After Cyclone Nargis left a trail of corpses along Burma’s coast in May 2008, foreign aid workers clamored to enter the military-controlled backwater.

Despite the world’s pleading, Burma’s paranoid generals forbade most foreign relief workers from entering the disaster zone. A frustrated U.K. threatened unauthorized air drops. The U.S. Navy was forced to float vessels loaded with life-saving supplies offshore.

But among the few who managed to access Burma’s worst-hit areas included adherents of the California-based Church of Scientology.

According to the church, miracles ensued after Scientologists touched down. Their team sought out traumatized Burmese for Scientology’s touch-healing techniques, professed to revive the spirit.

The infirm recouped strength, they said, and Burmese kids who’d lost their families regained their smiles. As the church tells it, even the surgeon of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s revered pro-democracy icon, wanted his personal relief troupe to adopt Scientology techniques.

“He goes, ‘This is amazing! I’m a doctor and I can’t even do this!’” said Andy Ponnaz, 57, a Bangkok-born Scientologist of mixed Thai-Swiss blood.

“I said, ‘Sir, I can teach all of your crew tomorrow. How many? 40? OK!’”

The far reach of Scientology

Those who know of Scientology through media exposes, or South Park’s stinging cartoon parody, may wonder what interests Scientology could possibly have in one of Asia’s most remote jungles.

The Western media has largely focused on Scientology’s celebrity followers, its secret scriptures and its costly hierarchy of enlightenment. Defectors’ tell-alls have shaken the religion’s public image. An internet campaign known as “Anonymous” vows to do much worse: destroy the church entirely.

But while Scientology endures scrutiny in America, the faith’s influence is quietly expanding in countries that lie beyond the Western media’s glare. In Burma, there is no South Park. Nor does the din of criticism reach non-English speakers in Indonesian cities ruined by earthquakes. Or poor hamlets in Ghana. Or crumbling city blocks in Chile.

Scientologists reach all these places and more. The faith has dispatched its yellow-clad “Volunteer Ministers” to almost every major global disaster in the last decade: from the 2001 World Trade Center attacks to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Japan’s earthquake-ravaged coast.

Ten years ago, this relief brigade was estimated at 6,000 people. Now, according to church stats, it’s up to 350,000 and growing. Within the past 12 months, the church’s volunteer ministers claim to have treated 3.1 million people in 185 nations and territories.

Scientologists call their volunteer ministers “the largest independent relief force on earth,” an assertion that rivals the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies claim of 97 million volunteers. But this is hardly the two groups’ only point of distinction.

What is an “assist”?

Scientology relief work is largely focused on delivering “assists,” a menu of touch-healing techniques said to reconnect ailing bodies with immortal spirits.

The healing promised by assists is radical: limbs purged of aches in minutes and minds freed from trauma on the spot. Using only their hands, and instructions from the Scientology Handbook, ministers swear they can even render a drunk man sober in minutes.

Is this tent revival-style faith healing? According to Scientologists, no. It’s described as a spiritual science, developed by their founder, the sci-fi novelist-turned-religious leader L. Ron Hubbard.

Mainstream psychiatry is uneasy with Scientologists’ forays into trauma relief. But in the church’s eyes, they are often the only force with the spiritual expertise disaster relief requires.

“When people are walking around like zombies, we can cut through that and say, ‘You, come here. Just lie down,’” said Ponnaz, the organization executive secretary of the church’s Bangkok foundation.

“They get results. Then the tables turn and they go, ‘Give me more!’”

Everyday believers

To an Asian villager in a disaster zone, a Scientologist is not Tom Cruise or John Travolta, the faith’s best-known believers. It’s a guy like Gary Bromwell, a tanned and silver-haired Australian from Perth.

Bromwell, one of the church’s most-traveled volunteer ministers, has missed few of Asia’s recent calamities. He recalls Indonesian troops weeping when afternoon rains stirred tsunami flashbacks. He’s encountered a boy whose face was dragged against the ground by waves until teeth showed through his cheek.

“Have you ever seen someone in shock? Their eyes are sort of vacant like no one’s home,” said Bromwell via phone from New Zealand, where he led a Scientology team in Christchurch. The city was rocked by a 6.3-magnitude quake in February.

“Their lights are out,” he said. “That’s because the majority of their attention is stuck back in time, on wax, at the point of trauma.”

Bromwell’s objective is to bring survivors back to “present time,” he explained. In Scientology lingo, the person’s “thetan,” or immortal spirit, is hung up on the traumatic event, leaving the body unable to properly heal.

If spotted by a Scientologist, a dazed disaster survivor is asked to lie down on a padded folding table beneath a tent. The person’s trauma-stricken spirit is then reconnected to the body, so say the Scientologists, with a combination of verbal instructions and touch techniques.

Physical injury is often handled with a “nerve assist.” The injured person lies belly-down, then supine, while a Scientologist traces fingers along their spine and strokes their limbs. The motion, according to the Scientology Handbook, unclogs blocked energy “improving communication with the body and bringing the being relief.”

Mentally trauma is treated with a “contact assist,” in which a survivor is asked to re-enact a troubling event at the location where it occurred.

A tsunami survivor, for example, may be asked to revisit the sea, coming closer and closer to the water until they can bear to dip their toes in the surf. (But Scientologists must “never forcibly drag the person up to the spot with the injury or accident occurred,” according to the handbook.)

Testimonials of touch healing

“These people have seen some nasty things and often that stays in their mind,” Bromwell said. “We do assists to relieve that. Then they can go home, sleep, and they don’t have those pictures stuck in their minds.”

In New Zealand, Bromwell found a boy who obsessed over the quake and suffered constipation for seven days. After applying Scientology’s healing powers, Bromwell said, the boy was suddenly able to relieve himself and play outside without fear.

Katrina Gregory, another Australian Scientologist, recounted her own miracles from rubble-strewn Christchurch. One man’s ankle was struck by a falling cable. Gregory, who is 33 and works as a personal assistant in Tasmania, restored the man’s ability to walk, she said.

“They’re pretty much jumping on the table because they’re hurting and sore and just want to feel better,” Gregory said. “I’ve done a thousand of these things and it amazes me how it always works.”

Other accounts are even more spectacular. In the book “After the Tsunami,” written by a Danish Scientologist, British actor and Scientologist Robbie Scandrett recalled treating an 11-year-old Indian girl who “had not slept since the tsunami and kept hearing the waves, creating a deep fear of the sea.”

Scandrett offered a “touch assist,” which requires touching parts of the girl’s body while saying “feel my finger.” Five minutes into the session, the girl “lost consciousness and slumped into her chair,” according to the account.

Another 45 minutes passed before “her eyes opened very slightly and tears streamed down her cheeks … her response was that she no longer felt any fear of the sea.”

But several people who have received assists, when contacted by Global Post, likened the nerve assist to a massage: pleasant, but not life altering.

“It was quite formal. They didn’t say much, only ‘I’m going to do a nerve assist on you,’” said Lalan Susanti, an Indonesian translator who worked in Aceh after the 2004 tsunami. “I laid down and they just used their fingers, going up and down the spine, then back up again.”

“After a few days, looking at all the debris and dead bodies, you feel tired inside and out. It was relieving,” said Susanti. “They were doing it to all the locals and they never said a word about religion.”

Back to the beginning with L. Ron Hubbard

“When I was a very young man, I spent most of my teens in Asia,” said Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, in an interview released by the church before his 1986 death.

Hubbard claimed in the interview to have “slept with bandits in Mongolia” and “hunted with pygmies in the Philippines.” His experiences led him to know Asia as “an area of the world where human misery and want are very visible, where man has reached perhaps the lowest states of degradation.”

His solution to this pervasive misery? A sweeping re-think of the mankind’s mind and soul called “Dianetics,” published in 1950. It was his first major genre departure from science fiction and is now revered by the church as a founding text.

In “Dianetics,” Hubbard asserts that most physical and mental ills are “psychosomatic” or induced by the mind. Negative experiences, he said, create mental images that get stuck in an unconscious vault of pain: the “reactive mind.”

If the images aren’t confronted and purged, Hubbard wrote, they lie in wait to trigger self-destructive behavior or even physical illness.

“Discharge the contents of this mind’s bank,” Hubbard wrote in Dianetics, “and the arthritis vanishes, myopia gets better, heart illness decreases, asthma disappears, stomachs function properly and the whole catalog of ills goes away and stays away.”

An electronic trauma detector?

Out in the field, volunteer ministers try to clear out this mental muck with assists. But their preferred method uses an electronic device to detect bad experiences, some of which they believe took place in previous lives.

The device is called an “e-meter.” The breadbox-sized unit, studded with dials and knobs, sends five electric volts into the body through two metal handles gripped by the person being “audited.” A trained “auditor” asks the person to recount painful memories over and over in vivid detail.

Those memories — believed by Scientologists to have actual energy and mass — can be detected on the e-meter’s dials, according to Hubbard. As the person confronts their pain, the bad experience will lose its sway over the mind.

“It’s a very precise machine,” said Ponnaz, popping open his e-meter’s heavily reinforced black travel case. “Any bit of pain or trauma is like a mass in your mind. And it registers.”

Science community speaks out

Psychiatrists, however, have largely dismissed all this as pseudo-science. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled the e-meter is “not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily functions.” And many psychiatrists have a dim view of Scientologists using these techniques on traumatized villagers.

“The Red Cross requires psychiatrists to take considerable training before they’ll allow them to go into a disaster site,” said Nada Stotland, a Chicago-based psychiatrist with Mental Health America, a non-profit advocacy group based in northern Virginia.

“They’re untrained,” said Stotland, who is also a former president of the American Psychiatric Association. “They have completely untested methods of dealing with people’s problems. These techniques have never shown results in scientific tests of any kind.”

Mental Health America even warned Scientologists to “stay out of mental health” after volunteer ministers rushed to New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The church’s view of psychiatry, however, is equally harsh.

Well-funded Scientology campaigns denounce psychiatry as an “industry of death” that peddles worthless therapy and spirit-clouding pills. Scientologists warn that “psychiatry kills” — they are particularly disdainful of shock therapy — and forbid one another from taking psychoactive pills.

“Has anyone been to a psychiatrist and actually gotten better?” Ponnaz said. “Our technology is available, written in normal terms, not high language. A guy on the street can read and understand it.”

Scientology takes hold in Asia

In a church promotional video, Phra Dang, an orange-robed buddhist monk, steps along a forested path. In single file, his faithful follow him into a temple classroom. Inside, he clutches “Dianetics” and his followers read a Thai-language copy of “The Way to Happiness,” an entry-level Hubbard text.

“I am Phra Dang,” says the monk, flanked by a large golden Buddha. “And I use Scientology in Thailand.”

Just as Scientology caters to celebrity “opinion leaders” — figures able to sway public sentiment — its volunteer ministers concentrate on winning over local religious leaders, police chiefs, doctors and varied authority figures.

Outside the Western world, some of these earliest successes are taking root in Thailand, Southeast Asia’s medical hub. At one of Bangkok’s most prestigious public hospitals, Siriraj, a Thai research nurse has proclaimed Scientology’s merit for several years.

“I have seen the effectiveness of these methods,” said Chanakan Boonnuch, speaking to Scientology’s New York branch in 2009, according to a church release. “Now I intend to speak about them in international journals and conferences.”

Experiences in Burma led another Thai doctor, 40-year-old physical rehabilitation specialist Ong-ard Sirikulphisut, to evaluate Scientology techniques scientifically.

On a laptop in Scientology’s Bangkok office, Ong-ard pulled up a photo of a Burmese woman. Her eyes appeared dead. She stared down at the dirt. Only her husband and 6-month-old infant survived the cyclone, he said. The rest of her family was killed.

“She swallowed a lot of sea water,” Ong-ard said, “She was severely stressed to the point of banging her head into the wall. So we gave her a nerve assist.”

In subsequent photos, the woman manages a slight smile that dimples her cheeks. Ong-ard later examined her case and 55 others, publishing the results in a Thai medical journal. His findings: “for the survivors, nerve assist procedure had 73.53 percent effectiveness in physical and mental stress relief in the first session.”

Ong-ard has worked for years at a pubic hospital in Chachoengsao, a province east of Bangkok. He first learned of Scientology eight years ago through a display on one of Bangkok’s busiest avenues. “There was this photo of L. Ron Hubbard auditing a woman,” he recalls. “I later came in for a seminar.”

He has since taught hundreds of his patients’ relatives to rely on Scientology assists to heal their loved ones. “They ask me, ‘Do you have magic in your finger?’” Ong-ard said. “Now that I’ve taught them, they go out to apply it on other sick people.”

This doctor, a graduate of one of Thailand’s most highly regarded colleges, is just one of thousands disseminating Scientology techniques in the developing world.

The church’s press releases boast of bigger and more remote training sessions each month: 40 nurses in Kolkata, 300 villagers in Papua New Guinea, 500 teachers in Ghana, 1,200 “fathers, mothers, nurses and even children” in Pakistan. In India, Scientology is known more as a self-help technique than a religion, but it has attracted thousands of followers nonetheless.

The church even dispatched ministers to wade into Bangkok’s recent color-coded street protests to pass out Scientology texts. “We’ve handed out this book [The Way to Happiness] to the Red Shirts, the Yellow Shirts, when they’re all kicking and shooting at each other,” Ponnaz said.

Scientologists insist their techniques are increasingly favored by public officials. Indonesia’s education department asked Bromwell to teach techniques to students at a primary school filled with traumatized kids after severe quakes, he said.

During Australia’s recent brush fires, Gregory said she was “getting people from the Red Cross, from the Salvation Army asking me what I could do for them.” And in post-tsunami Thailand, Ponnaz said, officials relied on Scientologists to restore order to a panicked public.

“The prime thing is order,” he said. “The pubic wanted to find out if their loved ones were in the morgue. Half were losing it, so they go into assists. They wake up and say, good, I got it. What am I here for? My brother’s body. Instead of flipping out, they’ve calmed down.”

The secret scriptures

A complex chart titled the “Bridge to Total Freedom” details the hierarchy Scientologists must climb to unravel life’s true meaning. “Factually,” it reads, “you’ve been traveling this universe a long time without a map. Now you’ve got one.”

The chart itself is no secret. In Bangkok’s Scientology center, as in many Scientology offices, it’s tacked to the wall for all to see.

But secret scriptures become available to those who reach senior levels, particularly Operating Thetan III, a rank achieved only after passing through what the chart describes as a “wall of fire.”

Ponnaz is an Operating Thetan VII, the penultimate rank. (The final available level, Operating Thetan VIII, is achieved at sea aboard a Scientology vessel.)

“I’m not going to talk to you about anything up there,” said Ponnaz of the bridge’s highest levels. “You’re here,” he said, pointing to the stage of the uninitiated: pre-clear.

“That’s not invalidating you,” he said. “It’s just saying, well, I know some stuff up here that if I just went ‘blah’ to you, it would throw you into a spin.”

The church’s public material tells of an ancient, non-fiction account — the “Space Opera” — that includes “space travel, spaceships, spacemen, intergalactic travel, wars, conflicts, other beings’ civilizations and societies, and other planets and galaxies.”

Whether the space opera is core to Scientology’s advanced scripture, as church defectors allege, is not publicly addressed by the church.

“I am not going to discuss the disgusting perversions of Scientology beliefs that can now be found commonly on the internet,” said Tommy Davis, the church’s chief spokesman, in an interview last year with ABC’s Nightline. Pressed further, he yanked out his lapel mic and walked off set.

Scientology detractors point out that accessing the loftiest scriptures requires coursework that can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Via the internet, a number of vocal church defectors have made a game of releasing as many secret documents as they can.

Anyone who punches “scientology” into Google’s search engine will see an equal number of official church sites and critical sites openly detailing the alleged secret scriptures. The church has returned fire in court, where lawyers have argued these texts are protected trade secrets.

Ponnaz, a Bangkok hotelier and aviator, has zero regrets about his investment. Those with less cash to spare, he said, can always earn free or reduced price courses by volunteering to audit fellow Scientologists with the e-meter.

“It’s like saying ‘I want a Porsche, but it’s too expensive.’” he said. “That doesn’t fly.”

Scientology’s mixed reviews

Psychiatrists dismiss Scientology’s relief brigade as simply ineffectual. Others allege much worse.

Scientology’s most aggressive enemy is a faceless online movement called “Anonymous,” which first announced its intentions to tear down Scientology in a 2008 YouTube video.

“The extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us,” said a robotic voice droning over over scenes of swirling skies. “Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed.”

Anonymous — a “hate group,” according to the church — sees sinister intent behind almost every move the church makes. The volunteer ministers are not spared: they’re depicted as “vulture ministers” out to prey on and convert vulnerable survivors.

But recruitment in disaster zones, Bromwell said, is prohibited by the church. “In fact, if anyone is not following the program … and trying to get people to become Scientologists, they’re instantly shipped out,” he said. “I’ve only had to do that once.”

A former aid worker with the non-profit group Peace Brigades, Paul Zeccola, remembers that Scientologists “stood out as part of the circus that came in to Aceh” after Indonesia’s tsunami. At first, he and his colleagues were highly skeptical of the ministers in yellow.

“But I didn’t hear about anything dodgy from anyone,” said Zeccola, now pursuing a political studies doctorate at Australian National University.

“I saw them getting their hands dirty in terms of cleaning up the mess that the tsunami caused,” he said, “unlike a lot of other expats up there who stayed in the comfortable offices writing reports and going across to Sabang for diving and partying.”

To Evi Narti Zain, an female aid worker from Aceh, the Scientologists she met after the tsunami were neither vultures nor miracle workers.

Zain recalls passing by a crew of Scientologists soon after the waves scattered 150,000 water-logged bodies across Aceh and Sumatra provinces. The volunteer ministers had set up camp by the local municipal headquarters and invited Zain into their tent for a nerve assist.

She climbed onto a folding table and lied down. A Scientologist touched her “very gently,” she recalled. It was over within minutes.

“I didn’t feel anything. Even relief,” Zain said. “But I do appreciate their effort. Specifically those who helped pick up the dead bodies.”

Source: GlobalPost.com

Marjoe was a precocious child preacher with extraordinary talents, who was immensely popular in the American South. His parents earned large sums of money off him up until the point he outgrew his novelty. Marjoe rejoined the ministry as a young adult solely as a means of earning a living, and not as a believer; he spent the next several years using his fame and status as an evangelist to defraud a small fortune out of individuals both through tent revivals and televangelism.

Eventually, Marjoe suffered a crisis of conscience and decided to renounce his ways, offering the documentary film crew unrestricted access to him during his final revival tour, repeatedly admitting on camera that he was a con-artist and revealing the tactics used by himself and other evangelists to swindle money from people.

Watch Marjoe here:

The Oregon House approved a bill Thursday that would remove legal protection for parents who choose faith healing over medical intervention when treating their children.

The bill passed unanimously, though two Republican representatives raised concerns that the legislation was taking the issue away from juries and sending the state down a slippery slope.

The legislation comes in response to an Oregon City church, the Followers of Christ, that has a long history of child deaths even though the conditions from which the children died were medically treatable.

Currently, spiritual treatment can be used as a defense against some*homicide charges. The bill would eliminate that defense and subject parents who chose faith healing over medical treatment at the expense of their child’s life to mandatory sentencing under Measure 11.

“In the past two years alone, two children have died and another had been severely disfigured due to lack of medical care,” said Democratic Rep. Carolyn Tomei, one of the bill’s sponsors. “These children suffered needlessly. Their deaths were avoidable.”

The bill has gained the support of several groups, including the Christian Science Church, and passed through legislative committee with unanimous support.

During the floor vote, two Republicans raised concerns about the bill. Rep. Mike McLane, R-Powell Butte, asked Tomei whether parents had ever been found not guilty as a result of the special defense. Tomei explained that in the most recent cases, grand juries have opted to charge the parents with other crimes to avoid the faith healing defense.

McLean, however, appeared undeterred.

“Oregon juries are quite capable of deciding,” he said. “We are taking this issue away from juries and grand juries.”

Rep. Jim Weidner, R-Yamhill, said he worried “we might be heading down a slippery slope.” He said he prayed earlier in the day about his son’s severe tonsillitis. His wife took his son to the doctor Thursday morning, he added, but “am I going to go to prison because I took the time to pray with my child?”

Both Republicans voted for the bill but pledged to seek amendments when the legislation passes through the Senate.

Tomei addressed the concerns in her closing remarks.

“Colleagues, this bill is not written … to send anyone to prison,” she said. “Our hope is that we’re sending a certain group of people a message that it’s against the law if their child is in grave danger … to not give them medical care.”

Source: Oregon Live

Scam artist “faith healer” and mega-millionaire Pastor Benny Hinn is being sued by a Christian book publisher who says Hinn violated the “immorality” clause in their contract when he had an adulterous affair with fellow preacher Paula White.

In August, Hinn admitted to a friendship with evangelist Paula White after The National Enquirer published photos of them in Rome, holding hands. Hinn was married at the time. His wife, Suzanne, had filed for divorce a few months earlier. Three years earlier, Hinn had signed a three-book deal with Strang Communications Co. of Lake Mary. He was paid a $300,000 advance on the first one, “Blood in the Sand,” according to the suit. Hinn acknowledged to his publisher “his inappropriate relationship” with White in August, according to the suit, and agreed that the publisher should get back its money, but he has yet to pay up.

Hinn is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions, money largely scraped out of the Social Security checks of the gullible elderly and the desperately ill. He travels the world in a $36M personal Gulfstream jet in between stays at his numerous opulent mansions.

William Lobdell Unmasks Benny Hinn

A Beavercreek couple who left their infant daughter’s fate to God rather than seek medical treatment for a mass that grew over her left eye will face charges of first-degree criminal mistreatment.

Prosecutors revealed Thursday during a custody hearing that a grand jury has indicted Timothy and Rebecca Wyland, members of Oregon City’s Followers of Christ church.

The Wylands’ 7-month-old daughter, Alayna, was placed in state custody earlier this month after child-welfare workers received a tip about the untreated and ballooning growth. Doctors said that the condition could cause permanent damage or loss of vision.

The Wylands were indicted within the past few days and probably will be arraigned next week, said Colleen Gilmartin, the deputy district attorney handling the custody case in juvenile court.

Under Oregon law, it is a crime for parents to intentionally and knowingly withhold necessary and adequate medical attention from their children. First-degree criminal mistreatment is a Class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

The Wylands and their church reject medical care in favor of faith-healing — anointing with oil, laying on of hands, prayer and fasting. The parents testified at a juvenile court hearing last week that they never considered getting medical attention for Alayna.

According to court documents, Rebecca Wyland anointed Alayna with oil each time she changed the girl’s diaper and wiped away the yellow discharge that seeped daily from the baby’s left eye.

Thursday’s hearing was procedural and reached no resolution.

The Wylands’ attorneys, John Neidig  and Thurl Stalnaker Jr., offered a plan they said would guarantee the child would receive medical care recommended by doctors, with options such as regular visits from state workers, having a trusted individual occupy the Wyland home and monitoring the family with Skype, an Internet program used for video conferencing.

Attorney Michael Clancy, who represents Alayna, also urged that the girl be sent home.

Clancy, however, was skeptical that prosecutors or child-protection authorities would accept any plan to quickly reunite the family.

“There is no plan, even if we came up with 100 pages of stuff … that is going to be satisfactory,” he said.

Clackamas County Circuit Judge Douglas Van Dyk noted that doctors treating Alayna haven’t reviewed the Wylands’ plan and said he wouldn’t approve the proposal without hearing from the physicians.

But Van Dyk also said Alayna should be returned home once a plan is in place “that makes the community feel secure about the care.”

He told all the attorneys to submit their proposals to him next week and said he would work out a suitable agreement at a July 30 hearing.

“That’s where this case is going as far as this judge is concerned,” Van Dyk said.

There could be a complication.

Prosecutors said that a child usually is not returned to parents accused of criminal mistreatment. It is not clear whether the district attorney’s office will seek a no-contact order or if one would be granted.

Gilmartin, doctors and DHS workers want assurances that Alayna will get treatment that will minimize damage to her eye and address any complications that arise.

Alayna had a small mark over her left eye at birth.

The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye.

It’s rare to see a child with an advanced hemangioma because the condition typically is treated as soon as it’s detected, said a doctor who testified at a hearing before Van Dyk last week.

“They never get this large,” said Dr. Thomas Valvano, a pediatrician at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. “This was medical neglect.”

Investigators who interviewed the Wylands noted the grotesque swelling that led DHS to act.

“Alayna’s left eyeball was completely obstructed, and you could not see any of it. The growth was multiple shades of red and maroon and appeared to me to be between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball,” said Clackamas County Detective Christie Fryett in a search warrant affidavit that included pictures of the growth on Alayna’s face.

Alayna is the Wylands’ only child.

Timothy Wyland was a widower when he married Rebecca Wyland two years ago.

Wyland’s first wife, Monique, died of breast cancer in 2006. She had not sought or received medical treatment for the condition, said Dr. Christopher Young, a deputy state medical examiner who signed the death certificate.

Source: The Oregonian

The Beagleys are members of the Followers of Christ, an unorthodox offshoot of the Pentacostal Church, who believe in a literal interpretation of  The Bible including in the power of Faith Healing.

In the context of Pentecostal Christianity, Faith Healing is the use of prayer and laying on of hands to cure illness. Unlike many other churches which include faith healing as part of their doctrine, the Followers refuse all forms of medicine and professional medical care. The church practices shunning of those who violate or challenge church doctrine, including those who seek medical treatment.

In 1999 the Oregon Legislature pass a law to limit faith healing as a legal defense following a public outcry over the deaths of children of church members.

Oregon: Faith Healers Found Guilty (NY Times)

Ore. parents found guilty of neglecting ill son (Washington Times)