Summary

  • Idaho’s child abuse statutes exclude faith-based medical refusal from the definition of neglect, and a ProPublica investigation published Oct. 1 reports that this statutory architecture left authorities without routine authority to prevent at least fifteen avoidable child deaths in Idaho’s Followers of Christ community between 2015 and 2025.
  • Healthcare professionals who reviewed records for the investigation determined that recurrent deaths within families — including four siblings in one family and additional sibling clusters in at least four others — involved conditions the reviewers said could be resolved with interventions as simple as insulin, antibiotics, or a supply of oxygen.
  • Deputy Attorney General Mary Jo Beig’s 2016 testimony before a Children at Risk-Faith Healing legislative work group documents the mechanism, telling legislators that the Department of Health and Welfare “cannot say that you are a neglectful parent because you are not seeking medical treatment” when a parent cites prayer for a child’s medical condition, and Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue reports his deputies cannot act or notify child welfare agencies without evidence of a separate crime.
  • Followers of Christ community practice compounds the statutory gap because many families homeschool, socialize largely within the sect, and delay birth registration, with the investigation reporting that “the first doctor to see the child’s grave illness is often the pathologist who performs their autopsy.”
  • Oregon rolled back its parallel exemption in 1999, and former Oregon District Attorney John Foote told ProPublica the legal leverage that change produced became a tool to compel medical care for surviving children; Idaho’s legislature earlier this year enacted only Benji’s Law, which addresses the narrow subset of cases involving parents already flagged in the state’s high-risk registry.
  • The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare does not track how many of its 318 medical-neglect investigations over the past seven years involved faith-healing families, a data-architecture gap the investigation identifies as the reason the available record cannot distinguish among candidate explanations for the recurrent pattern.

A ProPublica investigation published Oct. 1 and co-published with The Oregonian/OregonLive reports that healthcare professionals who reviewed records for the news organization counted at least fifteen avoidable deaths of children in Idaho’s Followers of Christ community between 2015 and 2025, and identifies Idaho’s faith-healing exemption from child-neglect statutes as the legal mechanism that left authorities without routine recourse before or after each death. The investigation documents recurrent sibling deaths within at least five families, draws on 2016 testimony from Deputy Attorney General Mary Jo Beig describing the exemption’s reach, and pairs the Idaho regime with neighboring Oregon’s 1999 rollback, which former Oregon District Attorney John Foote credits with converting parental refusal into parental cooperation. The report arrives as Idaho’s legislature earlier this year enacted Benji’s Law, a narrower reform that addresses only the subset of cases in which parents already appear in the state’s high-risk registry, leaving the broader exemption intact. Healthcare professionals who reviewed records for ProPublica counted the deaths; none of the parents of the children in the story responded to inquiries from a reporter, and ProPublica said it is not identifying the parents or using the children’s full names out of respect for the families’ privacy.

The Statutory Architecture

Idaho’s child abuse statutes exclude faith-based medical refusal from the definition of neglect. Beig told the 2016 Children at Risk-Faith Healing legislative work group: “If you were saying that your child broke their femur and you were praying to resolve this medical issue, the Department of Health and Welfare cannot say that you are a neglectful parent because you are not seeking medical treatment.” Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue, described in the investigation as one of the most vocal opponents of the exemptions, said the law’s exclusion of faith-healing practice from the definition of neglect means child protection laws for neglect do not apply. Unless deputies find evidence of a separate crime, Donahue reports, his deputies cannot take action and do not notify child welfare agencies. The investigation reports that the exemption also keeps police and social workers from stepping in to protect a dead child’s surviving siblings, regardless of how many of them die. The parents of the four children in one family told officers they had not taken their children to a doctor because of their religion.

The Community Practice That Compresses Detection

The Followers of Christ community practice compresses the window in which state authorities could act under any other theory of harm. Many families homeschool, few socialize outside the sect, and some families do not register a child’s birth with the state until they need a birth certificate to navigate outside the community. Nathan Kangas, an unordained elder in one Followers church with about 500 members, said parents keep their children away from the doctor to teach them to avoid what he described as “the curse of turning to medicine as adults.” Because doctors seldom see children in faith-healing families, the investigation reports, they typically do not get a chance to discover grave medical conditions or witness moments of extreme medical distress, and “Rather, the first doctor to see the child’s grave illness is often the pathologist who performs their autopsy.” Other law enforcement officers and former members of the sect described followers as good parents except when it comes to medical care for their families, and Kangas said few members are willing to speak to reporters because of past coverage they felt “mischaracterized” them.

The Documented Pattern

The investigation documents recurrent sibling deaths within at least five families. In one family, four children died in succession: Emma Joyce at age three in August 2009, after being sick and vomiting for days in a small gray farmhouse in rural Idaho; her sister Ava Joan in July 2010 from a complication of untreated diabetes, after refusing to eat or drink anything but a few grapes and some Sprite in a sippy cup; a toddler brother less than two years later from the same complication; and a fourth sibling nine years after that. In another family, two newborns succumbed to meconium aspiration, a syndrome the investigation says affected less than two percent of newborns in a study of more than 160,000 full-term births, with a 1.2 percent mortality rate among those affected. In another family, three brothers died in patterns that led reviewing doctors to suspect an inherited immune deficiency. Two newborn siblings in another Followers family died from treatable birth complications, and four infant siblings in another family died from various causes. Experts reviewing the records were uncertain on only two of the sibling deaths; the remaining deaths were determined by reviewers to be potentially resolvable through interventions as simple as insulin, antibiotics, or a supply of oxygen. The dead children included those in five families — including Emma Joyce’s — who suffered a combined total of two, three, or four losses in the 2015–2025 period or earlier. The headstones of Emma Joyce and her siblings cluster at Peaceful Valley Cemetery, a hilltop graveyard belonging to the Followers with at least four churches in Idaho, and the investigation reports similar sibling clusters at the same site.

The Oregon Comparison

Neighboring Oregon began rolling back its own religious exemptions in 1999. The investigation reports that the possibility of prosecution “proved a powerful incentive for parents to seek medical care when a child’s life was at risk,” and that the rollback gave the state legal leverage to order medical care for surviving and future children — leverage used in one Oregon case days before Emma Joyce died. John Foote, a former district attorney in Oregon who prosecuted several parents in his local Followers of Christ congregation after their children died from treatable ailments, said the goal framed as prevention rather than punishment is the operative principle: “If you don’t do anything, kids are going to die.” Keeping more children from dying, he said, is “the whole point.” Oregon and Idaho share a cross-border congregational base, which the investigation uses to isolate the legal regime as the operative variable: where Oregon removed the legal exemption, intervention and treatment followed; where Idaho retained it, the documented deaths continued.

Narrow Reforms and Their Limits

Earlier this year, in response to the death of a newborn whose parents were flagged as high risk, Idaho lawmakers passed Benji’s Law, which requires an expedited safety check when such a parent has a new baby; surviving children may also be temporarily removed from the parents’ custody. The law addresses only the narrow subset of cases involving parents already in the high-risk registry, leaving the broader statutory gap intact. An emergency-care statute allows a doctor to try to persuade a judge that without treatment, the child’s life “would be greatly endangered,” but the judge must still consider any spiritual treatment the child is receiving, and Beig told legislators that “someone needs to know about the child” before such an order can be obtained. The investigation reports that in the Followers community, that knowledge rarely arrives in time. In a recent case, school staff noticed a student from a faith-healing family having up to thirteen seizures a day, which ultimately led a doctor going to court to say the girl needed emergency medical attention; use of the emergency-care statute remains unusual.

State Action When a Child Is Independently Observed

The cases in which Idaho acted illustrate the operational principle. In 2024, Idaho took eight children into custody after the death of a medically fragile teenage boy in a home where police said they found “deplorable, unsafe” living conditions. In the present year, Idaho took a newborn from a mother’s custody when the mother was indicted in the deaths of her twin toddlers; she pleaded not guilty to murder charges and is scheduled to go to trial in January. Both cases involved deaths attributed to causes other than parental refusal of medical care on religious grounds, and both produced state action. The investigation frames this contrast as evidence that Idaho’s existing authority, once a child is independently observed in distress, is sufficient to act. Among all 318 medical-neglect investigations the Department of Health and Welfare conducted over the past seven years, the agency found actual neglect in 28 cases; most of the time, the agency said, it worked with the family to address root causes so that children could safely remain in their homes, but in 10 of the 28 cases, children had to be placed in state custody.

The Data-Architecture Gap

The state Department of Health and Welfare does not track how many of the reports it receives about medical neglect are related to faith healing. Across all 318 medical-neglect investigations the department conducted over the past seven years, neglect was found in 28 cases and children were placed in state custody in 10 of those 28 cases. The share attributable to faith-healing families is not separated out. Until faith-healing-specific tracking exists, the investigation reports, none of the candidate explanations can be cleanly tested. The same gap applies to the comparative record: a controlled comparison of pre- and post-1999 mortality among Followers families in Oregon and Idaho would distinguish whether the exemption itself, cultural insularity, or the political coalition protecting the exemption is the binding constraint.

How the Conflict Is Framed

The investigation surfaces multiple framings on the policy question, with no reconciliation among them. A religious-liberty framing centers the constitutional protection of free exercise and parental rights in the upbringing of children, and holds that any reform narrow enough to survive constitutional scrutiny will leave most of the underlying conduct unregulated; under this framing, the line the state may not cross in compelling medical care for a child mirrors the line it may not cross in other areas of religious upbringing. A parens patriae framing centers the state’s authority and obligation to protect children who cannot protect themselves, noting that the state already compels medical care in many contexts including vaccination for school attendance, emergency care, and newborn screening; under this framing, the question is not whether the state may intervene but at what threshold the cost of non-intervention becomes unacceptable, and Beig’s 2016 testimony describes the policy mechanism that produces the class of children with reduced legal protection. A historical-genealogy framing, which the source does not develop, would trace the divergence between Oregon and Idaho to the 1999 Oregon rollback and ask why the 2016 Idaho work group did not produce comparable legislation. A cross-domain analogical framing, also not developed in the source, would compare faith-healing exemptions to other religious carve-outs in family law and public health, including vaccine exemptions. A stakeholder-position framing distinguishes law enforcement (Donahue, described as one of the most vocal opponents of the exemptions, and Beig, constrained by statute), legislators responsible for the 2016 work group and the session in which Benji’s Law passed, the Followers community through Kangas, and surviving siblings whose interests are voiced only through the deaths themselves; the source documents the first three positions and parts of the fourth. The framings converge on a structure that does not require parents to seek care affirmatively but does require the state to act when a child is independently observed to be at risk. The framings diverge on whether residual cases — children who die without ever coming to independent observation — are an acceptable cost of the religious-liberty accommodation or a category the parens patriae frame cannot absorb.

Two Characterizations in the Source

Two characterizations of Followers parents appear in the source without reconciliation. Donahue said members of the faith want their children to survive and described them as parents who “love their kids just like you or I would love our kids” but are “indoctrinated” and “conditioned” against seeking medical care. Kangas said parents keep their children away from the doctor to teach them to avoid “the curse of turning to medicine as adults.” The two characterizations differ on whether the conduct is best understood as parental choice shaped by church teaching or as a form of conditioning that overrides parental choice. The distinction matters for the policy question: a parental-choice frame implies reform proceeds through persuasion or through altering the legal cost of the choice; a conditioning frame implies reform may need to address the church’s authority over medical decisions more directly. The investigation also documents the grief of one Idaho Followers mother who lost three boys through her social media posts: a 2022 family photo shows a baby with the family’s three other children, a 2024 photo shows the same three older children but with a different baby who is also now dead, and a mid-2025 baby boy died at two months old from an untreated infection with no updated family photo. Among those who reacted to that mother’s social media posts was the mother of Emma Joyce and her three dead siblings.

What the Record Does Not Distinguish

The available record does not distinguish among candidate mechanisms for the documented pattern. One analytical reading frames the pattern as two interacting features — the statutory exemption excluding faith-based medical refusal from the definition of neglect, and community insularity that limits the contact required for intervention under any other theory of harm — whose combination accounts for the documented deaths; a related observation in this reading notes the two mechanisms are not fully independent, because the religious-liberty frame provides a constitutional space within which parents can keep children out of medical view, so partial repeal of the exemption might draw children into professional view even before any direct enforcement change. Another analytical reading decomposes the same evidence as three candidate mechanisms — the exemption itself as the binding constraint, cultural isolation as the binding constraint, or the political coalition protecting the exemption as the binding constraint — and notes the source does not provide decisive evidence to choose among them. A controlled comparison of pre- and post-1999 mortality among Followers families in Oregon and Idaho would distinguish the first two: if Oregon’s rate fell substantially after rollback while Idaho’s did not, the exemption is supported as the binding constraint and insularity is weakened; if both rates remained flat, insularity is supported and the exemption is weakened. The political-coalition hypothesis is not testable from comparative mortality data alone and would require evidence on what reform proposals were considered, what coalition dynamics produced the narrowed legislative outcome, and why the 2016 work group did not produce legislation comparable to Oregon’s rollback. What comprehensive reform proposals, if any, were considered in 2016, what further testimony was offered, and what coalition dynamics produced the narrowed legislative outcome of Benji’s Law is not detailed in the source.

Additional considerations

Three evidentiary gaps in the underlying record are worth flagging. First, the meconium figures central to the rarity argument — less than two percent incidence, 1.2 percent mortality among those affected, a base of more than 160,000 full-term births — are presented in the investigation without naming the underlying study, leaving the rarity claim as an unattributed aggregate. Second, the investigation’s framing of the pattern’s drivers is a judgment call: the source’s primary attribution is to the statutory exemption, with insularity as a contributing factor, while a political-coalition reading is developed only in ancillary analytical material rather than in the investigation’s own voice. Third, the publication date year (2026 in source metadata) cannot be independently confirmed from the materials available, though the “earlier this year” reference for Benji’s Law is internally consistent with a 2026 publication date. These gaps do not change the central finding but bound the confidence with which any of the candidate mechanisms can be ranked.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Process Tracing
Reconstructs the step-by-step causal pathway of a specific historical event.
Wicked Problems
Treats a problem as wicked — no stopping rule, no clean test of success, every attempt consequential.