Faith Assembly taught a message of strict faith healing, that medical treatment should never be used, and the only way faith healing could fail is if someone wasn't a strong enough believer.
The leader, Hobart Freeman, was indicted on three felony counts by a grand jury, after a girl died from untreated kidney failure.
Experts can reasonably disagree about which deaths were mainly caused by Faith Assembly's faith healing practices.
| deaths | group | criteria | reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 52 people | Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 1983 | (TODO) | Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 1983-05-02 |
| 88 people | Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, 1984 | (TODO) | track it down from this |
| 64 people | Seth Asser and Rita Swan, 1998 | minor children | Asser and Swan (1998) |
| 91 people | ? the "Surviving Faith Assembly" author ? | (TODO) | (TODO) |
| 40 people | CDC and the Indiana State Board of Health, 1984 | (TODO) | Spence, Craig, T. S. Danielson, and Andrew M. Kaunitz (1984) |
| 90 people | ? | (TODO) | track down from here: "Authorities have said that as many as 90 deaths have occurred because the approximately 2,000 members of the Faith Assembly followed Freeman's preachings" |
Wikipedia
Washington Post
New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Chicago Tribune
Associated Press
United Press International
Fort Wayne News-Sentinel
Warsaw Times-Union
Kosciusko County Historical Society
The Oregonian, located in Portland, OR
The Christian Post
The News-Sun, located in Kendallville, IN
Star-News, located in Wilmington, NC
academic journal — Spence, Craig, T. S. Danielson, and Andrew M. Kaunitz. "The Faith Assembly: A Study of Perinatal and Maternal Mortality." Indiana Medicine: the Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association 77.3 (1984): 180-183. (full text)
academic journal — Malecha, Wayne F. "Faith healing exemptions to child protection laws: keeping the faith versus medical care for children." Journal of Legislation. 12 (1985): 243. (full text)
academic journal — Spence, C., and T. S. Danielson. "The Faith Assembly. A Follow-up Study of Faith Healing and Mortality." Indiana Medicine: the Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association 80.3 (1987): 238-240. (full text)
academic journal — Asser, Seth M., and Swan, Rita. "Child Fatalities From Religion-motivated Medical Neglect." Pediatrics 101.4 (1998): 625-629. (full text)
academic journal — Hughes, Richard A. "The Death of Children by Faith-Based Medical Neglect." Journal of Law and Religion 20.1 (2005): 247-265. doi:10.2307/4144687
book — "Handbook of Religion and Health", published by Oxford University Press in 2001, written by Harold Koenig, Dana King, and Verna B. Carson, page 67 [wikipedia]
book — "When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law", published by Oxford University Press in 2008, written by Shawn Francis Peters.
Asser and Swan documented fatalities among twenty-three religious denominations in thirty-four states. Many of the churches were small, and some of their names were unfamiliar to most mainstream Christians. The obscure Faith Assembly had the dubious honor of recording the greatest number of neglect-related fatalities among members of any church—sixty-four. The more widely known Church of Christ, Scientist (commonly known as the Christian Science Church) came in second place in this bleak race with a total of twenty-eight deaths.
...
As their critics often argue, these broad and sometimes contradictory religious-immunity provisions can derail even the most determined efforts by states to bring perpetrators of religion-based medical neglect to justice. Confusion over the scope of religious exemptions apparently reigned in Indiana until newspaper reports highlighted the problem. In 1983, the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel documented nearly three dozen apparently preventable deaths among infants and children whose parents belonged to the Faith Assembly. The circumstances of some of these deaths—which dated back to 1973, according to the paper—were nothing short of gruesome. A one-year-old girl named Eva Swanson died of blood poisoning and pneumonia in 1981 after she accidentally dumped a small pot of scalding tea on herself. The News-Sentinel reported that a fifteen-month-old named Dustin Gilmore "was deafened, blinded and killed" by a virulent form of meningitis. Because of their parents’ religious beliefs, none of the Faith Assembly children received medical care. Said one Faith Assembly mother who lost an infant to pneumonia, "Jesus was his doctor."37
The case of Natali Joy Mudd, a four-year-old Faith Assembly child who died in 1980, was especially horrific. A fast-growing, highly malignant tumor called rhabdomyosarcoma sprouted from near the girl’s right eye and, left untreated by medical science, "eventually grew to the size of her head," according to one press account. When Natali’s parents called police to report the girl’s death, investigators discovered trails of blood along the walls of their home. They surmised that the crimson stains had been left where the nearly blind Natali, groping her way through the house, had dragged her grotesquely disfigured head. "It’s hard to comprehend a little toddler going through all that because of religion, with all the treatments available," one of the investigators later said. (For rhabdomyosarcoma, these treatments include surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.) Natali’s death was perhaps doubly tragic because her sister, who also initially was denied medical treatment, later died of the same kind of tumor.38
Although prosecutions had been mounted in other states, the News-Sentinel’s review of deaths of Faith Assembly children revealed that none of the parents in the church in Indiana—not even the parents of Natali Joy Mudd—had been charged with manslaughter or neglect. "Today," one state legislator lamented, "we’re allowing the Faith Assembly to withhold medical treatment [from children] without being prosecuted." Explaining why he had failed to file criminal charges against parents implicated in more than a dozen religion- based neglect cases in his county, one prosecutor asserted that state law "specifically excludes [from prosecution] people who provide spiritual treatment" to their children in lieu of medical care. But Indiana’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Linley Pearson, suggested that this was perhaps too broad a reading of the statute and that prosecutors could move forward with charges and let juries determine if the measure applied in cases involving Faith Assembly parents. The state of the law in Indiana was so muddled that the two state legislators who had introduced the spiritual-healing measure disagreed as to whether it provided an absolute defense to parents implicated in cases of religion-based medical neglect.39
book — "Churches That Abuse", chapter 9 [pdf, pages 87-89] [html] [wikipedia]
book — "The Checkbook Bible: The Teaching of Hobart E. Freeman and Faith Assembly", written by Rodney J. Crowell, second edition 2012
TODO— I have this in the Kindle Cloud Reader. Figure out how to extract these images:
Warsaw Times-Union
Worcester Magazine, located in Worcester, MA
Current Publishing, located in Carmel, IN
Hobart Freeman
photos
Josh Wilson, former church member
Tom McLaughlin, former church member
Carol Boltz, former church member
(Much of this is copied from the book The Checkbook Bible by Rodney Crowell. Other info is cobbled together from forums. It doesn't always come from multiple independent sources, and should not be considered reliable.)
It's surprisingly complicated to talk about a person's cause of death. Death certificates list both the underlying cause and the immediate cause of death, but there can be multiple causes in each category, and there can be medium-term causes too.
Let's say that a child had a congenital condition that meant she probably wouldn't live longer than 12 months, but medical negligence contributed to her dying after only 6 months. Is it reasonable to conclude that the church's faith healing was the main contributor to her death? Sometimes there's just no simple answer.
This is how there can be different estimates of the total number of deaths.
(links underlined in green are archival copies, often located at the archive.org or Google News Archive)
keywords: Faith Assembly was previously known as the 'Glory Barn', and was located in various places including Claypool, Warsaw, Goshen, Kosciusko County, and Noble County — all located in Indiana.
TODO: find archives)