One Oregon couple now is in jail for the use of faith healing to treat their daughter’s diabetes, resulting in her death this past February.

Diabetes is not a disorder one can pray away. A person does not miraculously gain a working pancreas. Faith does not produce insulin. It would make no more sense to ‘pray away the disorder’ as it would to ‘pray away a compound fracture of the left clavicle.’ Not only will it do no good, and instead will make the person suffer needlessly if not result in permanent damage if not death. Which is why the faith healing performed on Syble Rossiter by her parents and church in Oregon is so tragic. Her death on February 5th was a completely pointless exercise in futility by her parents refusal to seek medical treatment for her type 1 diabetes, instead only trusting faith healing.

Syble’s parents, Travis and Wenona Rossiter, were arrested on manslaughter charges in connection with her death, as reported by KOIN:

The Rossiter’s are highly religious folk, belonging to the Church of the First Born, which claims to have been founded in 26AD and that the United States is a theologically founded nation, alongside other tenets of belief taken from their webpage. One of their core beliefs given is that of faith healing, that ailments are resolved through prayer, not through medicine.



This is not the first time this family has run afoul of the law for faith healing. Wenona Rossiter’s brother died of an easily treatable form of leukemia, which resulted in Wenona’s father going to jail in 1996 for criminally negligent homicide and her aunt was taken away from the family in 1991 after she was not treated for an abnormal fluid increase in the skull.

Now the two surviving children have been placed into foster homes for their own protection and the parents are facing jail time for this tragedy. This arrest comes soon after a Texas church became the epicenter for a measles outbreak with almost two dozen sick so far. And measles are not limited to just those in Texas either. People who turn to faith instead of medicine in turn reject their own religious teachings.

People who put faith over family lack common sense. Faith is there to enrich our lives, not to destroy it. if your faith requires putting your well-being, be it physically, financially, emotionally, or spiritually, then it is wrong. Diabetes can kill, as the Rossiter family now knows all too well. If you know of someone who is avoiding medical treatment to instead put their faith in, well, faith, please talk to them. No amount of prayer is worth someones life.