“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God or Satan is accepted as the first cause of everything that happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance, or change. Once such incantatory phrases as ‘we see now through a glass darkly’ and ‘mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform’ are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.”
—STEPHEN KING, THE STAND
“The Devil made me do it.”
—FLIP WILSON, AMERICAN COMEDIAN
In the early 1970s, Larry and Lucky Parker lived with their four children in Barstow, California, a town of twenty thousand people located halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All the Parker children were healthy except for eleven-year-old Wesley, who had suffered from diabetes since he was six. Larry was responsible for giving him his daily insulin injections. Unlike the Swans, the Parkers clearly understood the nature of their son’s illness and the consequences of not treating it.
The story of Larry and Lucky Parker, as told to Don Tanner, can be found in the book, We Let Our Son Die: A Parents’ Search for Truth. As described in that book, in February 1972, after returning from school, Wesley lay down on the couch, groggy and disoriented. Larry was the first to recognize what was happening; Wesley’s blood sugar was dangerously low—a consequence of having received the wrong form of insulin. The Parkers rushed him to Barstow Community Hospital, where they met Dr. Robert Chinnock. “Wes was back to his old self within a day or so,” recalled Larry. “We felt indebted to this specialist after that, and were impressed enough to make him Wesley’s physician. We appreciated him for teaching us how to keep Wesley’s diet better balanced to minimize insulin reactions and what to do in case of an emergency.” Larry also understood what could happen if Wesley received too little insulin. “With too little insulin,” wrote Larry, “blood sugar would be high, bringing frequent urination and loss of strength. Pain in the joints, head, and stomach would come next, followed by diabetic coma then death.”
On August 22, 1973, when Larry Parker decided to stop giving his son insulin, he should have known what could happen.
ALTHOUGH LARRY HAD BEEN told that Wesley would need insulin injections for the rest of his life, he believed that God heals. “I had seen it,” he wrote. “Cancer, shattered bones, blasted minds, touched by the power of God.”
The Parkers were members of the First Assembly of God Church, a traditional church led by Pastor Gary Nash. One Sunday, Nash turned things over to Reverend Daniel Romero, an evangelist. Romero told the congregation that through prayer, he had been healed of a painful spinal condition. As the service ended, Romero invited “anyone who needs a miracle in their life” to step forward. Lucky saw the moment as a chance to rid her son of a lifelong illness. The session was dramatic. Taking Wesley firmly by the shoulders, Romero asked:
“Do you believe that God loves you?”
“Yes,” said Wesley, tears welling up in his eyes.
It wasn’t the first time the Parkers had turned to God for help. Two years earlier, after being laid off from his technician’s job at the Goldstone tracking station, Larry had enrolled in Bible College in Santa Cruz, California, hundreds of miles from Barstow. After six weeks, he dropped out, ran out of money, couldn’t sell his house, and welcomed his fourth child into the world. But Parker knew that God would take care of him and his family. “I looked forward with excitement to see how He was going to provide for our needs,” he wrote.
LATER THAT DAY, OVERWHELMED by his session with Reverend Romero, Wesley declared himself healed. But that evening, Larry struggled. “What if Wesley shows sugar in his urine tomorrow morning?” recalled Larry. “What should I do? What do I tell him?” “Lord, forgive me,” he thought. “Wesley is healed. Your Word promises. . . .” Larry stayed up most of the night.
Larry Parker woke up at 8 o’clock the next morning. “The struggle from the previous night returned,” recalled Parker. “What if Wesley’s test shows he needs insulin? Give him an [insulin shot]? No. I’m going to stand on God’s Word. He must honor His Word. If the test is positive, it’s a lie from Satan and I’m not going to believe external signs.”
That morning, Wesley went into the bathroom and tested his urine. The testing strip turned positive, indicating large amounts of sugar—clear evidence that Wesley needed insulin. Larry recalled the moment that would eventually cost his son his life: “My heart broke as he reluctantly gestured for me to give him his shot. His small face carried years of disappointment and despair in that one moment. ‘Wesley, we’re not going to believe that test. It’s just a lie of Satan. You are healed.’” Parker then took the insulin syringe away from his son and threw it into the wastebasket.
WESLEY BEGAN TO URINATE more frequently, evidence that he was spilling massive amounts of sugar into his urine—evidence that he desperately needed insulin. Then Wesley did something he hadn’t done in years: wet his bed. “Wes had wet the bed before, when his diabetes had gotten out of control,” recalled Larry. “This was a sure sign that he was craving insulin. Again, doubt and confusion filled my mind. Should I continue to claim Wesley’s healing when the obvious symptoms showed that he was not? Was this also a lie of Satan, intended to make me deny my son’s healing?”
Larry refused to succumb to Satan’s deceptions. To prove his faith, he took Wesley’s entire supply of insulin to a local dump and threw it away. But Wesley continued to suffer, now with intense stomach pains. Parker watched his son stumble out of bed—weak and dehydrated—and drag himself to the bathroom where he threw up. “Dad, my stomach hurts again, and my head aches,” said Wesley. “I hurt all over. Please pray for me.” Larry called Lucky, who had been praying at a friend’s house with members of her church. Lucky was reassuring. Within minutes, Lucky’s prayer group filed in. All stood in Wesley’s room, praying: “Lord, we pray for strength,” they said. “Heal Wes, dear Jesus. Let the manifestations of your healing process appear even now. We command these symptoms to go and Satan to loose his hold on this boy, in Jesus’s name.” Wesley asked them to be quiet; his head was throbbing. The prayer group continued to pray silently in the next room.
Then Larry sought the solace of his friend Karl Kessler, “a strong Christian who knew his Bible.” Larry confided, “It’s so hard to watch your son suffer like that, especially when you know that if you give him insulin, he’s going to stop suffering. Yet if I do that, Karl, I’d be going against what God wants.” Kessler agreed to join the vigil. But Wesley only worsened, continuing to vomit, urinating frequently, and drinking water in a ferocious attempt to stave off dehydration.
Wesley started to hallucinate, asking his mother to attend to his infant brother, who Wesley believed was outside the house. Lucky interpreted this to mean that the Devil wanted her to stop praying. Seeing the battle as a war with Satan, Lucky vowed to press on. At 3:30 A.M., Wesley Parker’s breathing became more labored. Things were getting worse. And Larry was at his wits’ end. “Burying my face in our son’s bed, [I let] out my anguish in fervent prayer. ‘God, heal my son . . . in Jesus’s name!’” he demanded loudly.
Not everyone bought into the Parkers’s delusion. As Wesley sank deeper into the coma that would mark the end of his life, Pastor Nash and a friend, Mark Benkowski, paid him a visit. Seeing that Wesley was critically ill, Nash and Benkowski pleaded with the Parkers to take him to a hospital. “I appreciate your anxiety,” Larry said, “but I’m Wesley’s father, and God has given me the faith. I must act on it.” Parker continued to pray. “Oh, God, Your Son suffered only three hours, Wes has suffered for days. Oh, . . . God, why do You delay?” Lucky now believed it was possible that God had a different plan. “Could it be that God wants us to be willing to let Wesley die so that he can be resurrected?” she asked, weeping. Larry later said, “You could be right, yesterday my eyes fell on Acts 4:10 where the words were underlined whom God raised from the dead! Maybe that’s what God wants. Maybe He wants to see if we’re willing to go all the way with Him. Then we’ll see Wesley’s healing complete.”
DURING THE FINAL MOMENTS of their son’s life, the Parkers huddled together to sing a hymn:
Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus
Just to take Him at His Word . . .
O for grace to trust Him more.
When they finished, the Parkers noticed that Wesley’s feet were cold and gray. Their son was dying. “The more that we became aware that Wesley was dying,” recalled Larry, “the thicker the atmosphere of peace became. It was a peace that passes all understanding.” Larry then announced to his prayer group, “Wesley’s with Jesus now, but he’ll be coming back.”
“AN IDEA BEGAN TO FORM in my mind,” Larry wrote. “Maybe we should take Wesley to the church. What a setting for his resurrection—up near the altar, where he had been prayed for so many times for healing. Perfect!” So he called Pastor Nash and described his plan. Nash was horrified to learn Wesley had died. “Larry, you should have talked with me about this!” he shouted. “I told you to take that boy to a doctor!” Later, Pastor Nash visited Larry and told him he was all wrong and that “God’s not going to bring Wesley back from the dead.” “When he does,” snapped Larry, “then you’ll have to apologize.”
WESLEY PARKER’S FUNERAL received national attention, with interview requests from northern California, Chicago, and Los Angeles, including Regis Philbin. In a room “jammed to capacity,” Larry took center stage. “It says in the Gospel of John, chapter eleven, that Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave,” he began. “And that’s what we’re here for today—to see the bodily resurrection of Wesley Parker, one of Jesus Christ’s own. Just like Lazarus, he will rise.” Larry asked others to join him in prayer; when they finished, he gazed at his son’s casket. Nothing. “Wesley, rise up in the name of Jesus,” he implored. Still nothing. “Wesley, I command you to rise in Jesus’s name.” Embarrassed silence. Then a guitarist played Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus. The casket remained still. Someone shouted from the audience, “Larry, I think the Lord wants all of the children to call Wesley back to life.” The Parkers’s two daughters, Pam and Tricia, walked up to the casket and prayed; soon other children joined in. “Wesley, Wesley, rise Wesley!” Again, nothing. A young man stood up and said, “The ground upon which you are standing is holy ground.” A hush fell over the crowd. Larry interpreted this as a sign from God. “Just like it says in Exodus,” said Larry, “when Moses saw the burning bush and heard those very words, we should remove our shoes.” Larry thought he might have pinpointed the problem: nonbelievers in the audience hadn’t removed their shoes. So he walked up and down the aisles, carefully checking everyone’s feet.
Then a young man with a beard approached Larry and asked that he be allowed to pray for Wesley alone. Larry thought perhaps the man was an angel sent by God to answer his prayers. “Yes, of course,” he told the man and asked everybody to leave. The Parkers also walked out, waiting anxiously for the bearded man to emerge with good news. “The chapel doors opened suddenly, and the youth emerged slowly from the auditorium,” recalled Larry. “Hope burned in our eyes, then faded as he met our gaze dejectedly, tears disappearing in his beard.” There would be no resurrection today.
A reporter came up and asked, “What now, Mr. Parker? Your son did not rise.” Larry countered, “It’s just like Lazarus when he was raised from the grave. We’ll allow Wesley to be buried; and then God will raise him up after four days. That’s what’s going to happen!” On August 27, with neither of his parents present, Wesley Parker was buried at the Mountain View Cemetery. Two days later, the Parkers were arrested for murder. Charges were later reduced to felony child abuse and felony manslaughter. But Larry knew the real reason for the arrests. “We were being persecuted for our faith,” he said.
WHILE AWAITING TRIAL in the San Bernardino County jail, Larry encountered a deputy who asked, “You’re the one who prayed for his son to be healed and then let him die?” Larry said that he was, but that his son would soon be raised from the dead. “You know, I attend a church here in San Bernardino,” said the deputy. “You’ve caused quite a ruckus in our congregation—some people are saying you were arrested for your faith.” Comforted by the deputy’s apparent support, Larry said, “Now I know how Paul the Apostle felt when he was arrested.” “Yeah, but Paul was put into prison for doing the Lord’s work,” said the deputy. “Already feeling judged and condemned,” wrote Larry, “my heart sank once more.” (Presumably, Larry’s likening himself to the apostle Paul was a reference to Roman persecution of early Christians for threatening the social order. Larry, too, had threatened the social order, but not the one he had in mind; in this case, it was the social order that values parents who protect their children from harm, whether in the name of God or otherwise.)
To protest what he believed was religious persecution, Larry decided to fast. After turning away a few meals—and angering his jailers—he again put his fate in God’s hands. Parker believed that if his next meal was unpalatable, then the Lord wanted him to continue to fast. If it was delicious, then the Lord wanted him to eat. Parker didn’t have to wait long to find out. In the upper left hand corner of his metal dinner tray was a suspicious looking brown slop. Parker tasted it, uncertain of what he would find. But the concoction had a sweet, pumpkin flavor. It was delicious. So Parker ate it all. “The Lord answered my prayer,” recalled Larry, “but not in the way I had expected.”
Later, Pastor Nash came to the prison to tell Larry that his children had been placed in Juvenile Hall. Larry reached his boiling point. Angry at a God who would let this happen, angry at his confinement, angry at the unfairness of being at once faithful and treated badly, he shouted, “God! God! God! When will I get outta here? How are we going to get outta here?” Then he heard a strange voice. “Patience son, soon.” It was a voice that Larry knew to be that of the Lord. “He had heard me!” he declared.
WHEN THEY WERE FREE on bail, the Parkers decided to return to their church; but they were no longer welcome in Barstow. “Some of the people had turned their backs on us,” recalled Larry. “Others had instructed their children not to play with ours.” So, the Parkers drove thirty miles to Victorville, seeking the solace of an evangelist named Dick Mills, who echoed the words of Pastor Nash. “It was wrong for you to force this upon your son,” he said. Still, the Parkers refused to admit that they had done anything wrong. “But we didn’t force anything upon Wesley,” Larry insisted. “When his urine test showed he needed insulin, Wes prepared his injection as usual. But I told him the symptoms were just a lie from Satan, and he was healed. Wes was thrilled. But if he’d asked for the insulin during the suffering we would have given it to him immediately.” Mills softened. “God, right now, is flooding me with love for you,” he said. “And I feel like He wants you to know that He loves you very much. The Lord is going to bring you into new relationships, and give you new friends as the result of Wesley’s death.” The Parkers were relieved and grateful. “God truly did care for us,” recalled Larry. “And He had the circumstances of our lives under control.”
THE TRIAL OF LARRY AND LUCKY PARKER began in a San Bernardino courtroom on May 22, 1974. Pastor Nash was among the first to testify. Nash had written a letter to his church following Wesley’s death, which was read to the jury. “Dear Church member, As pastor I was opposed to the methods used by those praying for the healing of Wesley Parker. I say with full assurance in my heart that it was not of God and voiced my opinion of this to Larry Parker prior to the death of Wesley. There was a witness present who also endeavored to advise Larry Parker. Our advice was rejected. I believe in the gifts of the Spirit, but God does not have to permit a small child to go through suffering and torment, die, and be resurrected.” Nash was then questioned about his church’s position on faith healing. “As far as the church is concerned,” asked prosecutor Tom Frazier, “the acceptance or rejection by an individual of medicine is not a criteria for determining faithfulness, is it?” “No, sir,” replied Nash. (Although Nash clearly distanced himself from the Parkers at trial, he wasn’t immune to the notion that God could heal through the touch of a holy man. It was Nash, after all, who, according to Larry’s book We Let Our Son Die, had invited Reverend Romero to speak at his church: an event that later influenced the Parkers to withhold Wesley’s insulin.)
Cindy Wilson, a friend of the Parkers who had prayed for Wesley in his final hours, also testified. Cindy described her beliefs. “If you believe in God,” she said, “you have to believe in the Devil, too. He has power, too. He can deceive you.” Frazier asked, “Do you think it is possible for the Devil to deceive people from time to time?” “Yes,” replied Cindy. Frazier followed up: “And that some things that people might believe are from God may actually be from the Devil?” “Yes,” said Cindy. As other witnesses testified, Larry kept coming back to Cindy’s testimony. “My thoughts were haunted by her statement,” he recalled. “Were Lucky and I deceived?” Had it been Satan, and not their faith in God, that had caused Larry and Lucky to do what they had done?
By the time Larry Parker took the stand, he had come to believe that Satan had deceived him and that his attempts to make God prove Himself were misguided. When he was asked whether, in retrospect, he should have done anything differently, he replied, “Yes. We should have administered the insulin to eliminate the suffering while we continued to trust God for Wesley’s healing.”
The trial lasted thirteen weeks. When it was over, the jury found Larry and Lucky Parker guilty on all counts. But instead of receiving what could have been a twenty-five-year prison sentence, Judge J. Steven Williams sentenced the Parkers to five years of probation. Prosecutor Frazier was beside himself. “Your Honor,” he said, “the defendants in this case acted in such a manner that their conduct resulted in the death of their son. [Wesley] died at the hands of the parents and there are additional children resident in this home. The probation report indicates that numerous people interviewed as a result of the investigation feel that Mr. and Mrs. Parker are good parents. Yet I cannot help but ponder—what is a good parent? One that would permit such a thing to come to pass?” Judge Williams responded by saying, “They most certainly are guilty. The jury that prayerfully deliberated this case arrived at that judgment. However, I am sure that the defendants feel that they have the Lord’s forgiveness—and without presuming on His mercy—I hope that such is the case.” The Parkers wouldn’t spend another day in jail. Under the terms of their probation, they had to maintain employment, report to their probation officer once a month, receive eighty hours of psychological counseling, serve four hundred hours in a work-sentence program, violate no laws, neither leave the state nor change residence or employment without permission, report any illness of a family member, and refrain from advising, suggesting, or implying to anyone that they should not seek or follow medical advice. If they agreed, they would be allowed to raise their remaining children.
The Parkers willingly accepted the terms of their probation and were grateful that they had been the recipients of many gifts from God. “During the trial,” recalled Larry, “we were without definite income. Nevertheless, the Lord had been supplying our needs—checks accompanied letters of encouragement; groceries were provided; a Christian garage mechanic who had repaired our car’s brakes had even given us a month to pay. When our air-cooling system broke, a plumber fixed it without charge. God had taken what Satan intended for harm and turned it around for our good.”
After the Parkers had completed four of their five years of probation, they returned to court to ask that the length of their probation be reduced. Judge Williams decided to reduce their convictions from a felony to a misdemeanor. “Lucky and I were innocent of all charges,” Parker later wrote. “We were free. Free from the bondage of guilt and shame that had tormented us through our ordeal. Free from the stigma of felony convictions. Free to grow into a new abundant life of Christian maturity and balance.”
WHILE IT IS EASY TO EXPLAIN how Wesley Parker died, it is much harder to explain why he died. Unlike the Swans, the Parkers were medically sophisticated, having administered Wesley’s insulin for years. And they weren’t members of a faith healing group. Indeed, Pastor Nash had pleaded with them to see a doctor. So it’s hard to use religion alone to explain their choices. Rather, it might be more useful to focus on the Parkers as individuals, not as members of a group. Was there something in the Parkers’s psychological makeup that explains how they could have done what they did?
To address the forces that motivated the Parkers would require more than simply reading Larry Parker’s book, which was written seven years after Wesley’s death. But it might be of value to use the Parkers’s story to examine hypothetically the factors at work in a case as dramatic as this one.
To determine whether someone has a psychological disorder, psychiatrists turn to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). According to the criteria set forth in this manual, theoretically the Parkers could fall into one of three categories. The first two are personality disorders; the third is more extreme.
One possibility is that the Parkers suffered from Dependent Personality Disorder, described in part as “a pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior.”
Both Larry and Lucky Parker were the products of broken homes. To handle his feelings of isolation and rejection, Larry sought out an Assemblies of God church when he was only six years old. Lucky, too, was isolated as a child—raised by her aunt and uncle after her mother had suffered a nervous breakdown. One could argue that, to the Parkers, God was their surrogate parent. As a consequence, they often relied on God to tell them what to do and when to do it. When Larry lost his job, he prayed. He also prayed when he couldn’t sell his house or afford his children’s food and clothing. And when he was in prison, separated from his wife and children, when he most needed to take control of his life, he asked God to send him a sign, something that would tell him what to do. Although many people pray when faced with misfortune, the Parkers’s passivity—as described in Larry’s book—seemed far more extreme.
Larry Parker’s unrealistic dependence on God culminated in the death of his son. One would like to believe that if Wesley had been standing in the middle of a street with a car approaching, Larry would have pulled him out of the way—not prayed for the car to stop. Yet in a comparable situation, when Wesley faced a deadly but treatable illness, the Parkers chose prayer instead of insulin. Like frightened children, they sang Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus while their son lay dying. Years later, in another book, Larry would reassess the events that led to his son’s death.
ANOTHER POSSIBILITY is Narcissistic Personality Disorder, defined by the DSM as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, in fantasy or behavior, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.”
When Pastor Nash pleaded with the Parkers to take Wesley to the hospital, Larry said, “God had given me the faith.” After Larry was arrested, he likened himself to Paul the Apostle. When Larry asked God to set him free from prison, God talked to him. When Larry wondered whether he should fast, God sent him a delicious helping of sweet potatoes. All of these behaviors might reasonably be considered manifestations of a narcissistic personality.
In the end, Larry Parker believed that God would cure his son’s diabetes and later bring him back to life because he had asked Him to do it. To Larry, God was like the CEO of his own personal “make-a-wish foundation,” ready to reward his faithfulness whenever asked; like many believers in faith healing, he had presumed to know the mind of God. Although too late for his son, Parker later recognized the flaw in this presumption.
IN A MORE RATIONAL WORLD, someone like Larry Parker might not be labeled with something as gentle as a personality disorder. In my view, he would be considered psychotic, meaning “possessing a distorted or nonexistent sense of reality.” Unfortunately, for people with strongly held religious beliefs, it’s often difficult to know where to draw the line between faith and delusion. For example, Larry had believed that his son’s physical deterioration was a trick played on him by Satan. Larry reasoned that Wesley wasn’t really sick; he was well. The Devil was testing Larry’s faith by making it look like Wesley was sick. It’s hard to label this kind of thinking as anything other than delusional. But many Americans believe that the Devil roams the earth and works his deceptions. So, in some ways, Larry Parker represents a cultural norm. The same can be said for Larry’s belief that Wesley’s funeral service was being held on holy ground, causing him to ask everyone to remove their shoes, or for his belief that God had sent an angel—in the form of a bearded man—to help with the resurrection. Many religions claim holy ground, and many people believe in angels and demons. Again, Larry Parker is far from alone.
Larry harbored two beliefs, however, that even the most devout Christian would likely consider delusional. First, he believed he could cure his son’s diabetes with prayer. As Larry knew, children develop diabetes when their pancreas stops making insulin. He also likely knew—as explained by Dr. Chinnock—that children who stop making insulin don’t spontaneously start making it. But Larry believed that faith was strong enough to do something that had never been done before—cure diabetes.
Again, however, if Larry Parker’s actions are to be considered psychotic, we would have to similarly label all those who participated in his delusion, including Lucky, her prayer group, and everyone who showed up at the funeral service hoping to see a resurrection. Even Lucky’s lawyer, Leroy Simmons, reassured her during the trial that he, too, believed in faith healing. And we would also have to label as psychotic fifty thousand Christian Scientists and tens of thousands of Americans who comprise the twenty or so other sects that embrace faith healing.
Furthermore, if we are going to call anyone who believes in resurrections psychotic, remember that Oral Roberts, a popular evangelist, claims to have performed them. Although these resurrections surely never happened, no one rushed to put him in an institution after he made the claims. Indeed, many members of Roberts’s congregation believed him. This is not to say that one couldn’t reasonably label as psychotic all those who share the Parkers’s deluded beliefs in faith healing and resurrection. It’s just that you get to a point where so many people share a certain belief that calling them all delusional becomes harder to do.
IN THE END, LARRY PARKER didn’t have the support of some of his Christian friends because he had violated Christianity’s fundamental message: But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13). Not faith, love.
THIRTY YEARS AFTER the death of Wesley Parker, Larry wrote another book: No Spin Faith: Rejecting Religious Spin Doctors, a passionate exposé about the faith healers whom he believed had misled him and his son—faith healers who had been under the influence of Satan. “This book is meant to encourage those who have tried to claim a healing and failed,” he wrote. “Don’t berate yourself with the thought, If only I had had enough faith or If only I had believed strongly enough my [child] would have been healed. Those erroneous thoughts bring condemnation, which is not from the Lord. . . . It comes from our adversary the devil. He laughs at us for being taken in by leaders whom he has used to spin God’s Word into something it is not.”
Parker’s mission is to teach others not to make the same mistake that he had made. “To use scripture to demand whatever you want from God is not faith,” he wrote. “It is presumptuous to claim that God will do something when He has not yet told you He will do it. . . . I succumbed to this teaching and withheld insulin from my diabetic eleven-year-old son. To our shock and grief, Wesley died. I believe the Lord has now assigned me to alert the body of Christ to the deception of this teaching.”
One faith healer targeted in Parker’s book was Kenneth Copeland, whose ministry was at the heart of a massive measles outbreak six years later.