When Faith Turns Deadly

I grew up in the Church of the Firstborn in rural Oklahoma, a church community tucked far away from hospitals, specialists, and—if I’m honest—common sense when it came to medical care. From the time I was small, I was told that faith would heal all things. Broken bones, sickness, childbirth complications—none of it required doctors. What we needed was prayer, laying on of hands, and complete trust that God would intervene.

As a child, I didn’t question it. I watched my elders pray over sick children instead of taking them to the hospital. I heard whispered stories of women laboring for hours, even days, at home without medical help, only to lose their babies—or their own lives. These stories weren’t told with outrage or grief; they were spoken with resignation, as though death was simply part of the cost of being faithful.

At the time, I thought this was normal. But now, as an adult, I look back with horror and heartbreak.

Inside the Church of the Firstborn, there was an unspoken rule: if you sought medical care, you didn’t have enough faith. To even suggest calling a doctor was to risk being shunned, whispered about, or worse, labeled as someone who didn’t trust God. I remember women giving birth in tiny bedrooms, midwives from the church at their side—not trained medical professionals, but other women who had simply “done it before.” There was no safety net, no plan if something went wrong.

And things went wrong far too often.

We were taught that every outcome—life or death—was “God’s will.” When a mother hemorrhaged and died after childbirth, we were told, God wanted her home. When a newborn turned blue and never took another breath, we were told, God’s plan is mysterious. It was as though acknowledging that a lack of medical care contributed to these deaths was blasphemy.

When I read the 2004 Associated Press article about DeWayne and Maleta Schmidt, members of a Church of the Firstborn congregation in Indiana, it felt like déjà vu. Their daughter, Rhiana Rose, died less than two days after birth from a blood infection that could have been treated. They never took her to a hospital. Instead, they prayed and waited.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened in that church. In fact, Rhiana’s death was the third in six years. Yet a longtime church elder, Tom Nation, doubled down in defense:

“Scripture will still read the same as it does now. This doesn’t change anything for us.”

Those words chilled me to my core.

I thought of the funerals I attended as a child. I thought of the tiny graves behind rural churches, the mothers buried far too young. I thought of the shame that hovered over anyone who even considered going to a doctor. And I thought: how many of those deaths could have been prevented?

Let me be clear—I am not against faith. I am not against prayer. In fact, I am a woman of faith, and I still believe prayer changes things. But I also believe God gave us tools, wisdom, and medical knowledge for a reason. To reject those things out of fear or misguided doctrine isn’t piety—it’s negligence.

In the Church of the Firstborn, this doctrine wasn’t just taught—it was enforced through community pressure. I’ve seen parents who lost a child stand stoically at a graveside, refusing to cry because they believed questioning was sin. I’ve seen women terrified to admit they were having complications during pregnancy because they feared being judged. And I’ve seen the aftermath: widowed husbands, fatherless children, and entire families destroyed by preventable tragedies.

It’s impossible to know how many people died this way, because so many of these deaths were never reported publicly. They happened in living rooms, on back roads, in quiet rural homes. Babies who lived only minutes or hours. Women who bled out before sunrise.

We never called it what it was: a preventable loss.

And we certainly never spoke about how these deaths were linked—how a culture of control and isolation perpetuated a cycle of suffering. Instead, we called it “faith.” But looking back, I see it now for what it was: a system that valued ideology over human life.

As I write this, I think about my own journey—leaving that environment, unlearning what I’d been taught, and reclaiming my faith in a way that aligns with both compassion and truth. Today, I advocate for women in recovery and speak out for the missing and the murdered. But I also feel a responsibility to speak about this: the silent epidemic of preventable deaths within faith communities that reject medical care.

If you grew up like I did, you know the weight of these stories. Maybe you’ve lived through one yourself. Maybe you’ve buried someone you loved because help was never called. And if you’re still in it—if you’re in a church that tells you to ignore medical care—I’m begging you to hear me: your life is worth saving. Your child’s life is worth saving.

I write these words for the women who never came home from childbirth, for the babies who never had a chance, and for the families who were taught to believe it was all “meant to be.”

We honor them by telling the truth.
We honor them by saying out loud what others wanted to keep hidden.
We honor them by refusing to let faith be twisted into something that costs lives.

Because faith should never cost a life.