New FFRF investigation: College athletes pressured to pray to play
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is releasing today an updated edition of our groundbreaking “Pray to Play” report exposing how religious coercion still permeates college athletics.
A decade after our original investigation uncovered public universities using athletic department resources to support team chaplains, FFRF’s legal team has revisited the story to investigate what has changed — and what hasn’t. After more than a year of research, including public records requests to more than 40 colleges and universities, we found that religious pressure persists, even if direct taxpayer funding for team chaplains has diminished.
READ THE NEW PRAY TO PLAY REPORT.
Our investigation reveals:
- Coaches and athletic staff promoting Christianity through team activities, motivational materials and religious programming.
- Team chaplains receiving extraordinary access to student-athletes, locker rooms and athletic facilities.
- Evangelical organizations cultivating close relationships with coaches and players to recruit athletes into religious ministries.
- Student-athletes facing pressure to conform to religious practices for fear of losing playing time, scholarships or standing with teammates.
From Auburn and Tennessee to Texas A&M, North Texas and Boise State, the report documents troubling examples of religion becoming entangled with publicly funded college sports.
The bottom line: Student-athletes have a right to their own beliefs — including no religious beliefs at all — and should never be expected to pray to play or otherwise engage in religious rituals or activities in order to curry favor with coercive coaches.
At public universities across the country, student-athletes are facing religious pressure from the very people who control their playing time, scholarships and athletic futures. Public university coaches should develop athletes, not pressure them to practice religion.
“Coaches hold enormous influence over their players’ futures,” says FFRF Legal Director Patrick Elliott. “That authority should never be used to advance religious beliefs or make students feel that their opportunities depend on religious conformity.”
The report concludes, “At public universities, student-athletes have the right to participate in athletics free of religious proselytizing, promotion or bias from school employees.”
READ THE NEW PRAY TO PLAY REPORT.
If you know a student-athlete, coach or college sports fan, please share this investigation. And if you or someone you know has experienced religious coercion in college athletics, FFRF wants to hear about it.
Contact studenthelp@ffrf.org. All complaints are handled confidentially.
Thank you for helping us defend the constitutional rights of all student-athletes.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation
The post New FFRF investigation: College athletes pressured to pray to play appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Elizabeth Struhs died after her Christian parents withheld insulin. Could she have been saved?
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In Queensland, Australia, a formal public hearing is taking place to determine if government officials could have done more to prevent the needless death of a little girl who died because of her parents’ religious beliefs.
The inquest, as it’s called, examines the death of Elizabeth Struhs. On January 7, 2022, the eight-year-old Elizabeth was found dead in her home. She had type 1 diabetes and needed daily insulin shots… but the people closest to her, including her own parents, refused to give her that medication.
Instead, they all prayed for her to get better. (It never crossed their mind that they could just attribute the discovery of insulin meds to God.)
For six days, members of the group chose “faith-healing” over proven medicine, believing that’s what God truly wanted, and the little girl eventually paid the price for their religious negligence.
Even more damning? It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to her.
In 2019, her parents also withheld insulin from her. Elizabeth fell into a coma and had to be taken to a hospital. When she was admitted, she weighed only 29 pounds. She spent a month recovering.
Jason Richard Struhs and Kerrie Elizabeth Struhs were eventually sentenced to six months and 18 months in prison, respectively, for that incident. Jason, who expressed remorse, served no actual time behind bars. Kerrie was released after only five months but remained on parole.
A few weeks after Kerrie returned home, Elizabeth was dead.
In 2025, all 14 adult members of their extremist Christian sect were found guilty of manslaughter and later sentenced to anywhere from 7 to 14 years in prison.
And now, the Queensland coroner, Ainslie Kirkegaard, has opened a probe into the situation to determine if any of the government workers who had contact with the family over the years could have done more to prevent Elizabeth’s death.
It’s not a trial; it’s more of an information-gathering process for the future. The inquest began a week ago and will continue for another week; over 30 witnesses are scheduled to testify and all of them will maintain their anonymity throughout the process.
What we’ve learned so far is that the people with the power to step in never did in part because they didn’t want to trample on anyone’s religious rights. For example, one witness noted that were reported concerns about Kerrie Struhs in 2013 that said she was involved with a “controlling” religion “based on the Bible,” which led to her children being isolated. That led the witness to fill out a “Child Concerns Report”… but the fact that the kids weren’t being harmed meant it wasn’t elevated to a more serious “Child Safety Notification,” which would have alerted her superiors. Even in hindsight, though, that witness noted, “I would still conclude this was a Child Concerns Report.”
But after the 2019 incident, other witnesses said they were ready to elevate the issue. They were unfortunately stymied by investigators who said there was no reason to step in because they felt Jason, the father, would provide his daughter with adequate medical treatment. After all, he promised to inject Elizabeth with insulin even if his wife wouldn’t. That ended in 2021 when he joined the extremist Christian group that his wife was already part of.
We’ve also learned this week that doctors were concerned enough about the mother that they recommended she be forced to take a mental health assessment… but that, too, was overruled by officers involved in child safety. They said Jason would be able to take care of everything even if the mother couldn’t.
It was a pattern with those officials:
… the court heard from a police officer who had attended the meeting. He told the court he’d served as a child safety liaison for 10 years.
“I learned early on … you couldn’t change child safety’s mind once they had made their decision,” the officer told the court.
“I was never going to change their mind regardless of what I said.”
The officer said the attitude was not confined to a single child safety officer.
You can’t blame them for prioritizing family reunification, but they had a blind spot, it seems, when it came to the family’s religion.
We’ve also learned that correctional officers tasked with figuring out if Kerrie was a threat to Elizabeth after 2019 had no clue about the details of that case, so they concluded that she wasn’t a serious risk to anyone.
A senior correctional services officer told the court Kerrie should have been flagged for the “serious offenders unit” due to causing “serious child harm”.
That would have led to additional oversight over her case, the officer said.
…
The parole intake officer conducted an “immediate risk assessment” of Kerrie at the meeting.
The court was shown the file, which include the question: “Has the offender described any issues that may pose an immediate risk to themselves, others or impact on their immediate management?”
The officer marked this “no”.
Apparently, the lack of access to older information was due to an administrative error.
Still, what we’ve learned so far is that people who had the power to step in and save Elizabeth didn’t do it or couldn’t do it. That’s due to both bureaucratic bullshit and because they didn’t realize how much of a problem her faith was. They didn’t know Jason was just as brainwashed as the mother. They didn’t think parents would let their kid die because of their faith.
You have to wonder if they would have taken more drastic measures if religion wasn’t involved.
Instead, the desire to send Elizabeth back home overrode all the red flags officials saw. Even when doctors said the mother was not safe, the system found a way to keep Elizabeth with her parents, not realizing that was essentially a death sentence.
One possible outcome in all of this, I hope, is that the people who oversees medical staff realize they should listen to their doctors a hell of a lot more than people under the influence of extremist faiths that reject medical intervention.
A lot of the details in Elizabeth’s story are remarkably similar to a different faith-healing cult from Oregon: the Followers of Christ Church. Its members killed several of their children over the past two decades, by neglecting their treatable diseases, leading the Oregon legislature to eventually remove faith-healing as an exemption to homicide charges. A recent ProPublica report found that many of those deaths were preventable.
The simple fact is that children shouldn’t be sentenced to death because their parents are brainwashed by Jesus.
“Faith-healing” is nothing more than a myth promoted by certain kinds of Christians. It’s one thing if people pray to heal themselves—which would be useless but legal. But when they deprive a baby or child of medical treatment because of their own delusions, and their ignorance leads to the child’s death, they deserve to be branded as killers. And medical professionals should be allowed to intervene on behalf of the child when they discover those beliefs.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
