Why I Wrote This Book: Paul A. Offit, M.D., Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine

During the 1991 measles epidemic in Philadelphia—an epidemic that sickened 1,400 people and killed 9 children—I was an attending physician at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. During a three-month period, we saw more than 200 children in our emergency department and admitted about 40 to the hospital. The city was in a panic.

The epidemic centered on two fundamentalist churches: First-Century Gospel and Faith Tabernacle. Both of these churches, which had hundreds of children in their schools, refused vaccines and medical care for their children. As a result, six children in the church community died of measles and—as the virus spread outward—three children in surrounding communities also died. Died of a disease that could have been safely and easily prevented with a vaccine. Died of a disease that could have at least been supported with intravenous fluids for dehydration and oxygen for pneumonia. But the church parents chose prayer instead.

Medicine is frustrating enough. There is much that modern medicine hasn’t caught up to. But one thing we do know. The germ theory isn’t a theory anymore. Specific germs do cause specific diseases. And some of those germs, like measles, can be prevented.

I wrote BAD FAITH: WHEN RELIGIOUS BELIEF UNDERMINES MODERN MEDICINE for two reasons. First, I wanted to understand how parents of these church groups could suppress their most primal instinct: to protect their children. I needed to understand how they could stand back and watch their children die while invariably saying “Jesus was my doctor.” Second, I needed to understand how the legal system—in the name of respecting religion—has allowed parents of faith-healing sects to get away with it. How these parents are often reprimanded with a slap on the wrist. How they are invariably allowed to continue to care for their remaining children until a second child suffers. How the courts, like the parents, have been willing to stand back.

Lastly, I wanted to understand what was written in religious texts that could explain these parents’ behavior. As I am not a particularly religious person, I assumed that when I took on this project I would sound the same themes that have been sounded by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris: that religion is illogical and potentially harmful. But as I read through the Old and New Testaments I didn’t end up there. Rather, I came away with an even greater lack of understanding of why these parents were willing to let Jesus decide whether their children would live or die.

Independent of whether you believe in the existence of God or that Jesus was the Son of God or that the four gospels that made it into the final canon were in any way an accurate representation of Jesus’ life and work, you have to be impressed with the man described as Jesus of Nazareth. At the time of Jesus’ life, around 4 B. C. to 30 A. D., child abuse, as noted by one historian, was “the crying vice of the Roman Empire.” Infanticide was common. Abandonment was common. Hippocrates, who lived about 400 years before Jesus, often wrote about how physicians should ethically interact with patients. But Hippocrates never mentioned children. That’s because children were property, no different than slaves. But Jesus stood up for children. Cared about them when those around him typically didn’t. The quote that most affected me during my reading was from Matthew 25:40: “Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of my brethren you have done it unto me”—a quote that could be emblazoned on the entranceway of every children’s hospital in the world.

The book does have an unlikely hero: Rita Swan, a Christian Scientist who chose prayer instead of antibiotics for her son’s bacterial meningitis, only to watch him die a slow, painful death over a period of twelve days. But unlike virtually every other faith healer who stands back and watches their child die, Swan took responsibility for her actions. She didn’t claim that her son’s death was God’s will; rather, she came to realize that no God would ask a parent to let their child die in His name. That her religion was, in her words, “a fragile magic.” Five years after her son’s death, Swan founded Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty: CHILD. All royalties from the sale of my book will be donated to her organization.