What were these parents doing? Curiously, the Daily News fails to mention the ultimate cause, though the Examiner does:

Hana’s death was consistent with a corporal punishment style advocated by many Christian extremists, and memorialized in the controversial book, To Train Up A Child. According to reports, Hana was beaten and starved as part of a regimen of corporal punishment subscribed to by many Christian homeschoolers and other Christian fundamentalists.

The New York Times reports that the couple’s abusive parenting tactics mimicked instructions from the Christian parenting book. Evidence presented at trial indicated Carri Williams had repeatedly beaten Hana with a plastic tube – a device recommended in the book.

To Train Up A Child advocates using a plumbing tool to beat children with starting at age one. The book also advocates giving children cold water baths, putting children outside in cold weather, and forcing them to miss meals, as well as beating them; all of which exemplifies the abuse investigators said Hana endured.

This is unbelievable, but the Williamses weren’t the only parents who killed their child while using that book. According to the New York Times:

The same kind of plumbing tube was reported to have been used to beat Lydia Schatz, 7, who was adopted at age 4 from Liberia and died in Paradise, Calif., in 2010. Her parents, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, had the Pearl book but ignored its admonition against extended lashing or harm; they whipped Lydia for hours, with pauses for prayer. She died from severe tissue damage, and her older sister had to be hospitalized, officials said.

The Schatzes, who were home-schooling nine children, three of them adopted, are both serving long prison terms after he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and torture and she to voluntary manslaughter and unlawful corporal punishment. The Butte County district attorney, Mike Ramsey, criticized the Pearls’ book as a dangerous influence.

. . . The Pearls’ teachings also came up in the trial of Lynn Paddock of Johnston County, N.C., who was convicted of the first-degree murder of Sean Paddock, 4, in 2006. The Paddocks had adopted six American children, some with emotional problems, and turned to the Internet and found the Pearls’ Web site, Mrs. Paddock said. Sean suffocated after being wrapped tightly in a blanket. His siblings testified that they were beaten daily with the same plumbing tube. Mr. Paddock was not charged.

To Train Up a Child was written by Michael and Debi Pearl, who run the No Greater Joy Ministries. The Times describes them:

Through book and video sales and donations, the Pearls’ No Greater Joy Ministries brings in $1.7 million a year, which they say goes back into the cause. They live in a one-room apartment near the church. In his spare time, Mr. Pearl practices an offbeat hobby: he is a champion knife and tomahawk thrower.

Much of their advice is standard: parents should be loving, spend a lot of time with their children, be clear and consistent, and never strike in anger. But, citing Biblical passages like, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son,” they provide instructions for “switching” defiant children to provide “spiritual cleansing.”

They teach parents to use light taps to train infants not to roll off a blanket. For older children, parents are told to respond to defiance by hitting hard enough to sting with a willow switch, a belt, a wooden spoon or the tube.

Mr. Pearl describes child-rearing as a zero-sum test of wills. If a verbal warning does not work, he said, “you have the seeds of self-destruction.”

The Pearls:

Curiously, their book gets a large number of five-star ratings on Amazon, though the distribution is bimodal. Some of the comments are scathing:

The result of the book.  Hana Williams before:

and after:

Carri Williams, off to prison for 38 years:

Now you can argue that the three sets of parents who killed their kids were simply sadists, and would have behaved the same without the Pearls’ book or the religion that inspired it. We don’t know, for we can’t rerun the tape of life without the book.  But advocating such corporal punishments violates all the dictates of civility, and religion certainly gave the patina of divine approval to this kind of punishment.

But there are many other cases in which child abuse, and death, can be laid directly at the doorstep of faith.  I refer specifically to religions whose policy is to withhold medical care from children. There are several of these in the U.S., most notoriously the Christian Science Church (Jehovah’s Witnesses do it, too, refusing blood transfusions for themselves and their children).

As I reported five days ago, the majority of U.S. states (37/50) have religious exemptions for child abuse, so that parents can’t easily be prosecuted for, say, letting their diabetic child die a horrible (and preventible) death without insulin.  48 of the 50 states also have religious exemptions for vaccination, which puts not only the child in danger, but also those around it. These exemptions are sanctioned—indeed, mandated—by the U.S. government, which, ironically, requires such exemptions as a condition for states to get federal child-abuse funding.  Here at the University of Chicago, vaccinations are required for all students, except those who have medical reasons to avoid them (e.g.,compromised immune systems)—or religious reasons.

In fact, it’s largely the Christian Science church that lobbied the government to put these exemptions into law. If you want to read the whole sad story, I highly recommend a book I’ve just finished, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser (1999). It not only gives the long and sordid history of Christian Science (an oxymoron given its dogma), all the way back to its founding by Mary Baker Eddy, but also has a chapter full of heartbreaking stories about how its adherents have allowed their children to die. (The book, by the way, is superbly written and a fascinating read.) Nearly all those parents, when they have been prosecuted (for manslaughter rather than abuse) have gotten off or received probation or minimal fines. In the U.S. justice system, religion is far more exculpatory than is mental illness.

Note two things.  If you say that the conflict between religion and science is either nonexistent or trivial, think of of the many children who have died precisely because of that conflict. Those children would be alive today were it not for religion, for there would be no reason for their parents to withhold medical care.  That parental behavior comes directly from the religious belief that Western medicine is ungodly and that children can be healed through prayer. (Christian Scientists believe, in fact, that disease is an illusion and can be dispelled by correct thinking.)

Second, many of these parents, particularly Christian Scientists, are not fundamentalist Southern Bible-thumpers, but often educated and fairly affluent. I’ve known Christian Scientists, and I bet many of you do, too. They are not Biblical literalists, but they do accept the insane teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. In fact they might even be seen as religious “moderates”—precisely the group that, accommodationists tell us, are relatively harmless.

They are not. And that harm is sanctioned by the majority of U.S. state legislatures, who refuse to rescind religious exemptions for denying medical care and immunizations to children.  Here the moderates are not just condoning child abuse, but enabling it.

I wish I could tell you some of the horrific tales of suffering and death that American children have endured because of their parents’ religious beliefs. They would break your heart. You can find them in God’s Perfect Child or the other book I recommended recently: When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law by Shawn Francis Peters.

Parents can damage themselves all they want with their religious delusions. But they have no right to force those delusions on others, especially their children. Faith healing, largely condoned in the U.S., is a clear case of religion as child abuse, and we’re all part of the system that allows it.

In light of this abuse, Jesus’s statement in Matthew—”Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven”—becomes a horrible double entendre.