Faith Assembly in Wilmot, Indiana and its pastor, Hobart Freeman
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.
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)
"In cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Ga., the Indiana State board of Health assembled an investigative team to examine perinatal and maternal mortality rates pertaining to Faith Assembly members in Kosciusko and Elkhart Counties, Indiana, 1975-82."
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)
"Abstract. We investigated births and deaths within an Indiana religious group that was avoiding all medical care, including prenatal services. Religious group perinatal and maternal mortality rates for the years 1983-1985 were sharply lower than they were for the years 1975-1982. These findings suggest that public health and legal surveillance have an important role in the prevention of medical neglect."
academic journal — Asser, Seth M., and Swan, Rita. "Child Fatalities From Religion-motivated Medical Neglect." Pediatrics 101.4 (1998): 625-629. (full text)
"Abstract. Objective. To evaluate deaths of children from families in which faith healing was practiced in lieu of medical care and to determine if such deaths were preventable. Design. Cases of child fatality in faith-healing sects were reviewed. Probability of survival for each was then estimated based on expected survival rates for children with similar disorders who receive medical care. Participants. One hundred seventy-two children who died between 1975 and 1995 and were identified by referral or record search. Criteria for inclusion were evidence that parents withheld medical care because of reliance on religious rituals and documentation sufficient to determine the cause of death. Results. One hundred forty fatalities were from conditions for which survival rates with medical care would have exceeded 90%. Eighteen more had expected survival rates of >50%. All but 3 of the remainder would likely have had some benefit from clinical help. Conclusions. When faith healing is used to the exclusion of medical treatment, the number of preventable child fatalities and the associated suffering are substantial and warrant public concern. Existing laws may be inadequate to protect children from this form of medical neglect."
The scope of the article is described this way: "Several states had totals disproportionate to population. There were 50 from Indiana, home of the Faith Assembly. Pennsylvania had 16 fatalities, including 14 from the Faith Tabernacle. The Church of the First Born accounted for the majority of 15 deaths in neighboring Oklahoma and Colorado. In South Dakota there were 5 deaths from the End Time Ministries. Nationwide, the Christian Science church had 28 deaths in the study."
Faith Assembly had more than double the number of deaths that the second-place church had, across all US churches from 1975-1995.
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
"Faith-based medical neglect is permitted or facilitated by religious exemption clauses that appear in many state statutes and federal regulations, which allow religious parents to withhold preventative and diagnostic measures from and to refuse medical care for their sick children. ... The aim of this essay is to (1) examine critically the theology of one faith healing sect, that of the Faith Assembly, which is consistent with the jurisprudence of legal positivism; (2) discuss the dilemmas of a religious defense in the original Faith Assembly trials; (3) review the ethos of medicine in relation to spiritual healing; (4) explore restorative justice as a standard of adjudication; and (5) conclude by affirming a relational model of law as the context of restorative justice."
(In my opinion, this article is well-written and does a good job of summarizing Hobart Freeman's apparent motivations in disparaging medical care, and the various legal arguments made during the trials, including appeals, of parishioners Gary and Margaret Hall, and David and Kathleen Bergmann.)
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 reported that in the Faith Assembly, a small Midwestern church that encourages its members to forsake medical treatment in favor of prayer, nearly thirty children died because of botched deliveries or inadequate postnatal care. One case involved a stillbirth in Indianapolis, Indiana. When police investigators examined the child’s corpse, they found a sizable disfigurement on its left temple. An obstetrician who later reviewed the case surmised that "the baby’s skull was most likely crushed by an inexperienced person performing the delivery," according to a newspaper account. Many of the Faith Assembly stillbirths resulted from failed breech deliveries. One father who lost a child in such circumstances reportedly told police that the death was "a chastisement from God" rather than a product of his own negligence.29
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
(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.)
Melvin Greider (d. 1980) — co-founder
Hobart E. Freeman (d. 1984) — co-founder
June Freeman (d. 1999) — Hobart Freeman's wife, who managed the book store "Faith Ministries"
Bruce Kinsey (d. 2008) — Hobart Freeman's son-in-law
Steve Hill — Hobart Freeman's son-in-law, and assistant pastor at Faith Assembly; he now goes by the name "S. J. Hill"
Jack Farrell — assistant pastor at Faith Assembly, who left the church in June 1985
Malcolm Webber — lead pastor at Faith Assembly, after Steve Hill stepped down
Tom Hamilton (d. 2015) — a former traveling preacher for Faith Assembly
Joseph O. Brenneman — Lead pastor starting in 1994 at the Faith Assembly that's located in Larwill, IN. This is the closest geographically of the various Faith Assembly offshoots. Some URLs that were formerly associated with him:
It's surprisingly complicated to talk about a person's cause of death. Death certificates list both the underlying cause of death, and the immediate cause of death. However, 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 no simple answer.
Because of this, there can be different estimates of the total number of deaths due to medical negligence, even when experts analyze the same underlying data.
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.
My TODO for this document
I should consider paying for access to these newspaper archives:
