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The audience, mostly members of the Followers of Christ church, listen as Dale and Shannon Hickman, both also of the church, were sentenced in Clackamas County Court in 2011 for the death of their son, David.

(RANDY L. RASMUSSEN/THE OREGONIAN)

IN THE NAME OF GOD

Cameron Stauth

Thomas Dunne Books, $27.99

450 pages

By ANGIE JABINE/Special to The Oregonian

Many Oregonians still vividly remember the 2010 news photo of a baby girl with a huge, inflamed growth on her face that completely covered her left eye. Her parents were members of the Followers of Christ, a small fundamentalist Christian sect in Oregon City that rejects medical treatment in favor of prayer. When a disenchanted church member alerted Clackamas County authorities to the girl's plight, she ultimately received medical attention and kept her eye.

Sixteen-month-old Ava Worthington was not so lucky. In 2008 she was essentially asphyxiated by a fluid-filled cyst on her neck — one that could easily have been surgically drained. A year later, Dale and Shannon Hickman's baby boy, born two months prematurely at home, died without any of the life-saving medical care that preemies usually receive. And in 2010, 16-year-old Neil Beagley died in agony from kidney failure due to a common urinary tract blockage that could have been repaired years earlier. All three were children of the Followers of Christ.

In the compulsively readable"In the Name of God: The True Story of the Fight to Save Children From Faith-Healing Homicide," Portland reporter Cameron Stauth interweaves two parallel narratives, both equally compelling. One tells the tale of a fiercely secretive community that closed ranks when police officers, child welfare workers, and local news media, including The Oregonian, tried to find out why and how Followers of Christ children kept dying. The families were polite but tight-lipped -- all except one secret informant whose cooperation with outsiders was critical in bringing these families' cases to trial.

Stauth's second narrative centers on Rita Swan, a soft-spoken Michigan mother. Swan lost her own toddler to bacterial meningitis in 1977 after relying on healers from her Christian Science church to cure his illness. Swan could not accept that her son's death was due to her lack of faith, as some in her congregation had implied. Instead she left the church and embarked on a nationwide campaign to uncover similar deaths and to reform state "religious shield" laws that relied on a broad interpretation of the First Amendment to protect faith-healing parents against charges of child neglect or homicide.

Swan's adversaries were some of the most powerful people in America. Although worldwide Christian Science believers now number around 80,000, in the 1970s, they included President Richard Nixon's key advisors John Ehrlichman, Robert Haldeman, and Egil Krogh. Federal mandates during Nixon's administration offered broad protections to faith-healing practitioners, and even permitted Christian Science hospitals, whose medical personnel were trained in metaphysics, not medicine, to bill Medicare at the same rate as medical hospitals. As late as 1998, 40 states had broad religious shield laws. In Oregon, despite its largely secular population, the law was exceptionally broad, allowing a religious shield even against homicide. As Swan later told Stauth, Oregon is "so liberal, and so tolerant, that sometimes it doesn't see danger."

Stauth interviewed dozens of people inside and outside of law enforcement, but his key source within the Followers of Christ appears to be "Patrick Robbins," the disillusioned informant who secretly kept Clackamas County police apprised of various children's ill health. Without Robbins' detailed descriptions of the congregation and its gatherings, Stauth might never have been able to recreate them so vividly. But Stauth appears to use considerable artistic license in recreating certain more private scenes, such as Neil Beagley's state of mind as he built a parking space on his family's land for his Camaro, just three months before his death in June 2008. And Stauth's fondness for various disparaging nicknames for Clackamas County — "Clackistan," "Clackalackie," "Clackatucky" — can occasionally lead his book into the more lurid environs of the "true crime" genre.

But overall, "In the Name of God" is a highly nuanced story, presented by a reporter whose past books reveal his skepticism about the virtues of modern medicine and his openness to the mysterious power of prayer. Stauth came to see that the Followers of God seldom questioned their own strictures, but they weren't stupid or incompetent. As one Clackamas County prosecutor put it, "these folks have cell phones, landlines, computers, and TVs. We're not talking about Appalachia here."

Furthermore, they raised their children to be admirably self-reliant, especially the boys, earning their own money and saving it to buy their cars, apprenticing in their dads' small businesses. And in each case described in this book, the parents cared deeply about their children's health crises, scrupulously recording their eating and sleeping, and calling on the prayers of the family members gathered around them. As Stauth layers detail upon detail, the reader is left wondering how such close and devoted families could be so perversely willing to sacrifice their children for the sake of their beliefs.

If Stauth's depiction of Swan verges on hero worship, he builds a strong case: Swan has worked for decades, doggedly and persistently, state by state, to reform excessively broad religious shield laws. In Oregon in 1999-2000, buttressed by reporting by The Oregonian, KATU, ABC's "20-20," and medical examiner Dr. Larry Lewman, she engineered a bill that would finally make it possible to prosecute Oregon parents who refuse medical care for their children.

Even so, justice will continue to be meted out unevenly, depending on the evidence and resources that prosecutors can bring to their cases. As Swan noted after the 2011 trial of Dale and Shannon Hickman, the parents whose premature boy had died within hours of birth, the Hickmans faced sentences more stringent than those meted out to Brent and Raylene Worthington or Jeff and Marci Beagley, who had allowed their sick children to suffer needlessly for months and years before dying.

And despite all efforts to protect U.S. children, religion-based neglect will not go away. In August, two Albany parents who belong to the Church of the First Born — which shares forebears with the Followers of Christ — pleaded not guilty to manslaughter in the death of their 12-year-old daughter due to complications of diabetes. Their other two children are in protective custody while the parents await trial.

Angie Jabine is a Portland writer and editor.

Reading: Stauth discusses "In the Name of God" at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 27 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.