Idaho has decided, through both silence and statute, that some children can be legally left to die. That is the working reality behind a decade of pediatric deaths inside the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect with at least four congregations across southern Idaho, where at least 15 babies and children died between 2015 and 2025 from illnesses doctors could have successfully treated, according to a ProPublica investigation published on August 25, 2026.
The deaths were not hidden. Coroners logged them. Sheriff’s deputies knocked on doors. ProPublica gathered death records from coroners and police in five Idaho counties and shared them with more than a dozen pediatricians and birthing specialists, who identified conditions — pneumonia, sepsis, an untreated pituitary tumor, a correctable intestinal disorder — that a hospital could have handled with antibiotics, fluids, or a routine procedure.
What kept the state from acting was not a lack of evidence. It was a law.
Idaho’s criminal and civil statutes have, since the 1970s, allowed parents in faith-healing sects to pray rather than seek medical care as their children die. Since then the legislature has moved in the opposite direction of reform, codifying a broader parental rights framework, banning vaccine requirements in schools and childcare centers, and making parental consent a prerequisite for the medical care of minors. Critics argue that architecture makes the exemption harder, not easier, to unwind.
Consider how this looks from inside the county sheriff’s office. Kieran Donahue, the Canyon County sheriff and one of the most vocal opponents of the state’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,” he told ProPublica. His deputies can document a death. They cannot bring a charge the state has pre-emptively immunized.
The pattern is not new. It is the persistence that is unusual.
Oregon faced the same sect, the same theology, and the same deaths, and made a different choice. Lawmakers there eliminated the faith-healing defense from some charges, including manslaughter, in 1999, then trimmed what was left of the exemption in 2011. Oregon prosecutors and detectives later told ProPublica that more parents chose to get medical care for their children after the change. The theology did not change. The exposure did.
Idaho legislators have been shown this comparison repeatedly. Since 2014 they have rejected every effort to dial back the exemption. National coverage — including a February 2018 Washington Post feature — has landed without policy consequence.
Something else is doing the work here, and it is worth naming carefully.
The people who actually read the death records are specific about what they saw. Beth Hartman, an Idaho midwife and former chair of the state’s midwifery licensing board, told ProPublica that a death from respiratory distress is not the quiet passing people imagine — that the dying do not simply close their eyes. Barton Adrian, a retired Idaho pediatrician who reviewed the records, calculated that in one family with 12 children, the death rate ran to one in six, a figure he compared to the developing world.
The clinical view and the legislative view are looking at different objects. Clinicians see a child. Legislators see a coalition.
That coalition matters. Idaho’s rural Republican supermajority has, over the last decade, treated parental rights as a foundational commitment, in part because the same statutory language does work in unrelated fights over schools, gender-affirming care, and vaccine mandates. Any narrowing of the faith-healing exemption becomes, in practice, a vote on the broader doctrine. Legislators who might privately find the Followers’ practices indefensible face a political cost for saying so out loud.
This is the structural reason the deaths continue. The exemption is not defended on its merits. It is defended as a load-bearing wall in a larger house.
David Peterman, a retired Idaho pediatrician who saw patients for 40 years and reviewed the deaths of 18 infants and children at ProPublica’s request, concluded that the great majority were the result of neglect and were preventable. He has said he does not understand how Idaho law can contain an exception that allows these children to die. His confusion is not naive. It is the confusion of someone who evaluates a law by its outcomes rather than its coalitions.
The outcomes, at this point, are documented.
The review identified at least 15 confirmed preventable deaths between 2015 and 2025. Six more could not be evaluated because coroner records were incomplete or unavailable. In four cases the reviewers could not say with confidence whether medical care would have changed the outcome. Records show at least five sets of parents have lost more than one child. Two brothers died 13 months apart of the same treatable condition. A 16-year-old girl weighed 62 pounds when she died on New Year’s Day 2019, her growth stunted by a benign, treatable pituitary tumor. A 16-month-old boy died in 2021 of an intestinal condition that surgeons can usually correct in a single step, through minimally invasive surgery.
Nathan Kangas, an unordained elder in the sect’s Caldwell congregation, defended faith healing and its legal protection in an interview with ProPublica. Parents, he said, must keep children away from doctors to set an example. He lost his own wife and their last child during labor 23 years ago. Three of his 65 grandchildren have also died.
Take a step back and look at the incentive map.
For the sect, the exemption removes the last friction between belief and practice. For legislators, repeal carries political risk and no obvious political reward — the Followers are a small, insular community, not a swing constituency, and the families of the dead children are inside that same community. For prosecutors, the statute forecloses the case before it starts. For coroners, filing a death certificate is the end of the process, not the beginning of one. Every actor with the power to intervene has been given a reason not to.
Contrast this with how Idaho treats parental decisions it considers deviant in other directions. A parent who declines a vaccine schedule is protected; the state has banned vaccine requirements in schools and childcare centers outright. A parent who declines antibiotics for a septic infant is protected too. But under a 2023 law, a doctor who provides puberty blockers or hormones to a patient under 18 commits a felony carrying up to 10 years in prison. The state has made explicit choices about which decisions around a child’s body carry criminal weight and which do not. The faith-healing deaths sit inside those choices.
This is not an argument about religious liberty in the abstract. Oregon’s experience suggests that removing the exemption does not eliminate the faith. It changes the calculation parents make when a child is visibly sick. The exemption is doing work that is legal, not spiritual — it removes the fear of prosecution, and with it, the last external pressure to call a doctor.
Bills to narrow the exemption have been introduced and defeated. A 2016 legislative working group heard days of emotional public testimony and closed without issuing a recommendation. Separate attempts to narrow the definition of medical neglect for all Idaho families, down to only the most life-threatening situations, have also failed. In the meantime, lawmakers have expanded the parental rights framework rather than carve out a pediatric exception.
The line this investigation makes visible is a legal one, drawn deliberately, defended on grounds unrelated to the children inside it. The Followers of Christ did not make Idaho law. Idaho lawmakers did. Every year the exemption remains, that authorship remains too.
A sheriff can call it needless. A pediatrician can call it intolerable. Neither description is a charge. In Idaho, on the current statute, neither can become one.