By Audrey Dutton, ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Co-published with The Oregonian/OregonLive.
A sheriff’s deputy opens the door of an Idaho farmhouse where a newborn baby has just died. It’s almost 10 p.m., but the house is filled with adults and children seated anywhere they can find a spot: in reclining chairs, on the wood-stove hearth, on a chest of drawers. Some of the women hold babies in their laps.
“Sorry,” the deputy whispers as the door creaks.
No one greets the officer. No one speaks or even looks at anyone else, casting their eyes instead at the floor or around the room.
The deputy’s video camera records as he walks through the front room and past a bedroom door adorned with children’s artwork. Inside the bedroom, newborn Malachi’s mother sits in a recliner. His body lies in her lap, covered by a blue blanket.
As people in uniform ask Malachi’s parents about his birth, death and the two days in between, members of the family’s church — one of at least four Followers of Christ churches in Idaho — watch from folding chairs. People come and go from the bedroom; one woman cradles a sleeping toddler.
Malachi died from pneumonia and bleeding lungs, according to an autopsy.
It would have been treatable with antibiotics and newborn care in a hospital, said doctors who reviewed his death records for ProPublica.
But Malachi’s parents belong to a faith-healing sect that doesn’t believe in medical care, based on a literal interpretation of several Bible verses. The Followers of Christ sect believes that God heals the faithful and that life and death must be left to God’s divine will.
When the coroner’s deputy lifted Malachi’s body to take it away that night in October 2023, there was no wailing or sobbing from his parents. Malachi’s father stood quietly as his mother hung her head and rested it in her hand.
A pediatrician who reviewed Malachi’s death records said a baby in his condition would have been gasping for air, turning blue from lack of oxygen and breathing so hard that the outline of his rib cage was visible.
It was the first time the coroner and sheriff sent their deputies out to that house, to interview those parents and document the slow suffocation of a newborn boy.
The next time was 13 months later, when their next newborn, Liam, died from the same treatable condition that killed his brother Malachi.
“This Is Needless”
In any Idaho household not steeped in faith-healing, those two deaths would be investigated as crimes. Idaho law says parents can’t endanger, injure or neglect their children or let them suffer. To do so is a crime, and if the child dies as a result, the parent could be charged with manslaughter.
But those laws do not apply to children like Malachi and Liam. Since the 1970s, Idaho’s criminal and civil laws have allowed parents who belong to Followers of Christ and the state’s other faith-healing sects to pray rather than seek medical care as their children die.
Lawmakers in Oregon, where the same religious groups exist, removed the state’s faith-healing exception to child abuse laws nearly 30 years ago, countering the overwhelming pressure former Followers say parents face from their congregations. More parents chose to get medical care for their children after the change, Oregon prosecutors and detectives said.
Idaho lawmakers have chosen a different path.
Since 2014, they have rejected repeated efforts to dial back Idaho’s faith-healing exemption, instead crafting legislation to further limit the role of anyone but a parent when it comes to children’s health and safety. The state has codified “parental rights,” banned vaccine requirements in schools and childcare centers, and made parental consent a prerequisite for medical care of minors. Legislators also have tried to narrow the definition of “medical neglect” for all families to only the most life-threatening situations, but those attempts have failed.
Local and national media outlets have reported on deaths among Followers of Christ families in Idaho. ProPublica went further, enlisting the help of experts to determine which of those deaths could have been prevented.
ProPublica gathered death records from coroners and police in five Idaho counties and shared them with more than a dozen pediatricians and birthing specialists.
At least 15 babies and children from the faith-healing sect died between 2015 and 2025 from illnesses that doctors could have successfully treated, the experts concluded.
The estimate of preventable deaths is almost certainly an undercount. The experts could not evaluate six more deaths because coroner records were incomplete or unavailable. In another four cases, they couldn’t say with confidence whether medical care would have changed the outcome.
Separately, the experts identified numerous preventable losses of babies who died during birth or in utero very close to their due dates, cases that coroners labeled as stillbirths.
For some families like Liam and Malachi’s, the death of a child wasn’t a one-time tragedy: Records show at least five sets of parents have lost multiple children, a phenomenon that has not previously been reported.
None of the parents responded to letters or text messages from ProPublica, and one declined to comment during a brief phone call. (ProPublica is choosing not to identify them or use the children’s full names out of respect for their privacy.)
But Nathan Kangas, a patriarch in the sect’s Caldwell, Idaho, church, defended faith healing and its legal protection during an interview with ProPublica.
Children and babies can’t make their own decision to rely on faith healing. Kangas said their parents must keep them away from the doctor to set an example, so the young ones won’t be cursed later in life by turning to medicine.
Kangas lost his own wife and their last child during labor 23 years ago. Three of his 65 grandchildren also have died.
Asked why God would not want children to live full and healthy lives, Kangas said he had no answer but quoted a verse from the Book of Psalms: “Precious in the eyes of the Lord are the death of His saints.” The Followers believe that life on Earth is “a preparing ground,” Kangas said. He pointed to the Book of James, which tells people to “be afflicted and mourn and weep” and “let your laughter be turned to mourning.”
“It isn’t necessarily that we’re supposed to have a joyous life here,” Kangas said. “It’s actually quite the opposite.”
Some outsiders take a very different view.
Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue, one of the most vocal opponents of Idaho’s faith-healing laws, has sent deputies to follow up on the deaths of at least 10 Followers’ children and infants since he took office in 2013.
“This is needless,” Donahue said. “This shouldn’t be happening.”
David Peterman, a retired Idaho pediatrician, reviewed the deaths of 18 infants and children at ProPublica’s request.
Peterman saw patients for 40 years and did his residency at a center that offered special training in child abuse and neglect. He said the vast majority of the deaths he reviewed for ProPublica “are the result of neglect and unequivocally preventable.” He said it is “beyond comprehension” that the Idaho Legislature has refused to change the law.
“How is this tolerable?” he said. “I don’t understand how there could be an exception in Idaho law that allows for these children to die.”
Disciples of a New Religion
The Followers of Christ sparked curiosity in Idaho from the time they arrived in 1899. Over time, Followers of Christ formed congregations across southern Idaho. It went on to become the state’s largest faith-healing religion and later spread into Oregon.
The religion also breaks with most Christian denominations in that it does not recruit or proselytize. Other than on the rare occasion an outsider marries in, the sect grows only through existing families.
Like other faith-healing sects, the Followers sought answers in Bible verses such as in the Book of James: “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”
When someone dies despite fervent prayers, the Followers believe it is God’s will. When someone sees a doctor, the Followers see it as a sin. No mainstream Christian denomination today accepts this interpretation of the Bible.
“I think over time, it’s kind of morphed into, ‘This is one of the things that separates us from all other faiths or religions, is that we don’t go to the doctor,'” said Laren Eells, who left one of Idaho’s Followers of Christ churches about a decade ago.
Former members say that someone who visits a doctor might be shunned, reprimanded or simply left out of social events — although Kangas said only “a few people here and there” in his church would go that far.
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