Here is a tricky and dangerous question

Dr. Mohler mentioned a recent article in the New York Times dealing with faith healing, parents refusing medical care for their minor children. This issue pops up periodically, typically when a child is severely injured or in this case dies. It sounded chilling, so I went to the article and read it in its entirety. The event cited in the NYT happened in Wisconsin…

WESTON, Wis. — Kara Neumann, 11, had grown so weak that she could not walk or speak. Her parents, who believe that God alone has the ability to heal the sick, prayed for her recovery but did not take her to a doctor.

After an aunt from California called the sheriff’s department here, frantically pleading that the sick child be rescued, an ambulance arrived at the Neumann’s rural home on the outskirts of Wausau and rushed Kara to the hospital. She was pronounced dead on arrival.
The county coroner ruled that she had died from diabetic ketoacidosis resulting from undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes. The condition occurs when the body fails to produce insulin, which leads to severe dehydration and impairment of muscle, lung and heart function.
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About a month after Kara’s death last March, the Marathon County state attorney, Jill Falstad, brought charges of reckless endangerment against her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann. Despite the Neumanns’ claim that the charges violated their constitutional right to religious freedom, Judge Vincent Howard of Marathon County Circuit Court ordered Ms. Neumann to stand trial on May 14, and Mr. Neumann on June 23. If convicted, each faces up to 25 years in prison.

Set aside for a moment the issue of refusing any sort of medical care for Christians. That is a whole can of worms that really isn’t pertinent to the bigger question. There are precedents in the Bible for treatment of medical conditions, not necessarily a slew of antibiotics every time your kid gets a cold, but some kind of treatment beyond prayer. For example, Paul urges Timothy to take a little wine for his frequent stomach ailments in 1 Timothy 5:23. So setting aside the issue of modern medicine or natural remedies, the issue I want to look at has less to do with the specific example of this case (faith healing) and more to do with the general practice and protection of religious beliefs in a pluralistic, secular society. The statement that Dr. Mohler pointed out and that really struck me as well was this statement from the presiding judge:

“The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief,” the judge wrote in his ruling, “but not necessarily conduct.”

So what this judge is saying is that the First Amendment protects your right to believe whatever you want, but not necessarily to practice your religion however you want. I don’t want to be Chicken Little here, because I know that the law exempts parents in a lot of circumstances. But also there is the issue that while the laws of an individual state protect parents, those laws can be reversed and the underlying issue is the Constitutional expression of religion and what that does or does not apply to.

What does the First Amendment say? A lot of people appeal to the First Amendment but not many actually look to see what the wording was or ask "what does it really say"? People throw the word “rights” around cavalierly but there are certain rights enumerated in the Constitution and there are lots of things that are not spoken of. This is what the First Amendment actually says and concerns:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Note that the key here is religious expression or exercise. Exercise necessarily implies not just belief but outward expression. People often say that the First Amendment protects our “freedom of religion”, but what is at stake here is not merely belief but practice as well.

Where I am troubled is the tension between parental rights and the perceived obligation of the state toward children. It is pretty easy to look at seemingly obvious cases of neglect and say the state should step in. It is harder though when you alter the fundamental ideal that the default is that parents have the right to make decisions for their children. It is not a stretch, and in fact has become law in many places, to see this intrusion spreading beyond merely issues where parents withhold medical treatment and into determining what is or is not appropriate discipline for children. Beating a child to death is not discipline but many assume that any sort of corporal correction for children is inherently child abuse. We have administered stern correction to our children on a fairly regular basis (eight kids=lots of discipline!) and there are some who would say that what we do, while commonplace a generation ago and for most of human history, amounts to child abuse. There is a stream of thought in some circles of academia that seems to be gaining credence that even religious instruction amounts to abuse of children. In other words, you are free to breed if you must but the state and the academics will decide what your kids will think, learn and how they will behave. It is not difficult to see where applications of a narrow interpretation of the First Amendment as merely protecting belief and not practice can lead to outlawing of corporal punishment and homeschooling. A perfect example of this was the raid on the polygamist compound in Texas where one unsubstantiated rumor of abuse led to armed law enforcement officials swooping in and removing hundreds of children from their homes. It took weeks for these children to be reunited with their parents. I am sure that the members of the FLDS cult assumed that could never happen, but it did and we had better be vigilant in our suburban homes and orderly mainstream churches because the same thing could happen to us.

Thus our quandary. No one likes to see an 11 year old die from a very treatable disease. The impulse can very easily be to wonder why the state didn’t step in. But when you read words like: ““The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief, but not necessarily conduct.”, it can be chilling. Where do we draw the line? What is to regulate the well-meaning, in some cases, intrusion by the state into parental rights? The law runs on precedent and if the precedent becomes that the First Amendment, especially as it pertains to parents and children, only covers belief and not practice, what will stop the state from mandating public school for homeschooled kids, from banning any sort of corporal discipline in families, ultimately from banning religious instruction for children as being unhelpful to the promulgation of a pluralistic society? These are not alarmist statements, these are real questions we need to ask and think through before we look around and see our children being taken away.