When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law (review)

In this gripping study of parents’ faith healing of their children, Peters effectively tugs readers’ loyalties back and forth between devout religious parents and parens patriae, the state in its role as “parent of the country” (69). The narrative compels tolerance for the strong faith that persuades parents to decline medical help even as they watch their children die. Yet, Peters also conveys the courts’ and prosecutors’ frustration that the legal system cannot protect children from fatal harm, or even punish the responsible parents after harm has occurred.

Peters effectively employs individual tales of faith healing from numerous times and places to create a broader narrative that identifies a recurring and vexing pattern, namely, that “secular political forces, whatever the noble intentions of the individuals who marshal them, still face an awkward task when they endeavor to police religious conduct” (212). His research and documentation are extensive. The stories include nineteenth-century England’s Peculiar People; John Alexander Dowie of the Christian Catholic Church, who began his healing ministry in Sydney, Australia, in 1876 and later emigrated to Chicago; the origins of Christian Science in Massachusetts in 1866 and the church’s later involvement in healing cases across the United States; as well as faith healings at Philadelphia’s Faith Tabernacle and Oregon’s Church of the First Born and Followers of Christ Church during the 1990s. In each case, a richly detailed narrative of the parents, their faith, and their interactions with state authorities unfolds as Peters offers finely nuanced accounts of the tensions between the competing claims of church and state.

These specific cases are ably woven into Peters’ broader narrative, in which he provides more general information that sets the context for the cases. This material includes a history of faith healing that sets the stage for the discussion of the parents’ beliefs, explanations of the legal requirements that illuminate the possible range of the courts’ responses to children’s death, and references to the history of medicine. The latter subject is especially interesting. Peters explains that faith healing became less credible as medicine and science grew more authoritative and reliable.

Although Peters writes in the first chapter that the “pursuit of justice in these cases . . . is the story of this book” (26), the conclusion contains no normative philosophical or legal account of justice. Instead, the powerful narrative leaves readers in the midst of a recurring story, repeated from century to century and across the world—the dramatic opposition between the claims of faith and justice in protecting children. The ambiguous conclusion is appropriate, given Peters’ reminder that the law has few or no tools powerful enough to influence parents who are able to accept their child’s death as the will of God.