This story is central to “Bad Faith,” which explores how religious beliefs can undermine medical care. Paul A. Offit, a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, tells us that our ability to protect children from abuse at the hands of parents is somewhat recent. “At the time of Jesus’ birth, infanticide was legal. Children weren’t considered to be people; they were property no different than slaves. So parents could do whatever they wanted to them. Children were stoned, beaten, flung into dung heaps, starved to death, traded for beds, sexually abused.” As Offit writes: “It is hard to overstate the influence of Jesus’ teachings on the fate of children.” But, he goes on, “given Jesus’ love for children, his support of physicians and his belief that a God who abhors suffering and comforts the afflicted would never give children diseases as a test of faith, how did we come to a place where parents, in the name of Jesus, are willing to ignore the screams of meningitis, the breathlessness of pneumonia and the disfiguring erosion of cancer when lifesaving therapies are at hand? The answer lies in the illogical end to a series of events that were first described in the New ­Testament.”

Offit is referring to passages not only of Jesus raising the dead, but also of his apostles doing the same. Peter resurrected Tabitha, and Paul raised a young man named Eutychus. No longer were miracles limited to God or Jesus: “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14:12).

In fact, the reason for the continued and enormous popularity of faith healing is that, to some extent at least, it works. New research suggests that placebo response generates measurable endorphin release in the brain: “Believing you are being healed causes the body to undergo physiological changes that promote healing.” Still, diseases like meningitis or leukemia are unlikely to be reversed by a placebo response.

Since the early 1900s, parents who willfully withheld medicine in the name of religion have been prosecuted and convicted. But, Offit tell us, beginning in the ’70s, the prosecutors’ task became difficult. The blame for this setback can be ascribed to two powerful men in the Nixon administration, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, both famous for their roles in the Watergate scandal, and both Christian Scientists. They became involved because of Lisa Sheridan, a 5-year-old who in 1967 died of pneumonia. Her mother, Dorothy, a Christian Scientist, had opted for prayer instead of antibiotics. The autopsy of the child showed a quart of pus in her chest, and the Massachusetts district attorney charged Sheridan with manslaughter. She was sentenced to five years’ probation. This was around the time when Walter Mondale was working to introduce the landmark Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act (Capta).

“Elders in the Christian Science church saw the trial of Dorothy Sheridan as a wake-up call,” Offit writes. “If she could be prosecuted for following the tenets of her faith, all of them were at risk. Capta was about to shine an unwanted light on their way of life. Something had to be done. So church authorities turned to the two men they were certain could help.”