The Collins Family and the Dangerous Disinformation Circulated About Medicine

Last week in a piece on COVID denial in Evangelicalism I shared a little about a new family attempting to be the foremost Quiverfull family, an attempt to be cultural enforcers that goes by the name The Collins Kids on social media. The driver of this family’s attempt at what used to be called ‘social climbing’ that now seems to go by the name ‘cultural influencer’ is mom Karissa, who has a pile of online projects.

What I find the most interesting about these families who attempt to be influencers is that in almost all of them, Alexander, Rodrigues, Campbell and others, it’s the women driving it. Instead of being the sweet smiling submissive woman they all claim to be they are the ones seeking publicity, running the family business or ministry, doing everything they can to draw the eyeballs instead of quietly supporting their men, like they order us to do.

This week I’ve seen some disturbing allegations being posted by Karissa. Starting with this, her story of how her family came to be Quiverfull.

This is Quiverfull. Willfully misunderstanding a snippet of scripture to avoid taking any real responsibility for their own life style choices.

But here is what I hold the most against Karissa Collins and others like her, the hateful backwards ideas about the medical field, against medicine and medical treatments.

As I have stated many times, but most recently in my response to Bethel Redding constant attempts to bully me, when your theology has a body count it sucks! It sucks badly! Did they miss the times in the Bible that Jesus healed people, or sent someone to a physician to confirm a healing? Never once did Jesus say do not trust doctors and medicines!

Medicines we still use today came out of traditional and folk medicine usage of plants and other natural helpful substances. Medicines came out of that. Unfortunately many Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians are still hung up on the fact that back in the Dark Ages women who practiced herbal medicines and healing arts were many times thought to be witches, or practicing some dark arts. Instead of the reality that sometimes honey and garlic is enough to stop a cough and other natural remedies might work. It was not magic, it was the nature of the medicinal substances. Some of the remedies are still being used successfully today.

Some of the old healing arts and herbal medicines were practiced in monastic communities by the monks, so much for it being ‘demonic’.

This is some Salem Witch Trials regressive unhelpful thinking that kills people.

The most concerning thing to me is how it impacts those in the church with mental illness. It’s bad enough to have cancer, or heart disease or diabetes in the church and refuse all medicines that will keep you alive. But there should be a special pit in hell reserved for those that push this nonsense about mental illness, which has been proven to be helped with medicines. Not always, but enough to make it a good treatment option.

I keep thinking about the recent death of a pastor’s wife, who struggled with mental health, Marilane Carter. She was on her way to get mental health treatment far away from her family when she died in what seems like a mental illness driven incident, found in her car, with the car backed into a steel shipping container in a rural area of West Memphis.

When I first heard the story I thought we were looking at a tale of a pastor bumping off a spouse and making it look like an accident. Now it seems likely it was a bad decision made by a disordered mind clouded by mental illness.

While I had no real idea why Marilane was seeking her mental health so far from her home it’s pretty easy to see why she may have been motivated to do just that. People, like Karissa Collins, in the church are cruel and judgmental when people of faith admit they are struggling with mental health issues. This notion of Jesus should be enough is so heavily ingrained in the church that it shames anyone dealing with depression and anxiety. If only you had enough faith, bandied about endlessly by the clueless. Better to seek treatment far away from your home church circle.

We need to push back every single time we run across people making religious claims about health and mental health that are superstitious folk tales like this. They kill people, maybe not as directly as the kid wielding an assault weapon in Kenosha, Wisconsin the other night, but just as dead.