined to comment and the lawyer for the Neumanns didn't return phone calls. The judge has imposed a gag order in the case.

Christian Science church members nationwide have lobbied lawmakers not just to allow spiritual healing, but to exempt members from mandatory health insurance and to allow insurance carriers to reimburse spiritual healers. And believers in spiritual healing have chalked up some recent wins. Iowa last year allowed parents for religious reasons to opt out of mandatory childhood screenings for lead poisoning.

Massachusetts, the only state that requires residents to have health insurance, allows residents to opt out of buying medical insurance for religious reasons.

Church lobbyists are now asking that the state allow insurance plans to reimburse prayer practitioners, who can charge $20 to $50 for a day's worth of prayer, says Wanda Jane Warmack, the church's legislative manager.

STUDY: CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS DIE YOUNGER

Jon Van
September 24, 1989
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Even though Christian Scientists abstain from tobacco and alcohol, they apparently die younger than the rest of the population, perhaps because they also shun most therapies offered by modern medicine, a new study has found.

The higher death rate among Christian Scientists was reported by a scientist on the faculty of Emporia State University, William Franklin Simpson, who compared longevity over the last 50 years of graduates from a Christian Science college with that of people attending a public university.

Although abstinence from tobacco and alcohol has been proven to extend life, graduates of Principia College in Elsah, Ill., a Christian Science school, didn`t live as long as liberal arts graduates of the University of Kansas in Lawrence who completed school at the same time, Simpson found.

The founder of the Christian Science faith, Mary Baker Eddy, taught that illness is just a product of the mind, and that all drugs do is tap into human faith and belief. Eddy urged members of her church to eschew most medical therapies and to instead treat illness and affliction with prayer alone.

Several states exempt from child-abuse laws those Christian Science parents who withhold medical care from their offspring. Medicare and some health insurance funds pay for Christian Science prayer care just as they do for orthodox medicine, Simpson noted in his report, which was being published in Friday`s Journal of the American Medical Association.

Studies of Christian Scientists and their health are rare because their church is secretive.

Simpson, a Principia alumnus, based his findings upon information taken from the Principia Alumni Directory, which regularly lists graduates of the college and provides obituaries when alumni die. Adherence to Christian Science beliefs is virtually a requirement for admission to Principia, Simpson said, and he assumed for purposes of the study that most of the graduates continued in that faith after graduation.

In analyzing death records of 5,558 people who graduated from Principia between 1934 and 1983 and those of 29,858 who graduated from the University of Kansas during the same period, Simpson found that the death rate among Principia graduates from cancer was double the national average and that 6 percent of the overall deaths of Principia graduates were due to causes generally regarded as preventable by orthodox medicine.

''If Christian Science healing methods work as well as medical healing methods, one would expect to see Christian Scientists live as long as non-Christian Scientists,'' Simpson concluded. ''However, this study has shown that this is not the case.

''Christian Scientists (at least people who claimed to be Christian Scientists at the time they were students at Principia College) have a lower life expectancy than a control group of students from the University of Kansas.''

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-09-24-8901150766-story.html