In the Name of God

The True Story of the Fight to Save Children from Faith-Healing Homicide


By Cameron Stauth

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2013 Cameron Stauth
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-00579-3


Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Author's Note,
Prologue: Genesis,
Part One: The Book of Matthew,
1. The Serpent,
2. God's Perfect World,
3. Death and Dismemberment,
4. The Exorcist,
5. The Crime Family,
Part Two: The Book of Judas,
6. Betrayed with a Kiss,
7. The Getaway,
8. The Snitch,
9. Crime Scene Investigators,
10. Guilt and Innocence,
11. The Wages of Sin,
12. The Love of Judas,
Part Three: The Book of Revelation,
13. The First Great Awakening,
14. Sacrificed on the Altar,
15. Angel Baby,
16. Police Work,
17. Clackatraz,
18. Tender Mercies,
19. Healing the Blind,
20. The Father, The Son,
21. It Is Finished,
Epilogue: Exodus,
Index,
Also by Cameron Stauth,
About the Author,
Copyright,


CHAPTER 1

THE SERPENT


They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick, and the sick shall recover.

— The Book of Mark 16:18


London, England 1705


The Dark Ages were over and revolution smoldered, soon to flame. Kings and priests were hated. The common man was on the rise, ready to seize the power of not only governments, but God himself. It was the Age of Enlightenment.

An English writer named Charles Gildon, struggling to make sense of the cataclysm, wrote a book called The Deist's Manual that described the forty great religions of Europe, including a newly founded, wildly rebellious church known as the Followers of Christ.

The Followers had originated in London in the late 1600s, identified by neither a founder nor a place of worship, which kept them safer from the torturous wrath of the Church of England. Prudently, when they met secretly in each other's homes, they didn't even pray out loud.

At the dawn of the 1700s, they rose slowly to prominence in a milieu of clean and sober Christianity that was not far removed from the sexless, humble piety of the Pilgrims. The Followers, though, thought that the Pilgrim's life of obedience and restraint was hardly worth living. They believed in a joyously mystical, almost orgasmic universe of miracles and wonder: a kingdom of heaven on earth that they alone ruled as supreme beings, operating without restraints.

The religious movement they helped create was called the Great Awakening.

Gildon, an atheist turned Anglican fundamentalist, wrote:

The Followers of Christ are the heirs of Salvation. They are above ordinances.

They walk Here as if they were Above. They meet at the houses of their members for a silent contemplation of the Angels in Heaven.

They hold themselves nearer to those that are of Their opinion than those with whom they have any tie of Birth.

Some call them Visionaries. Some call them Revelation Men.

Their divinity is concerned with the Most Mysterious Things in the nature of God.

Not everyone agreed. Gildon had sulfurous detractors, including mainstream Presbyterian Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, who once insulted Gildon by saying, "Charles Gildon is a man with six well-fed whores and a starving wife."

It was an era of bitter religious contention, believed to be temporary, as the Age of Enlightenment began to unfold its wings, in yet one more attempt to finally make the world rational.


Bow, New Hampshire
1829

"Mary is dying!" Mark Baker screamed. His eight-year-old daughter was writhing on the floor, gnashing her teeth. She suddenly became lifeless, her eyes open but empty. Her mother crouched over her as her father raced for the doctor, lashing his horses as he stood rigidly in his wagon.

By the time he returned, Mary had recovered. But her fits began to recur.

One night Mary was lying in bed and heard a voice cry her name three times. She later recalled that when she replied, her body began to rise. It rose one foot off the bed and remained there. Then she was lowered gently back down. She levitated again, and was lowered. Then again. She knew it could not have happened — but that it had — and she believed forever-after that she was possessed by a strange and wondrous power.

Mary continued to suffer horrible fevers, seizures, ulcers, pain, and paralysis, and her suffering did not cease when she tried homeopathy, hydrotherapy, and various healing diets, including grain-based vegetarian regimens created by Seventh-day Adventist John H. Kellogg, and by the Reverend Sylvester Graham, who claimed his new flour could cure almost anything.

Physicians couldn't help Mary. The only two choices she had were those who had begun to use ether and operated aggressively, or the traditionally passive doctors — the two options categorized at that time as those who killed you, or those who let you die.

Finally she turned to a protégé of the famous Dr. Franz Mesmer, and found relief.

Dr. Mesmer, of Vienna, had initially employed magnets to heal, believing that a universal force of animal magnetism existed in all people. Benjamin Franklin had tried to bottle this magnetic power in 1784 as a "powder of sympathy," but when he failed, the biomedical version of the cure was abandoned and Mesmer began to simply place his hands soothingly on a patient's midsection — just above the navel, in the hypochondrium region — sometimes for hours at a time. It seemed to work.

With this treatment, Mary Baker experienced a rebirth of her health.

Mary considered Mesmerism to be not only scientific, but a logical extension of the biblical practice of laying on of hands. It cast out not only fevers, but demons: two for the price of one. She refined the theatrical practice, dressed it with theology, and began to sell it herself.

Mary's therapy and the exotic belief system she built around it gained acclaim and gave a nice jolt to the tepid religious rut that had overtaken America. Her growing group of acolytes became part of the Second Great Awakening, along with other radical, all-in churches that made big promises of worldly glory and heavenly ascendance.

The one with the flashiest backstory was the new Mormon Church, founded in 1830, which offered its adherents wealth and membership in a pre-doomsday super-race — as well as the right to have a lot of wives, all submissive. The Mormons believed that two warring tribes of Israelites had been the original settlers of America — the bad Red Israelites, and the good White Israelites. Jesus, they said, had materialized on the East Coast shortly after his resurrection to try to stop a genocidal race war that the Red Israelites eventually won, as evidenced by the fact that when Columbus came to America he met no surviving Caucasians.

The Mormons even had a living witness to their story: Joseph Smith, who swore he'd heard the whole thing in New York from a warrior-angel who gave him golden tablets and magic reading glasses. The tablets and glasses soon disappeared, but Joseph Smith had enough material to write The Book of Mormon, and attract a following of thousands of modern, or latter-day, saints. They alone were God's chosen people, Smith said, destined for an End Times heaven that far surpassed the standard Christian utopia.

The seductive Mormon inducements trumped those of another group founded a few years later, the Seventh-day Adventists — who also promised eternal ecstasy, but demanded a monastic lifestyle of no dancing, card playing, music, self-adornment, reading, or meat-eating. Not even celebrations on Christmas or birthdays.

The most popular of the rebellious charismatic churches was that of the backwoods-based, snake-handling, poison-drinking Pentecostalists, who guaranteed a fabulous hillbilly heaven, but only for the ultra-trusting. They arose in the late 1880s as part of an offbeat segment of Radical Reformation evangelicals that included The Foot Washers, The Plain People, The Dunkers, and the Peculiar People, named after an alternate translation of Deuteronomy's "The Chosen People."

A group offering not just similar perfection, but "higher perfection," was the even wilder Followers of Christ, who had migrated from England to Canada for religious freedom and were trickling down to America with an exciting, exclusive offer of daily face-time with God himself, plus submissive wives, perfect health, and superiority over everyone on earth — except for one minor sacrifice: Nobody could ever go to a doctor. They thought healing was God's job, not that of crude physicians, who at the time also served as barbers. The Followers — convinced, like the others, that they alone were God's chosen people — even claimed that one of their first American settlers, James McDonald, had baptized Joseph Smith in the 1820s, shortly before Smith had begun to take dictation from angels and write his own bible.

The basic concept of these New England churches was simple: You can be perfect (if you're one of us) because we are not of this poor material world, but God's perfect world.

In this manner, among these people, modern faith healing in America was born.

Among all the mystics, Mary Baker came closest to perfecting the art of ethereal branding and franchising. She became the print media's preeminent drama queen, enmeshed in poisonous feuds and outrageous claims during the creation of her faith-healing empire. Mary grew rich and famous teaching others how to make money by treating illness with no overhead.

After the early loss of her first two husbands, one to yellow fever and one to desertion, she made headlines in the highly publicized Salem Witchcraft Trial of 1878 by instigating a lawsuit against her ex-boyfriend for casting a spell on her with a form of witchcraft that she called malicious animal magnetism. She lost the case, but stayed in the news cycle when her third husband — Gilbert Eddy, who'd sealed their marriage deal by agreeing to a no-sex clause — was arrested for killing her ex-boyfriend. Eddy soon died of heart disease, despite Mary's fervent attempts to convince him that clogged arteries were impossible in a perfect world.

Mary blamed Eddy's demise on "mental murder," committed by one of her students. But she was unable to produce the neural murder weapon and the case was dismissed.

Nonetheless, Mary Baker Eddy became the only woman in world history to found a major religion, the Christian Science Church. It became one of the most powerful churches in American history, and one of the most hated. For the next century, as its influence and wealth grew, it helped protect a constellation of radical faith-healing churches, including the Followers of Christ, as children, elders, and other vulnerable people began to die by the thousands at the hands of faith healers — with no consequences whatsoever — across a growing country founded by the Pilgrims on one primary principle: freedom of religion.


Oneida, New York
1840

Follower James McDonald had a son shortly after he'd baptized Joseph Smith and moved in the 1830s to the emerging utopian colony of Oneida, where he claimed that his son not only had the gift of divine healing, but could even raise the dead. The claim shocked the people of Oneida, which wasn't easy, because the town was the home of the anything-goes, proto-swinger Perfectionist religion, which coined the phrase "free love."

More shockingly, McDonald's son, Jacob, openly kissed other men on the mouth. That same act had previously resulted in the arrest of the Followers minister, Jacob Cochrane, on a charge of adultery and promiscuous behavior. Cochrane's legal defense: The Holy Greeting was a centuries-old custom, based on the biblical assertion that Jesus had kissed his disciples on the mouth. Therefore, Cochrane said, because the Followers were, unlike the era's pretender churches, directly linked to Jesus, the kiss was not sodomistic at all, but holy: hence, the name, Holy Greeting.

The claim didn't help Cochrane with his Oneida jury, even though the Perfectionists did believe that mankind had begun to live in a "new age" that allowed "complex" marriages. Cochrane went to jail.

Jacob McDonald wisely hit the road, and soon enlisted in the Union Army. The Followers were pacifists, but were also idealistic, and willing to kill for the abolition of slavery. Abolition was an obsession among them, along with temperance, courtesy, medical self-care, good hygiene, thrift, and raising the dead.

As a young soldier, McDonald, according to Followers' lore, was sitting alone on the tongue of a wagon one evening, reading Scripture, when a Divine Apparition floated out of the trees. The Holy Ghost commanded Brother McDonald to defy convention, heal the sick, redeem the wicked, and let Him worry about the lawyers.

With this calling, Brother Jacob McDonald drifted west and began to baptize sinners in a chain of saved souls that eventually reached Brother John Evans, one of the many Followers who was part of the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1893 — "a glorious period in our time," according to the Followers' genealogy. Brother Evans, a cowpoke who could speak in tongues, was ordered by his pastor to, "Teach the Brethren, here and elsewhere, up and down this unfriendly World. And those that hear thee shall wear a starry crown."

Evans and a small band of Followers families — the Caldwells, Cunninghams, Youngs, Morrises, Eellses, and Smiths — joined a wagon train in 1898 for their exodus from Oklahoma. They headed for the lush gardens and rich gold mines of Idaho, which had just been made a state, following its abolition of polygamy.

The West, they believed, would be their American Eden.


Caldwell, Idaho
1939

The snake in the garden wasn't doing its job. The fat blacksnake was supposed to be eating the garden's grasshoppers and spiders, but little Eleanor Evans could clearly see the insects climbing all over their vegetables. Snakes that big didn't usually eat bugs, but the pond the snake lived in was just about empty of the bullfrogs and bluegills it liked, and in the Dust Bowl year of '39, as Eleanor later recalled, just about anything would eat just about anything. Some people were even eating their blacksnakes, which wasn't too smart, because the blacksnakes ate the rattlers.

Around this time of day, with the sun straight up, the rattlers would sometimes slide into the dusty garden, but not if they smelled the blacksnake, which could handle a rattlesnake bite. Blacksnakes were like the Followers that way. Eleanor had seen her dad snatch up great big rattlesnakes by their tails and proclaim, "In Jesus' name, Devil be gone," then cast them down, and watch the snakes crawl away to die. Snake handling was kind of a contest among the men, to see who really had faith. It didn't always turn out so well for those with lack of faith, but whose fault was that?

Once a rattler had bitten her great-uncle Wilbur, but he just prayed it out and was fine. People respected Wilbur, because he was one of the Oklahoma pioneers, but he'd made everybody mad by fighting in the Great War, which was probably why the snake bit him. He had a sore arm after the bite but he lived almost forever until he got sugar diabetes, and he almost prayed his way out of that. Now he was in the Peaceful Valley Cemetery, just up the road, buried in a long row of Evanses, next to the sections of Cunninghams, Morrises, Smiths, and Beagleys. He'd been laid to rest next to his daughter, who'd started to have a baby, but couldn't. Her baby wouldn't come all the way out, they said — just the poor thing's little blue head — and she and the baby had gotten sick and died.

It was a beautiful cemetery, though — especially the places where they buried all the kids, because folks always did something special with their kid's graves, like putting cribs or bed frames around them, so it would look like their children were just sleeping. The Followers were crazy about their kids.

Eleanor was just six in '39 but she already had a couple of friends in the cemetery. It didn't spook her, though, because she'd already been dead herself, and knew it didn't amount to much. It happened when she had pneumonia as a little kid. That was back in Hailey, next to the rich town of Sun Valley, before they were forced out of there when the powerful folks got mean. Eleanor remembered that when she got sick her grandma had held her by the cook-stove to keep her warm, while her dad and the elders prayed over her. But then she got real sleepy and died.

They said her arms flopped down and she was limp as a dishrag. She wasn't breathing, of course, and everybody said her body turned the color of an eggplant. That's when Grandma handed her to Mom — who'd been dead herself, as a baby — and they laid hands on her. It didn't work the first time, according to Mom, and she just got more purple. She was dead quite a while, Mom said, so they had to keep her close to the stove so she wouldn't be cold when she came back to life. They praised the Lord and anointed her. They raised a ruckus, because everybody loved her to death. She was good with her little brother, Donny, and was a big help around the house.

Eleanor didn't remember coming back. But everybody else sure did. They talked about it all the time. It was a regular family story.

Out in the garden, while Eleanor was picking beans by the lazy old blacksnake, which was like a pet, her grandma came out with a big wicker basket and they started gathering tomatoes. The tomatoes weren't much at all that year — they were as bad as the dried-out snap-beans, and even worse than the apples and pears, which were just runty little things you couldn't even make a cobbler out of.


(Continues...)

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