Notes from the Field — August 26, 2026
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For most of Idaho’s history, the law was blunt: a parent who let a child go without necessary medical care was guilty of a crime, and if the child died, that parent could be charged with manslaughter. The 1887 territorial code made no exception for belief. Then, in the 1970s, the state carved one out — and has defended it ever since, even as the deaths kept coming.
Since 2015, reporting has documented at least 15 children in Idaho’s Followers of Christ congregations who died of treatable conditions — pneumonia, sepsis, a correctable birth complication, an untreated pituitary tumor. None of those deaths produced a criminal charge. Idaho’s religious exemption, now covering neglect, injury, abuse, and manslaughter alike, makes that outcome not a gap in enforcement but the law working exactly as written.
The exemption is younger than the problem it protects
The historical record undercuts the claim, made by some lawmakers over the years, that the exemption defends a deep-rooted tradition. From the 1880s through the early 1970s, Idaho prosecuted faith-healing neglect like any other neglect. The shift traces to a federal mandate: the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 conditioned state child-welfare funding on new reporting standards, and the federal health department interpreted that mandate — in a way the surviving records don’t explain — as requiring a religious carve-out. Most states complied. Idaho went further than most, broadening its exemption again in 1976 to also shield faith-healing families from having children removed for lack of medical care.
The federal mandate didn’t last. The Reagan administration reversed the interpretation in 1983, and several states rolled their exemptions back once the requirement was gone. Colorado repealed its version in 2001, after a 13-year-old died of untreated diabetes in a sect related to the Followers of Christ. Oregon eliminated its exemption in the late 1990s; prosecutors and detectives there say more parents have sought medical care for their children since.
Idaho did neither. It kept the exemption on the books after the federal justification for having one had already disappeared, and it has continued to widen the surrounding legal terrain since — enacting a parental-rights framework, banning school vaccine mandates, requiring parental consent for minors’ medical care — while, since 2014, rejecting every legislative attempt to narrow the medical-neglect exemption itself. A 2016 legislative working group heard days of testimony and closed without a recommendation.
The instrument, not the intent
This isn’t a story about faith. It’s a story about what a safeguard becomes once the reason it was built disappears and nobody is required to take it back down. The 1974 federal mandate manufactured a legal shield that Idaho’s own history shows was never there before; once the mandate lapsed, the shield stayed, doing work its original justification can no longer account for. Every year the exemption remains on the books, the state — not the congregations sheltering under it — is the author of that choice.
Two of the more recent cases involved children named Malachi and Liam. What happened to them would be investigated as a crime in any other Idaho household. In the household they were born into, it wasn’t. A prosecutor can call the exemption a gap that leaves children unprotected. A pediatrician can call the resulting deaths preventable. The law, as written, calls neither of those things a crime.
The gear that keeps turning here isn’t a hidden one. It’s a public record, sitting in statute, that anyone in Boise could vote to close.
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Copyright 2026 — Steve Sagnotti
Sources: ProPublica, “Idaho Law Protects Faith Healers. It Wasn’t Always That Way.” and “Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen.,” Aug. 26, 2026.
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