WTF is Biblical Naturopathic Medicine?
How unqualified, unlicensed providers abuse "religious freedom" to avoid government oversight
I was driving a couple weeks ago to another town in South Carolina and passed a small building with a sign offering “Biblical Naturopathic Medicine” services. As a skeptical physician with an interest in pseudoscientific therapies like naturopathy and a writer that focuses on harm done by religion, it got my attention. So I kicked the ADHD into hyperfocus mode and started looking things up, soon finding myself on a journey to somewhere I never would have imagined: a strip mall in Texas.
I promise there will be incantations called “Protection from Pestilence” and “Kidney Redeemer.” There will be blood covenants and coercive contracts and government subversion. So stick with me. Let me take you there. But before I can tell you what biblical naturopathic medicine is, I first need to explain what it is not. And it is decidedly not the same thing as naturopathic medicine.
Naturopathy is a system of medicine that combines some elements of science-based “Western” medicine with a variety of alternative medicine practices. There’s an emphasis on “finding the root cause” instead of treating symptoms and a focus on the idea that the body has a natural ability to heal itself. Currently, naturopathic doctors can be licensed to practice in 23 states, and there’s a continual push to increase this number. Their scope of practice varies by state; for instance, they can’t prescribe medications in Colorado, but can in some other states. There are four naturopathic medical schools in the US; perhaps the most well-known is Bastyr University with campuses in Seattle and San Diego. On the surface, Bastyr’s naturopathic medical school curriculum looks relatively similar to that of an allopathic medical school (where an MD would train). The program lasts 4 years and includes education about organ systems and physiology mostly similar to what allopathic medical students learn. It costs about the same, too, at $43,520 per year.
Bastyr’s website states that “the naturopathic doctor (ND) degree program integrates both scientific and holistic viewpoints in a rigorous, science-based natural medicine curriculum. The program includes more than 4,100 hours of didactic and clinical instruction.” The word “holistic” usually refers to treatments that fall into the largely indistinguishable categories of alternative, complementary, or integrative medicine. These are treatments that either haven’t been shown to be safe and effective, or that have been shown to be unsafe and/or ineffective. Some of these are relatively harmless bullshit like reflexology or acupuncture, which has been repeatedly shown to be nothing more than theatrical placebo. But they can also include things like chlorine dioxide (marketed as Miracle Mineral Solution), an industrial bleaching agent rumored to cure all sorts of diseases from HIV to cancer and often recommended for use in children with autism. Naturopaths also frequently order testing that is not only unhelpful but can also cause harm, such as IgG “food allergy testing” that doesn’t indicate actual allergies and frequently results in unnecessarily restricted diets.
I can’t go into depth with every treatment modality offered by naturopaths, but I want to single out homeopathy as an example of a treatment used by naturopaths that doesn’t just not work; it doesn’t even make sense. “Homeopathic” is not, as many people believe, a synonym for “natural,” but rather a very specific system of “medicine” developed by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. Hahnemann was a German physician who had given up the practice of medicine because he felt that it did more harm than good, which at the time was frequently true. He was a skilled linguist and found his niche translating medical texts. One day he came across another physician’s account of the use of cinchona bark to treat malaria. We now know that this bark contains quinine, which actually is an effective malaria treatment.
But Hahnemann doubted this and decided to try it for himself. Upon eating a toxic amount of cinchona bark, he developed symptoms that were consistent with malaria, stumbling upon the first principle of homeopathy: substances that cause symptoms in healthy people can be used to treat those same symptoms in sick people—often summarized, “Like cures like.”
It’s a bit more murky exactly how he arrived at the second principle of homeopathy, which is that the more dilute the substance, the more powerful it is. Homeopathic preparations are made by diluting a substance, usually 1:10 (X) or 1:100 (C), multiple times and “succussing” (shaking the vial vigorously and striking it on some surface) after each dilution. As the substance becomes more dilute, Hahnemann hypothesized for some unknown reason, the preparation becomes stronger. A basic understanding of physics makes it immediately obvious why this is absurd. If you were to start with 1mL of a substance in a 10mL vial and dilute it 1:100, you would have a vial that contained 1 part per thousand. Do that 29 more times to reach a 30C dilution, and your final vial would contain one part per 10^60 (a 10 followed by 60 zeros), making it statistically all but impossible that the final vial contains even a single molecule of the original substance.
Homeopaths believe that water has “memory” and somehow retains the essence of what was previously in it. Homeopathy doesn’t hold up to basic plausibility, and it has never been shown to work better than placebo in a well-designed trial. But students at Bastyr’s Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine program have courses dedicated to it in 5 of their 8 semesters.
Naturopaths, as one might assume, often believe the naturalistic fallacy, that “natural” is synonymous with “safe.” This thinking has become more popular in the public in recent decades, but isn’t difficult to counter for anyone willing to question it. Uranium. Hemlock. Amanita mushrooms. Sharks. But the harm done by naturopaths is often indirect, because of what they don’t do rather than what they do. Because they believe the naturalistic fallacy, they tend to steer parents away from vaccinating their children and often discourage patients from pursuing conventional medical treatments that, while imperfect, can be beneficial or even life-saving. Trusting in the body’s ability to heal itself is fine for a cold, but doesn’t tend to go well for leukemia or bacterial meningitis.
I think most naturopaths are probably good people that truly want to help patients and believe in the treatments they use. I disagree with them about a lot of things and believe that scientific evidence supports me in that. But they aren’t the kind of naturopaths this story is about. This story is about biblical naturopaths.
The practice I had driven past is run by “Dr.” Melanie Nolan.1 Her website displays the practice name as “Clarity Holistic Health: Private Healthcare Membership Organization,” and lists, among several other credentials, “Biblical Naturopathic Doctor” from Life Training Institute and “Certified Biblical Therapist” from the International Institute of Biblical Therapy. I’ll let her bio speak for itself:
Melanie Nolan is a trained specialist in a separate and distinct healing art that operates according to Biblical principles and mandates. As a born-again believer under the priesthood of Christ, she carries out a duty and responsibility of a priest to guide others into wholeness of spirit, soul, and body. She uses homeopathy and spiritual modalities to facilitate the biblical principles of cleansing, building, and the removal of unwanted intruders. Melanie Nolanis [sic] a Biblical Therapist and has training in a specialized course of study in Homeopathic Medicine, Biblical Medicine, Cognitive & Behavioral Psychology, Nutritional Therapy, Aromatherapy, Herbal Therapy and Neuro Linguistic Therapy. In addition, she has been trained in prayer, healing, the laying on of hands, prophecy, anointing with oil, Biblical counseling, inner healing, and deliverance ministry. She is also the author of over 6 books and the founder of Clarity Health School of Biblical Therapy.
“Over 6.” Just say 7.
Naturally, I was interested in the training provided by the institutions that issued her credentials. The website for Life Training Institute, which proclaimed her a “Biblical Naturopathic Doctor” revealed that this title is bestowed upon the completion of a 29-course program that can be yours today for only $2,573. Four of the courses have videos; the remaining 25 are “textbook” courses that appear to be just…reading regular books and submitting an exam. The courses include topics like iridology, reflexology, homeopathy, aromatherapy, herbs of the Bible, and “How to Pray for Healing.” Three of the courses (Biblical Naturopathy, Sclerology, and Muscle Response) feature, or perhaps consist of, books by Bill Yeary, who we will meet again on this journey. There’s also a course called “Legal Guidelines for Unlicensed Providers,” which is telling.
Melanie’s “Certified Biblical Therapist” credential was listed on her website as coming from the “International Institute of Biblical Therapy,” which doesn’t seem to exist. It appears to actually be from the International Institute for Faith Based Counselors (or the International Institute of Faith Based Counseling—the website can’t seem to make up its mind. Melanie’s confusion is understandable.) The IIFBC’s Certified Biblical Therapist program consists of five courses and costs $579. They also offer a confusing array of other very similar-sounding programs with names like Certified Christian Counselor, Certified Faith Based Clinical Counselor, and Licensed Biblical Therapist (all of which are apparently trademarked).
The Certified Christian Counselor program is for those that just want to dabble in educating themselves before setting out to help others deal with mental illness, recover from trauma, and build healthy relationships. It’s only two video courses and $239. But for the overachievers, they even have a Doctor of Philosophy in Christian Counseling ($3,129), which is a very familiar format to that of the Life Training Institute’s “doctorate” programs. It consists of 29 courses, most of which are just reading regular books like Dave Ramsey’s The Financial Peace Planner and Emerson Eggerichs’s Love & Respect, a wildly popular Christian marriage book written by a man in a dysfunctional marriage.
Her website also states that she is a “Diplomat (D.PSc) of Pastoral Science & Medicine,” by which I can only assume she meant “diplomate” and not some sort of foreign ambassador. The “D.PSc” is clearly intended to fool people into believing that those who hold it are actual doctors. When I typed that in the search window, the first result that popped up was a 2016 NPR article titled “Pastoral Medicine Credentials Raise Questions in Texas.” And if questions are getting raised in Texas, you know something’s up.
This honorific was issued by the Pastoral Medical Association, which has now been rebranded as the Professional Wellness Alliance, an organization based in Texas that exists to provide legal protection to unlicensed “holistic health practitioners,” many of whom have “learned the hard way” that “providing services without a defendable legal basis can get you into some serious trouble.” Without a license from the PWA, they say, “you risk losing your business. Paying costly fines and legal fees. Or worse — possible jail time.”
But for a mere $49.95 per month (plus a $99 application fee), PWA will provide a “defendable legal basis” for you to skirt state laws that exist to protect people from serious harms that could come to them from unlicensed medical and mental health providers.
The treatment modalities “protected” by the PWA include naturopathy and functional medicine, which themselves can include pretty much anything you want them to, as well as reiki, essential oils, “Spiritual Counseling & Pastoral Services,” “and MANY MORE!” Thousands of people have been “licensed” by this organization and are providing healthcare or counseling without any actual oversight or accountability.
The “defendable legal basis” is accomplished by requiring clients that want to obtain services from one of PWA’s licensees to join their “private member community” and sign a Member Agreement that defines documentation of their treatment as “private member educational records” rather than medical records. The “private member community” nonsense is based on their belief that being a private organization exempts them from government regulation and oversight (because freedom), and reclassifying medical records as “private member educational records” means that they aren’t [thought to be] subject to HIPAA, which provides access to medical records for law enforcement, state medical boards, and other government organizations. Members must also agree to hold the PWA (who is providing bullshit licenses to unqualified providers) “harmless in all matters related to your association with PWA, affiliates or Provider Members” (although it seems this doesn’t always work), and to agree to an arbitration clause.
Curious about exactly what biblical naturopathy and biblical counseling entail, I looked up the website for Life Training Institute, the institution that declared Melanie a doctor. It’s located at 1029 S Main St, Lumberton, TX 77657, a detail that caught my attention only because of the image that popped up on Google Maps. Apparently the Life Training Institute is housed in what appears to be a small and somewhat dilapidated home with a red pickup truck parked under an attached carport, which also serves as the headquarters of Wayne’s Mobile Home Transport. A tax records search revealed that the property is owned by T&M Investments, Inc. and was apparently appraised at a very generous $409,330.
The Life Training Institute/Wayne’s Mobile Home Transport headquarters sits adjacent to a small strip mall featuring signs for Royalty Massage, Getting Well Naturally, Compassion Christian Counseling, and Stroker’s Ink Tattoo. Sadly, the tattoo shop has closed.
Compassion Christian Counseling shares a distinctively bad logo with the Life Training Institute and has a 3-star rating on Facebook—the same as Wayne’s Mobile Home Transport, incidentally. The website declares CCC to be “an Evangelical Protestant organization” and lists three counselors: Lori Carl, Bonnie Semien, and Bill Yeary. Both Lori and Bonnie are “Certified Faith-Based Clinical Counselor(s)” a title bestowed by the IIFBC after taking 3 courses at a total cost of $359. Each of them also has an array of other credentials and accolades that do not include training in psychology or related fields.
Bill, for his part, has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from UT Austin and a whole bunch of other credentials without any institution listed. These include “Certified Temperament Counselor,” “Master of Arts in Clinical Christian Psychology,” and “Licensed Clinical Pastoral Counselor,” all of which he obtained in 1998 before becoming a “Certified Faith Based Clinical Counselor” in 1999—a title one can obtain from the IIFBC by completing 3 courses, each of which contains 11-13 video lessons and costs $124.
In 2001, Bill completed the “Certified Traditional Naturopath” program at Trinity School of Natural Health, a program consisting of four online courses and a $1,600 tuition fee. And he has a “Doctorate in Biblical Naturopathy,” presumably from the Life Training Institute—the same institution that granted my local biblical naturopath her BND…and which Bill apparently founded, along with the IIFBC, Compassion Christian Counseling (located beside the now-closed tattoo shop in the strip mall), Getting Well Naturally (a biblical naturopathy clinic and supplement store in the same strip mall), LifeHouse Church (which has one of the worst websites I’ve seen in a decade and apparently meets every Thursday from 6:30 to 8:00pm in the Wayne’s Mobile Home Transport/Life Training Institute house), and the now defunct Life Care Nutritionals.
Phew. Here’s a flowchart.
On the surface, Bill doesn’t seem to be in it for the money and fame that a lot of men in both evangelical and grifty alternative medicine spaces are seeking. There’s nothing fancy about him, either in-person or online. Counseling sessions at Compassion Christian Counseling are $60 (pretty cheap if they’re one-hour sessions), and his websites list people alphabetically with his last name, Yeary, always ending up on the bottom. The IIFBC certifications do have to be renewed annually, but the fee is hardly extravagant at $49.
He offers biblical naturopathic services at Getting Well Naturally, which is described as a “Private Healthcare Membership Association” and a “Private Member Healthcare Association”—again, consistency isn’t Bill’s jam. The “What is a PHMA?” page on his website explains that “sometimes the well meaning laws of government become a hindrance to helping each other without jeopardizing your own freedoms.” Because laws restrict “what alternative health professionals can say or do,” and the government has “very limited jurisdiction over private membership associations because they are not in the public domain,” being a PHMA offers “freedoms to serve members with alternative healthcare solutions.”
Becoming a member costs $10, which is credited towards the member’s first visit, and requires the prospective member to sign a contract that proclaims that the Association’s “main objective is to protect our rights to freedom of choice regarding our health information and care, through maintaining our Constitutional rights.” If the member chooses “to forgo drugs, surgery, or radiation that has been recommended” by other providers, they “fully accept the risk that [they] might suffer serious consequences from that choice.”
A prospective member must acknowledge that “no doctor-patient relationship exists” and that they have “freely chosen to change [their] legal status as a public customer or client to a private member of the Association.” The contract states that because it is private, the Association “is outside the jurisdiction and authority of Federal and State agencies and authorities concerning any and all complaints or grievances.” The prospective member must waive their “HIPPAA privacy rights” (sic), not so the Association can disseminate their healthcare information freely, but rather so they can control it even more tightly. In addition to protecting one’s privacy, HIPAA also has provisions as to when health records can or must be turned over—to law enforcement or state medical boards investigating people practicing medicine without a license, for example.
The prospective member must agree that “activities within the Association are a private matter that I refuse to share with the State Medical Board, the FDA, FTC, Medicare, Medicaid or my own insurance company without my expressed specific permission,” and that “all records and documents remain as property of the Association, even if I receive a copy of them.” With these two provisions, the contract creates a dual-key system, meaning that both the member and the Association would have to agree to hand over records to government officials, at least according to the contract. They also have to “affirm that [they] do not represent any State or Federal agency whose purpose is to regulate and approve products.” If you ask a cop if he’s a cop, he’s like, obligated to tell you. It’s in the Constitution. The contract requires the prospective member to “agree not to file a lawsuit against a fellow member of the Association, unless that member has exposed [them] to a clear and present danger of substantive evil,” and warns that any violation of the terms of the contract by the member will result in “a no contest legal proceeding” against the member.
Holy shit. Somebody got an A in their “Legal Guidelines for Unlicensed Providers” course. I’m not sure how much of this would be enforceable, but it’s certainly coercive.
For those who choose to sign the contract, their activities with the Association begin with a one-hour consultation in which Bill reads their fingernails, tongue, sclera, and irises before running a “computer scan of body systems” and presumably recommending supplements or homeopathic remedies from his store. The website has quite a bit of advice available for free in the form of .pdf files called things like “Artery Sanctifier” and “Kidney Redeemer,” which include several tangentially-related Bible verses, recommended dietary changes or supplements, and a prayer. My favorite is “Protection from Pestilence,” an incantation invoking a “blood covenant with God,” who will protect the incanter “from the snare of the trapper and from the deadly pestilence.”
“I renounce you Satan and your hosts,” one is to say, “and declare you to be my enemy. I command you Satan to leave me now according to Luke 10:19, James 4:7, and I John 4:4…By the blood of the covenant, I draw a blood line around myself, my family, my friends, and my stuff.” (My stuff!!) It ends, as it couldn’t not, “in Jesus Name.”
For the true patriots, there’s a “Prayer for America” that “renounce(s) the sins of abortion, pornography, adultery, fornication, homosexuality, sensual pleasures, drunkenness, drug abuse,” and quite a few other things including “robbing You of the tithe” and pledges to “vote the Bible in selecting those that will govern this nation.”
My least favorite was “Home Health for Kids,” a much longer document that recommends garlic as “a good alternative to antibiotics” for urinary tract infections and tells parents absolutely not to vaccinate any child under 2 years of age “because they don’t work.” (They do.) Children under 2 can’t “handle the inflammation and all the toxins that are put into the vaccines,” parents are told. If they do decide to vaccinate their child, they should “only give one at a time so their immune system is not overwhelmed.” And it recommends that pregnant people take a letter signed by their attorney to the hospital stating that no vaccines are to be given to their baby in the hospital. There’s a “Reasons not to vaccinate” section that starts with the lie that “Vaccines have never been proven safe or effective.” This is presumably why there is no “Reasons to vaccinate” section.
I don’t know how much churching goes on at LifeHouse Church. The tragically awful website and lack of a detectable social media presence certainly don’t seem like a church plant hoping to grow. The church’s website lists another minister, Yi Wen, as providing “outreach to International Lamar students.” Lamar is a university located in Beaumont, TX, where Life Training Institute had previously been located. I couldn’t find any more information about Yi Wen aside from a very brief 2009 article in the Beaumont Enterprise about a 42-year-old man named Yi Wen Zhu that died after he drove his car off a ferry ramp. I can’t confirm that it’s the same person, but it’s entirely possible that the website hasn’t been updated since before 2009 (and that nobody gives a fuck because it’s not an actual church).
It seemed odd to me that Bill’s name doesn’t appear on the Life Training Institute website except as the author of some of the books used in the courses. Usually people want to take credit for their work. Similarly, the website for the IIFBC lists Bill only as one of 13 instructors authorized to teach their curriculum. But the church site does list him as a minister, and he appears prominently on the Getting Well Naturally site—his bio there was where all the pieces came together for me. With the number of different and sometimes opaque businesses he runs, I had some suspicion that the church could be used as a financial smoke screen, since churches don’t have to disclose their finances to the IRS.
The footer of Bill’s various websites usually makes a very clear statement about what exactly the organization is:
Compassion Christian Counseling is an Evangelical Protestant Organization.
LifeHouse is an Evangelical Protestant Church.
IIFBC, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Evangelical Protestant school of ministry and seminary.
Life Training Institute, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Evangelical Protestant school of ministry and seminary.
Except these statements aren’t exactly true. I went to ProPublica to pull up the IRS Form 990s that 501(c)(3)s are required to file, and couldn’t find any for IIFBC. I did find 990s for Life Training Institute—two of them, from 2004 and 2005.
The 2005 990 was filed under Life Training Institute, but it listed as its websites hisclinic.org (the website for Compassion Christian Counseling), and iifbc.com, so they were all apparently a single financial entity. The total revenue for the year was $301,846, with $114,261 from Medicare/Medicaid payments. Bill had a very modest salary for working 40 hours per week: $14,305 plus a $9,031 housing allowance. Not as modest as Lori Nobles, who worked as a counselor only two hours a week but was paid just $180 for the entire year. The Institute/other Institute/counseling center spent $42,102 on Christian faith-based counseling, $61,050 on religious counselor training, and $93,090 on a ministry to children from low-income families. I mean, that’s generous if it’s true, but there were three full-time employees, none of whom made more than $25,000 including housing allowances. I’m not an expert in nonprofits, but the fact that Life Training Institute spent $42,734 on housing allowances seems odd. So does the fact that they spent nearly a third of their gross revenue on helping children of low-income families, which is not their primary mission, while not paying their full-time directors a living wage. Given that their two main missions are providing counseling and training counselors, and their primary expenses were providing counseling and training counselors, it seems likely that much of these expenses went to the people (or person) providing those services.
The Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements seemed odd because nothing on the CCC website indicates that they accept insurance or Medicare/Medicaid, but the most recent financial statement I could find was from 17 years ago, so maybe it was a different practice structure. Also, unless they had actual trained professionals on staff at the time, they shouldn’t have been getting any payments from Medicare or Medicaid. But why is the most recent 990 I can find from 2005? Just one mouse click away, Guidestar informed me that Life Training Institute (along with IIFBC and CCC) no longer has to file 990s because they’re a church. Yep, the bogus naturopathy diploma mill, the bogus counseling diploma mill, and the counseling center run by unlicensed providers are a church, presumably as of roughly 2006.
Side note that the organizations’ (the apostrophe placement is intentional) address on the 2005 Form 990 was 1297B Calder Ave, Beaumont, TX. Bill hasn’t ever been fancy.
Allow me to come back to this church website. (TW: The home page includes non-consensual praise music that was clearly not recorded in a shitty house in Lumberton, TX.) I said the website was bad. But it’s spectacularly bad, not just at being a website, but at doing the thing an actual church would want it to do, and also at doing the thing that someone using a fake church to hide his money would want it to do. The entire point of evangelicalism is to grow the church. It’s what evangelize means. But the website is clearly not intended to do that. There are no links to social media pages, which is really odd for a church that is reaching out to international college students. And I’m unable to find LifeHouse Church social media pages by searching myself. The church website rather lazily copies verbatim (as does the Life Training Institute) the Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message on their “What We Believe” page. The logo is disappointingly bland. There are a handful of bad stock photos like this postage stamp-sized gem, and one small photo of Bill baptizing someone in a steel stock tank.
The church website email link goes to the CCC’s email, and under “LifeHouse Outreach” the website links to the CCC. A “donate” button on the church’s website goes to the CCC PayPal page and indicates that the donation would support Rapha Support Services. The Facebook page for Rapha Support Services has posts with links to IIFBC classes, but hasn’t been active since 2016, and clicking on the website link results in a 404 error. And the address? 1029 S Main St. in Lumberton, TX.
The organizations this tiny-ass house church supports financially are listed as:
The nation of Israel
CBN - Orphan's Promise
Living Word Orphanage in Madurai, India
Various ministries that help the poor, widows and orphans
Is revenue from the Life Training Institute, IIFBC, CCC (and hell, maybe Wayne’s Mobile Home Transport) being funneled into this “church,” where it enters a financial black box? LifeHouse Church certainly wouldn’t be the first evangelical organization to label itself a church to avoid having to report their financial information. Bill certainly seems like the kind of dude that doesn’t want the government in his business. Is this “church” actually enjoying the privilege of tax-payer subsidies while sending financial support to a foreign nation? Is this “church” that includes a counseling clinic staffed by unqualified and unlicensed providers receiving payments from Medicare or Medicaid?
I’m used to disagreeing with people. I disagree with naturopaths about a lot of things. I disagree with conservative Christians about a lot of things. But my problem with Bill Yeary isn’t that he’s wrong about medicine, or that he’s a conservative Christian. My problem with Bill and others like him is that they think being conservative Christians means the rules don’t apply to them. It’s the collective narcissism of evangelicalism. “Religious freedom” does not grant you the right to do whatever you want with no government interference. Being a Christian doesn’t get you out of paying taxes, or disclosing your organization’s financial information. Being a Christian doesn’t mean you can practice medicine or provide mental health care without a license.
Starting what is little more than a Goodreads page and calling it a PhD or a naturopathic doctor program does not make your shitty website an educational institution. Reading the books, some of which you wrote, on the list you created, and watching the videos you recorded for your bullshit biblical naturopathy diploma mill doesn’t make you a doctor. Thinking that you can take two online courses and be qualified to provide counseling just because you slap “Christian” on it instead of earning a Master’s degree and doing hundreds of hours of supervised therapy to become a licensed therapist is deranged. Trapping the patients you are supposed to be helping into coercive contracts that give you the right to do whatever the fuck you want with impunity whether or not it hurts them, while barring them from suing you, and allowing you to sue them for seeking help from the state to protect them from your quackery is despicable. And if LifeHouse is an operational church, I have significant concerns about someone who would use coercive contracts like the one for Getting Well Naturally being a spiritual authority in people’s lives.
What happened to rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s? What happened to “if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well”? Where did “whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed” go? What happened to the Jesus that flipped over the tables of people trying to profit in the name of religion? All of this is so contradictory to the teachings of Jesus Christ that it would be unrecognizable to his followers. But don’t say it’s not Christian; it absolutely is. There are other Christianities, too. Many people reading this are Christians who are just as appalled by all of this as I am, Christians with whom I am proud to stand for progressive causes. But to say that Bill Yeary isn’t a real Christian is dangerous. It validates the equation of “Christian” with “good,” which by extrapolation equates “non-Christian” with “evil,” reinforcing the Christian privilege that enables people like Bill. It also lets decent Christians off the hook by allowing them to distance themselves from a past in which many evil things have been done in the name of Christianity and a present in which there are cancers within their religion that desperately need to be removed before they metastasize any further.
So what is biblical naturopathic medicine? It’s untrained, unqualified, unlicensed practitioners that believe their religion makes them immune from government oversight. It’s people that think two individuals signing a contract to call something what it’s not prevents them from being subject to laws designed to keep people safe. It’s delusional people that don’t want to be held accountable for the things they do, doing things they shouldn’t. It’s people that are so arrogant to think that their holy book, written thousands of years before we discovered germ theory, during a time when seizures and schizophrenia were attributed to demonic possession, by authors that never intended for it to be used as a medical text, gives them superior knowledge to those of us who respect our patients enough to spend years actually studying medicine and who are willing to be held accountable for our actions. It’s biblical literalists that disingenuously omit the abortion potion recipe provided by the LORD in Numbers 52 from their biblical naturopathy curriculum, while voting for legislators who put the lives of their constituents at risk by criminalizing abortion and putting a bounty on the heads of pregnant people and the physicians that have devoted their careers to caring for them.
If you enjoyed this, check out this excerpt from my book People’s Chosen God:
The story of humanity, as told by the Bible, begins in a garden where an unnamed woman, newly created by God from one of Adam’s ribs, finds herself naked and unashamed, in conversation with a legged serpent. Without provocation or preamble, the serpent asks the woman if it’s true that God had prohibited her from eating from any tree in the garden. She replies, essentially, that she and Adam are free to eat from any tree save for the one in the center of the garden—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Any contact with this tree would result in death.
The serpent (not identified as Satan) refutes this, telling the woman—honestly, as we will learn, “You will not certainly die.” The serpent explains that the reason God had prohibited eating the fruit of this tree is because if she were to eat its fruit, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Relieved, the woman eyes the fruit, and seeing “that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.”1
The woman hands a piece of the fruit (almost certainly not an apple) to Adam, who was right there beside her and hadn’t bothered to intervene. He eats it without hesitation. Although they are the only two people in the garden—on the planet, even—they are immediately ashamed of their nakedness, and they fashion some rudimentary clothes for themselves out of fig leaves.
Hearing the sound of God meandering through the garden in physical form, they hide from him. When God asks Adam where he is, Adam responds that he had hidden, explaining, “I was afraid because I was naked.” God does the thing parents do when they know their child did something but feel compelled to get a confession anyway, asking Adam, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” Adam does the thing men do when they don’t want to be held to account, immediately shifting the blame: “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”2
God’s gaze follows Adam’s outstretched pointer finger as he turns to the woman and asks, “What is this you have done?” She replies, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”3
God curses the serpent who, again, had both a larynx and an unspecified number of legs, to a lifetime of slithering and dust-eating, as well as transgenerational animosity with humans. (Mutism isn’t mentioned, but may be presumed based on the characteristically nonverbal nature of modern serpents.) The woman receives a sentence that includes painful childbirth and subjugation to her husband. And Adam, for his part, is cursed with toilsome horticulture and eventual death and decomposition.
Adam names his wife Eve…[click below to continue]
I went back and forth with whether or not to use my local biblical naturopath’s real name and link to her website. In the end, I decided not to for multiple reasons. First, she is a woman of a minoritized race and I have no idea what her financial status is. This clinic may be keeping food on the table, and I don’t want to add to the oppression she is already experiencing. Second, everything I saw on her website indicated that her heart is in the right place; she allows patients to barter for services and has made classes she teaches pay-what-you-can. If you want a link to her website, I’m happy to provide it, but I don’t want to instigate any harassment. All other names of people and institutions are accurate.
11 Then the Lord said to Moses, 12 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him 13 so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), 14 and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— 15 then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offering to draw attention to wrongdoing.
16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. 20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
23 “‘The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. 24 He shall make the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering will enter her. 25 The priest is to take from her hands the grain offering for jealousy, wave it before the Lord and bring it to the altar. 26 The priest is then to take a handful of the grain offering as a memorial offering and burn it on the altar; after that, he is to have the woman drink the water. 27 If she has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink the water that brings a curse and causes bitter suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. 28 If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children. (Number 5, NIV)