Idaho’s faith-healing exemption: A legal shift from strict medical mandates
Newspaper archives and historical documents indicate that Idaho statutes previously required parents to provide medical attendance without a specific exemption for spiritual belief, a protection that was not present in the state’s laws from the 1880s through the early 1970s.
Idaho law currently protects parents who choose prayer over medical care for their children from charges of child neglect or manslaughter. However, newspaper archives and historical documents indicate that this protection is a recent development. From at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, state statutes mandated that parents provide medical attendance without a specific exemption for spiritual belief.
The 1887 edition of Idaho territory statutes, published before statehood, defined the willful omission of medical attendance as a misdemeanor. The text stated that any parent who willfully omitted to furnish necessary medical attendance was guilty of a misdemeanor, with no mention of spiritual belief as a lawful excuse. Three years later, the state constitution explicitly put limits on freedom of religion, noting it would not excuse acts inconsistent with the peace or safety of the state.
Historical cases demonstrate that the state previously enforced these medical care requirements. In 1915, 13-year-old Pearl Annis died of septic shock after her father, a member of the Followers of Christ sect, refused medical attention. He was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of refusing to provide medical care. The Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect that arrived in Idaho in 1899, has remained active in the state. According to ProPublica reporting, the sect’s congregations in Idaho experienced 15 preventable deaths of children between 2015 and 2025.
The legal landscape remained strict into the 1960s. In a case involving a Followers family in a Boise suburb, a judge ordered the state to take custody of a 10-year-old boy with pneumonia and measles complications after his mother and younger sister died. The boy survived hospitalisation, and a doctor testified that without it, the child almost certainly would have died. The judge told the father that to regain custody, he would have to be willing to give the boy medical care as the law required, stating, “The law governs conduct. Religion governs opinion.”
The shift began in 1971 during a full rewrite of Idaho’s criminal code. The Idaho Legislature added a section exempting those who chose treatment by prayer or spiritual means from endangerment charges. Legislative records do not make clear how the wording originated, but the passage of another law one year later, which affirmed the “spiritual means” language, has been credited to the Christian Science church.
The federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 further influenced the adoption of such exemptions nationally. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare interpreted the law as requiring states to have a faith-healing exemption to qualify for grants, an interpretation that records from the time do not explain. In 1976, Idaho broadened its exemption to prevent children from being placed in foster care solely due to a lack of medical care. While the Reagan administration adopted neutral regulations in 1983, leading some states to roll back their exemptions, Idaho has retained its special treatment for faith healers.
