Faith, Medicine and the Law

Divine healing sits differently within different churches, and the difference has occasionally reached a courtroom. The great majority of bodies that pray for healing, Catholic, Orthodox and mainstream Pentecostal alike, teach explicitly that prayer accompanies medical treatment rather than replacing it, and hospital chaplaincy is itself built on that assumption. A small number of groups have taught otherwise.

Faith Assembly congregations in the American Midwest and similar small denominations have at times taught that seeking medical care shows a lack of faith, and prosecutors have brought manslaughter and neglect charges against parents in cases where a child died of a treatable condition after medicine was withheld in favour of prayer alone, cases that recur periodically in American courts and that child-welfare researchers have tracked as a distinct pattern rather than isolated tragedy. Faith-healing exemptions written into some state child-welfare statutes, which excuse parents who rely on prayer from a legal duty to seek medical care, have themselves been challenged and narrowed in several states following such deaths. Large public healing meetings associated with figures such as Oral Roberts and later Benny Hinn drew both enormous crowds and sustained scrutiny, including investigative reporting that could not verify claimed cures and questioned the selection and framing of testimonies given on stage. None of this touches the quieter and far more common form of the practice, a hospital visit, an anointing with oil and a prayer offered alongside, rather than instead of, whatever medicine is already doing.