Much of Chapter 5 of my book Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (the chapter’s called “Why does it matter?”) deals with religiously-motivated child abuse, mostly in the form of religious parents denying medical care to children. Some of the stories are horrific, especially the first one I tell involving a girl with bone cancer. While Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are major culprits, with their faith often mandating that God rather than doctors will cure children, there are other groups like them. And when the children die, as they often do (Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibit blood transfusion, and the kids, indoctrinated with that dogma, may die if they don’t get blood), the parents used to get off with light prison sentences or even parole. After all, it’s religion, Jake, so it’s okay to let your your kids die in its name! For some reason, all the cases I described in my book involve Christian parents.
Well, it’s still happening The Guardian reports today about on eight-year-old diabetic (type 1) girl whose father, converted to an evangelical sect, decided to deny his daughter the insulin she needed to live. (I am SO familiar with this kind of behavior. It’s not ubiquitous, but it’s not vanishingly rare, either.) The daughter died, of course (this was in 2022), and the death was likely a painful one.
The difference between this case, described below (click on screenshot to read), and similar cases in the U.S., is that the parents—and 10 other people—were convicted of manslaughter yesterday, a much more serious charge than often levied against such parents in the U.S. I suppose manslaughter is an appropriate charge, but one shouldn’t rule out murder charges, either since sane persons know what will happen if they withhold insulin from a diabetic child. (I know of no murder charges ever filed against these odious parents.) Anyway, I get quite exercised when helpless kids die because God is supposed to save them, and often this happens with the child’s assent, because they get propagandized. Religion often comes with the need to propagandize, especially to your kids.
An excerpt from the article:
It took Jason Struhs 36 hours to call the ambulance after the death of his daughter Elizabeth.
When the police followed shortly afterwards, they heard singing. The Saints, a religious sect in Queensland, that has been likened to a cult, were praying for the eight-year-old to be resurrected.
“I’m not jumping up and down in joy, but I’m at peace …” Jason told a police officer that day. “I gave my little girl what she wanted. And I expect God to look after her.”
Justice Martin Burns on Wednesday found Jason Struhs, and religious leader Brendan Stevens, along with Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie, brother Zachary, and 10 other members of the group, guilty of her manslaughter.
Elizabeth Struhs died at her family home in Rangeville, Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, on 6 or 7 January 2022, of diabetic ketoacidosis.
Jason told police: “There were no feelings of oh well, that didn’t work.”
“I have to be patient. I have to keep praying. I didn’t sit there and think that I had killed my daughter, I was thinking that she was in a better place now,” he said.
The delay before calling the ambulance after a child’s death is quite common, though I don’t know why. The kid is dead and it has to be reported. At any rate, there was a trial at the end of 2024.
Throughout the nine-week trial last year, the court heard hours of interviews with the Saints filmed by police, at the scene and in the days afterwards.
Recently released to the media, they give an insight into their beliefs.
Elizabeth’s mother, Kerrie Struhs, believed so strongly in the Saints’ faith she had been previously jailed for not providing her daughter the necessaries of life in 2019, when Elizabeth became sick for the first time.
Jason took her to the hospital in a coma over Kerrie’s objections. She told the police she wasn’t grateful to the medical staff for saving her life.
“What do you think might have happened if she wasn’t taken to hospital the first time?” she was asked by police, days after Elizabeth’s death.
“I believe she would have got better and didn’t need any medical assistance at all,” she replied.
When Elizabeth was returned to the family with no lasting medical problems, she took it as proof of a miracle. She never attended hospital to see her daughter’s treatment.
A month after Kerrie was released from jail, Elizabeth was taken off her insulin after two-and-a-half healthy years and became sick again – but her mother told police she never had any doubts.
She told them she was surprised God was taking the situation “to the extreme … as in, to death”, but saw it as part of his plan for the “last days”.
If Elizabeth had died and was brought back in front of paramedics, more people would see the miracle, she said.
“These are end days. I see this as simply God is needing to show people, give people a chance to see that God is still here. And we are the ones that will declare it faithfully,” she told police.
Jason was originally not religious; it was only when he “found God” that he turned into someone who could kill his daughter:
For 17 years, his wife and many of his children attended the small home-based church service multiple times a week, but Jason Struhs didn’t believe in God at all.
For years he helped her administer insulin four times a day, take her to doctors, prepare specific meals and check her sugar levels.
. . . . After a verbal fight with his son Zachary and counselling by the other Saints, Jason converted in August 2021.
“The next four months after turning to God had been the best four months of my life, because I had peace. I now had family who loved me,” he said in his police statement.
The sentence below, which I’ve put in bold, is what really angers me. These people are so absolutely sure of the fictions they embrace that they are willing to let their offspring die because “they’ll be in a better place,” There is no evidence for such a place! Jason feels no remorse for what he did.
The Saints prayed and sang as a group. Finally, on 8 January, Jason called the paramedics.
“I said to everyone that even though God will raise Elizabeth, we couldn’t leave a corpse in the house, we couldn’t leave her body sitting there forever,” Jason said.
On 8 January, Jason told police his faith was stronger than ever.
“I am fully at peace at heart. I don’t feel sorry, I feel happy because now she’s at peace and so am I … she’s not dependent on me for her life now. I’m not trapped by diabetes as well.”
Burns will sentence all 14 on 11 February.
Only prosecution and strong sentences will curb this kind of behavior, though some of it will go on in secret, for religion is powerful.
I won’t harp on this further; you can read my book to see similar cases. The point, of course, is that this girl would still be alive if there were no religion, for only religion would make a parent stop giving medical care to their offspring. (Well, I suppose there are other forms of such lunacy as well, but these are doctrines of Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other fringe Christian sects like the Saints.) And the courts, in the U.S. at least, used to go much easier on parents like this than, say, parents whose kids died from malnourishment or related abuse. Religion used to give you somewhat of a pass, though that now seems to be changing, thank Ceiling Cat.
Here’s a video about the death of Elizabeth and the trial. Do watch it, because you’ll see how these people remain deluded even though they thought God would “bring her back” after she died.
Finally, I present for your appraisal the cover of the Jehovah’s Witness magazine Awake! from 1994. Every child on the cover of this magazine died because they refused blood transfusions. But it’s okay, because they put God first. I used this slide in the talks I used to give about faith versus fact. In the case of Elizabeth, faith is The Saints; fact is insulin.
h/t: Paul
The Gnostic-O-meter is getting a strong reading from “Awake!” and “trapped by diabetes” – the Gnostic prison of diabetes, transcended by awakened gnostic consciousness – in this case, rejection of the demiurgic material of insulin… ?.
BTW – this was on the back burner, so forgive the disorganization/tangent – but diabetes is serious so I figure it’s worth saying something :
I have been made aware of M.D.s on YouTube that are producing videos on diabetes. Their clearest point if I understand is [1] progressive increase of insulin from overeating sugar leads to diabetes, and [2] that the progress can be halted or more* by reducing sugar intake. [ tech note : HbA1C is a common regular test if you have diabetes or not ]
I looked for something credible, and best I found is from UCLA, from Dr. Obidiugwu (Kenrik) Duru. and, by the “*” above, get this – from the article below (but not Dr. Duru’s words):
“diabetes can be reversed in most people”
Make of this what you will – (I never knew – replace “dot” with “.” to avoid WordPress gremlins ):
Can Diabetes Be Reversed?
November 22, 2023
By Ashley Bell
medschool dot ucla dot edu/news-article/can-diabetes-be-reversed
This is from 2023, so after this story above, but the point is maybe such info gets out and some people get the wrong ideas, like cold-turkey-quitting insulin?
And then usually there’s an info sheet on Rxs – what does the insulin Rx info say?
Type 2 can be managed partly through diet. Type 1 cannot, that’s when the body’s immune cells destroy the pancreas, and requires regular insulin treatment.
yes – type I and II very important distinction.
The type of distinction that can be “lost in translation”.
Correct. That point needs to be made about his comment.
I think you’re talking about type 2 diabetes. This girl had type 1. But what, exactly, are you trying to say? I’m a bit confused.
For the diabetes, I’m saying that I only heard about this idea that diabetes can be “reversed”. I am not claiming anything as such – I only happened to read that linked article just now – which does make some type I/II distinctions – so I’m thinking it over. I had more of a static understanding of diabetes before for both types.
As pertains to the religion here, I can see how someone might get the idea they can e.g. quit insulin to get out of a trap, as they put it. Which would be bad.
Diabetes II can be mitigated to some degree, but permanently “reversed” by diet and life style only in people who have very mild cases anyway. High insulin levels are frequently not a sign of “overeating sugar”, but of an already developing insulin resistance that forces your pancreas to pump out more insulin.
Three cases I know:
My partner can reduce the insulin he has to take (but no more than that)with a low carb diet.
A friend achieved a remission of his early diabetes by walking or running 12 kilometers a day and a strict diet for a few years, but the disease progressed anyway, he now has to take Metformin in addition to his life style changes for the same effect.
I have some genetic propensity for diabetes myself. Never thought I would see any effects of it, as I have always had a BMI below twenty, and had very low blood glucose levels indeed even postprandially in my twenties. Fast forward to my mid thirties, I get some symptoms associated with very high insulin levels (despite a “healthy” diet). At 40, my blood glucose levels rise to above 200 postprandially. I have managed to control that acceptably without medication, but boy it takes time and effort (and money, as the diet is much more expensive than usual fare).
By the way, there is very little evidence that sugar outside of sugary drinks is worse for you than bread or potatoes. For me and my husband, it’s the bread, potatoes and pasta that are the problem, and “whole grain” doesn’t change a thing.
Type 1 and type 2 diabetes are essentially different diseases.
Type 1: an auto-immune attack (probably a mis-directed response to a virus) destroys the islet cells of the pancreas and thus no insulin is made. This itself is not heritable, but the tendency to mis-direct antibodies is slightly so.
Type 2: Higher than average blood sugars cause chronic over-production of insulin, leading to relative insensitivity to it. This leads to higher sugars, more insensitivity and so on. All the while, high sugar is actually toxic to islet cells and they slowly die off, so eventually instead over over-production, there is insufficient insulin. Catch that at an early stage, and drastic weight loss and calorie restriction can improve insulin sensitivity and normalise sugars (but the islet cells do not grow back, so you cannot relax your attention to diet!). This is strongly heritable.
This is a much-needed article. Thanks for posting it. But I might add that along with the religious nuts, there are also the anti-science nuts who think that every vaccine is a government conspiracy. They have a lot of blood on their hands as well. And now, of course, we have the trans nonsense where teachers are suggesting to young children that they could have a sex change. Fortunately, we are starting to see pushback against that.
The religious nuts as in the described case are tragic but not very common.
On the other hand, the anti-vaccine campaign is really picking up steam.
I see it in reader comments on articles about RFK Jr. A lot of people are taking the vaccines cause autism idea seriously.
That book RFK Jr wrote “The Real Anthony Fauci” is quoted extensively. The book appears to be garbage.
You cannot argue with these people. I’ve tried. Their minds are made up.
Fortunately there are only a few diseases in a few circumstances that we rely for prevention on herd immunity from vaccination. Most vaccination protects the vaccinee and that’s all it has to do. The hardest case is the child with an immune deficiency (inborn or acquired from treatment of some childhood cancers) who can’t take live-virus vaccines like MMR or Sabin polio vaccine, the latter not used in Canada. (And vaccinia against smallpox; that was one of the benefits of smallpox eradication.). We handle this by excluding from school and daycare unvaccinated children either, depending on jurisdiction, absolutely or during outbreaks, which are of course almost always among the unvaccinated who often all attend the same church. Since no vaccine is perfect, there may be secondary cases in the vaccinated, usually mild but still contagious.
I used to worry about these healthy unvaccinated children whose parents attend a fundamentalist church or who listen to RFK Jr, but I no longer do. They probably won’t get measles so long as most everyone else’s kids are vaccinated. If they get measles they can die for all I care. As you say, there is no reasoning with these people. The state should certainly apprehend children for transfusion and for other clearly life-threatening conditions. At least in Canada it nearly always does, except for teenagers with capacity and when the child’s parents are aboriginal. But again, unless I was the treating physician with a fiduciary duty to advocate for that patient, I don’t care.
Parents of children who can’t take live vaccines need to be vigilant. The state will put you on a watch list if you ask questions at school board meetings about gender indoctrination — “You don’t ‘own’ your children. We do.” — but protecting those children you don’t own but only love from fatal contagious disease, not so much.
Polio is probably the most serious of the diseases for which there is a vaccine.
Tetanus and diphtheria aren’t very good either although not very common.
Measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox are not usually serious (except rubella for pregnant women).
It wouldn’t take much publicity about cases of polio or tetanus to take the momentum out of the anti-vax movement.
When I was in second grade I caught the mumps. I was staying with my grandparents. My grandmother made me a cheese omelet. My saliva glands were so sore I couldn’t eat it. It smelled so good. It sure seemed serious to me at the time. 😉
@Filippo Measles & mumps are definitely not fun. I had all four of the above as there was no vaccine at the time.
Measles isn’t usually fatal but it can be.
RFK Jr seems to be backing off on the vaccine talk, although it might just a ploy to get confirmed.
“Polio is probably the most serious of the diseases for which there is a vaccine.”
That would be rabies, though not as contagious as polio, far deadlier. And there’s also Ebola…
I think anti vaxxers should watch this film and see all the people trapped in iron lungs. Some of the old photographs are horrendous.
It sounds morbid, but it’s actually a great film, because it’s about Robin Cavendish who, thanks to his supportive wife, refused to be condemned to lie in a bed, paralysed from the neck down from polio. He designed a chair to help him breathe so he could leave hospital. He even managed to go on vacation with his family. He helped so many others. He was given three months to live, but lived another 30 years, time to see his son grow up.
I recommend the film.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JycCFypvgmI
For their children to avoid measles by herd immunity, the vaccination rate needs to be 93-95%. We are dipping below that, which is why when a case arises there is an outbreak. Most kids will be fine, but some will not. It’s worse in adults, like most childhood diseases, where the death rate is 1 in 1000.
I’m old enough to have seen all these diseases. I’ve seen a child die of chickenpox (encephalitis). I’ve met blind and deaf kids whose mothers had rubella. Personally, I had mumps pancreatitis as a child, and so many ear infections that I now have half of one ear working (the three main bacteria causing otitis media also cause meningitis, and vaccines against them make such ear infections much rarer now). I regard time spent arguing with anti-vax parents as well spent.
I didn’t mean to imply that we shouldn’t promote routine mass childhood vaccination programs with every vaccine that passes licensing hurdles for safety and efficacy. Literally I never met a vaccine I didn’t like. A parent who wants to keep his child unvaccinated should really have to work at it. Just signing a religion slip shouldn’t be enough to let the child mingle freely with other children without restriction, and it’s not, in Ontario. There is no religious exemption for any public health mandate here. But we don’t do compulsory, non-consensual vaccination for anyone. There is a measles outbreak going on right now in the next county over from us, centred on a fundamentalist church that runs its own school with its own buses for the rural students….as most are.
Measles is so contagious that, as you say, you have to get very high uptake of vaccine so that one case will find a second susceptible with probability less than one. And if the susceptibles are hived together as they typically are nowadays, they’ll all get infected even if 100% of the rest of the province is vaccinated.
My main point is that it is not possible to eradicate most infections from the earth just by vaccinating everybody, the way we did with smallpox and may have just missed doing with polio before the world fell apart. Parents should regard vaccination with the more modest and selfish goal that it will protect your own children no matter what other parents do, in the next county or in Pakistan. It’s not a collective action problem, fortunately.
The bacterium that caused most meningitis in infants and toddlers is Haemophilus influenzae capsular serotype b. The vaccine raised against the capsular polysaccharide has eliminated this scourge. (It has nothing to do with influenza btw, an accidental misnomer.) My understanding is that vaccination has not reduced the incidence of ear infections which are mostly caused by the non-encapsulated variants of the organism. Severe ear and mastoid infections have been declining for decades in developed countries, even before Hibvax, and no one seems to know why. My son had frequent ear infections but his children have had none, despite similar daycare exposure. It is not even clear that antibiotics improve the course of uncomplicated otitis media, a question raised by increasing antibiotic resistance….although it must be hard not to prescribe them for a screaming febrile toddler with a bulging eardrum.
(It’s possible that encapsulated strains of Hib caused more severe cases of otitis and from there invaded the blood stream to cause sepsis and meningitis. If these were, say, 5% of all otitis, the elimination of these cases through vaccination would not allow detection of a decline in all otitis despite being of great public health benefit in meningitis. Christopher has stimulated me to read about this.)
Leslie, I’m sure you weren’t displaying any negativity towards vaccines, and I apologise if it sounded like that!
The three commonest bacterial causes of OM are H.influenzae, N.meningitidis and S.pneumoniae. All three are now included in routine childhood vaccination schedules and I expect it does have something to do with OM being less of a scourge.
There was a brief fad in the early 1960’s to treat OM with a single IM shot of streptomycin, and it was that which led to my deafness (it’s ototoxic) rather than the consequences of glue ears. At least my vestibular apparatus wasn’t affected.
Along with Oprah W. who promoted every woo-woo anti-vaxer, RFK is the most dangerous American citizen currently alive.
I REALLY hope the Senate shoots that rat down.
D.A.
NYC
Trump far exceeds RFK as the most dangerous American currently alive…who the hell gave RFK the job in the first place!?! Plus, the obvious…
Don’t leave out Musk, who forced the head of the FAA to quit on 20 January. Musk also hacked into the OPM website to disseminate his illegal buyout offer to Federal employees.
I’m pretty sure that in the red state in which I reside they would have only gotten probation. Such medieval belief is rampant here.
Terrible story. (I read your excerpts, not the original.) One could write entire books about this phenomenon. A young child could have lived a full life had she not died from neglect—or worse. One can only hope that the tide is turning against tolerating this type of abuse.
Actually, these nuts were charged with murder (intentional homocide). It was not a jury trial but judge only. The judge ruled for the lesser included offence of manslaughter, finding that the prosecutor failed to prove intent. Still, the judge handed down the strongest sentence he could.
Edit: I should have included the source, which was a report made by the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74mjxmg10zo
Thanks for the update!
Jason apparently did not convert to religion because he had some sort of epiphany. Rather, he was afraid of being ostracized by his family if he didn’t. I cannot understand how social pressure could cause someone to adopt a belief. (“Support mental health or I’ll kill you.”)
Social pressure often causes people to profess beliefs they don’t hold. Not everyone has the courage to dance to his own drum. A threatened loss of employment, friendship, love or status makes countless people buckle at the knees. If there were some technology to determine the true beliefs of people the technology would reveal a world filled with liars.
Genderism is the most prominent and recent example of these kinds of beliefs that are professed by many but held by few. It’s ironic that The Guardian can criticize one kind of stupid belief that can kill teenagers, and in the same pages support a second that’s equally stupid and harmful (“gender-affirming care” is lifesaving).
And it has been thus since the beginning of insulin availability. Ca. 1923, insulin had just become available. My mother, then ~15y/o had a neighbor friend Molly, who was type 1 and wasting. She started getting insulin and started to improve.
But her parents were of the oxymoronical Xtian Scientist persuasion and decided that they were acting against God’s Will and stopped the injections. Predictably, Molly died.
If these lunatics are so anxious to get up to heaven, why don’t they all just commit suicide instead of standing around and sniffing each other in prayer ?
Oh they often do. See the mass cult suicide in Kenya just last year. Hundreds.
D.A.
NYC
Sounds like Jason felt that Elizabeth’s diabetes was too much of a burden, for him.
I think that more often than not a tragedy such as this strongly cements a believer’s faith. Either my beliefs are valid and my faith righteous, or I am a horrible monster.
Exactly. After your daughter is dead is not the time to think, “Oops! Maybe I was wrong…” It’s practically psychologically impossible.
And there’s always the convenient rationalisation when something goes wrong that the devil caused it, and when it goes right then the god caused it. Demiurge anyone?
(I actually had a friend who believed and said such obvious nonsense. It was a somewhat difficult relationship.)
As a psychologist who worked in an acute medical setting for seven years, I’ve often spent hours with parents and doctors exploring ways that parents with such beliefs can find the treatment acceptable. Lots of times we found the church in question would inform us of such paths, so I often asked the chaplain to intervene too. As someone who conducts evaluations of children for child protective services, I often include a few lines when relevant on the fact that corporal punishment in our schools is still legal (of course, at least they live), ours being the only developed country along with Singapore where it’s still legal (it’s banned in over 120 countries). It’s legal at home of course too. We know for sure today that such violence increases aggression among kids, plus causes neurodevelopmental (mostly emotional) injury.
Not to mention some dead children.
The imprisoned shameful family can pray God frees them from jail. I am betting it won’t work.
No problem, that would all be part of Its Divine Plan.
We hear about these rare cases in the west from time to time but I fear that in the Eastern Bloc, Russia particularly where there are a lot of crazed Christian cults, it might be much more common.
Of course the Kremlin’s faith based censorship won’t report it. Like honor killing in the Islamosphere.
Then there’s the many deaths from “witchcraft” (finding and killing witches) in Africa and Papua New Guinea. In PNG you can’t even go to the cops because they believe in witches also.
D.A.
NYC/FL
Sorry in advance to overpost here but I have a dog in the diabetes fight. I’m a (lifelong skinny!) type 2 diabetic diagnosed about 5 years ago. I have a bit of medical education but I’m no clinician.
As I see it all of the “walk back diabetes” crowd consists of very obese people who have lost a lot of weight. There may be exceptions but I’m yet to see one.
best regards with an insulin smoothie,
D.A.
NYC/Florida
Same with my brother-in-law. He’s 69 and has always been thin and active.
He was diagnosed about 15 years ago (Type 2). He follows the diabetic diet very carefully and exercises regularly.
His health is otherwise good but he still has to take insulin. His mother also developed it in middle age.
Cases like these are useful for proving what many non-religious or “sophisticated religious” people have trouble understanding…and that is that many religious people REALLY believe in what they profess, including all manner of superstitious, strange, and harmful ideas.
Child killers get plenty of attention in prison.
The reason for the delay in reporting the poor girl’s death was because they thought that prayer would bring her back from the dead. They gave up after three days. Bloody idiots!
What was their first inkling that it wasn’t going to work?
Also, what is the logic of praying here? God clearly wanted the girl to die. Is praying going to change his mind? Can an all knowing being actually “change their mind”?
All hospitals have special programs to coddle JWs and their ridiculous beliefs and demands. Their religion makes it stressful and harder to care for them. I wish the medical system in which I work would treat them like a pro-cigarette religion. Would they have special programs to allow them to smoke in hospitals and have snuff in the wards? As a society, there should be shame and ignominy for being part of these damaging and ludicrous sects. We need to stop coddling them.
I didn’t know that hospitals catered to them. Crazy.
The parents and their co-religionists could easily have thought they were being Good Christians™, being convinced that “he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” and similar fictions.
“I was thinking that she was in a better place now”, he said.
And under some circumstances would he use an AR-15 to help his whole congregation into that better place? I hope not. At least he’s out of circulation for a while.
“If Elizabeth had died and was brought back in front of paramedics, more people would see the miracle”, she said.
And if pigs flew then we would have self-delivering bacon. Lock – her – up.