Feeling is Believing: Pentecostal Prayer and Complementary

and Alternative Medicine

Candy Gunther Brown

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring

2014, pp. 60-67 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2014.0002

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/544276

Access provided by USP-Universidade de So Paulo (24 Oct 2017 17:25 GMT)

Feeling is Believing: Pentecostal Prayer and
Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Candy Gunther Brown

S ensory experience is pivotal to postmodern culture. A globalized world

seems newly interconnected, yet individuals may feel more isolated than ever
before. Scientific technologies and modern medicine have achieved remarkable
triumphs and exhibited devastating limitations that leave people unsatisfied
and searching for more. Modernization has not resulted in secularization,
but sources of religious knowingrevealed Scripture, inherited tradition,
institutional authorityhave become unsettled. Postmoderns want more than
intellectual certainty; they long for direct experiences of what is really real. In
the United States and globally, many postmodern Christians combine scien-
tific medicine with diverse touch-oriented religious and spiritual healing
practices to find healing, reassurance that God is present with them personally,
and hope for their future lives on earth and in the world to come.
This essay draws on ten years of ethnographic research, in the United
States and across globally diffuse social networks, on Christian prayer for
divine healing and participation in complementary and alternative medicine
(CAM). I argue that touch-oriented healing practices attract adherents by
promising sensory experience of the sacred. Bodily experiences in turn shape
religious perceptions and may open a revolving door between religious world-
views.

Ethnographic Research on Prayer and Complementary

and Alternative Medicine
Since 2003, I have been studying the global spread of Pentecostal and Char-
ismatic Christianity through what I call proximal intercessory prayer for
divine healing. The practice involves getting up close to a sick person, laying
hands on their head, shoulder, or diseased body part, empathizing with their
sufferings, petitioning God to heal, and commanding healing in the name and
authority of Jesus of Nazareth. Many of the Christians I surveyed, interviewed,
and observed sought prayer for healing both because they had physical and
emotional needs and because they wanted evidence of Gods personal love
and active intervention on their behalf. The pentecostal network at the center
of my researchChristians influenced by the Toronto Blessing revivals of the

SPIRITUS | 14.1 Spiritus 14 (2014): 6067 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press
1990semphasized that healing is often an immediately tangible experience.
Practitioners deliver words of knowledgea gift of the Holy Spirit which
communicates that God wants to heal a particular condition nowexperi-
enced as sympathetic pains that disappear once the word is shared. People
testify to healing if, during or after prayer, they feel at least an eighty percent
reduction in symptoms such as pain or an increase in mobility that allows them
to do something they could not do before. People also point to sensory percep-
tions of heat, tingling, vibrating, or sensations akin to electricity as evidence
that the Holy Spirit is present and at work to bring healing, whether or not an
improvement in symptoms can yet be perceived.1
I asked Christians whether they did anything besides pray when they 61
needed healing. Few informants rejected modern medicine, but many expressed
ambivalence: wanting benefits of drugs and procedures, but disliking the side
effects, failures, costs, impersonal approach, and materialistic assumptions. In-
formants also described their love for complementary and alternative medicine,
or CAM. I was surprised, because most of my informants are theologically
conservative Christians who eschew religious pluralism. Yet many of the CAM
practices they mentioned are closely connected with selective interpretations
of religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism (Daoism), and/or
Western metaphysical spirituality. These practices include yoga, chiropractic,
acupuncture, Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, mindfulness meditation, martial arts,
homeopathy, and certain anticancer regimens. A common denominator among
Christian prayer and CAM is an emphasis on sensory experienceincluding
sensations of heat or tingling and the likeas evidence of the sacred. It seemed
that Christians interpreted similarity in physical sensations as evidence of com-
mon spiritual causation. In other words, if particular sensations indicated the
activity of the Holy Spirit during prayer, and one experienced comparable sen-
sations during a Reiki session, these too could be attributed to the Holy Spirit.
In twenty-first-century American culture, theologically conservative
Christians debate the meanings of sickness and how healing should be pur-
sued. There are cessationist evangelicals (for instance, Calvinist Presbyteri-
ans and Baptists) who affirm biblical miracles, but who believe that miracles
ceased after Bible times because they are no longer needed as confirmation of
the gospel, and sickness can glorify God and produce spiritual sanctification
as sufferers submit to Gods will. Pentecostal and Charismatic continuation-
ists (Protestant and Catholic) believe that gifts of the Holy Spirit, including
healing, are for today; healing is still needed because people are still sick, not
everyone has yet embraced the gospel, and physical and spiritual wholeness are
complements rather than competitors. Until recently, both groups of Chris-
tians associated CAM with Eastern religions or New Age spirituality and
generally rejected CAM as idolatrous. Today, many Christians are motivated

Brown | Feeling is Believing

 by desire for perceived benefits to accept linguistic substitutions by marketers
that CAM is not religion, but neutral science or universal spirituality
that aids Christian devotion. (It is interesting to observe that Christians who
have ceased to worry that yoga is religiously contaminating instead fret about
whether Christian yoginis are modestly dressed.) Continuationists appear to
be more prone than cessationists to accept CAM claims that spiritual forces
mobilized are comparable to the Holy Spirit.
This cultural transition invites explanation given differences among
biomedical, Christian, and CAM worldviews. To simplify, biomedicine devel-
oped as scientific naturalists embraced a materialistic and monistic worldview
62 which presumes that only material factors are relevant to treating disease. By
contrast, CAM reflects a holistic and monistic worldview that material and
spiritual realms are connected and of essentially the same substance. An as-
sumption unifying diverse CAM approaches is the existence and possibility of
manipulating universal, life-force energy, variously termed qi, ki, prana, vital
force, or innate intelligence. Touch-oriented CAM practices solve the human
dilemma of individual separation from the universal life force by rebalancing
vital energy to restore harmony. Christianity has historically been interpreted
as holistic and dualistic. As with CAM, there is a material-spiritual continu-
um, but creation is distinct from a personal Creator. The human dilemma of
broken relationship between humans and God can only be reconciled through
divine initiative and human response. Prayer for healing often involves touch,
but healing comes through the power of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus,
rather than through human manipulation of impersonal spiritual energy. Rela-
tively few Christians reflect upon assumptions underlying medical, religious, or
spiritual healing practices, or ponder religious implications of selecting one or
another therapy. Christians instead ask the same question as other postmod-
erns who desire better health: what works?

Defining Religion and Spirituality

There are in America today two broad families of religion, those that em-
phasize Word/belief (such as Protestant Christianity), and those that emphasize
practice/experience (for example, certain interpretations of Hinduism, Bud-
dhism, Taoism, Western metaphysics). Heirs of the Protestant Reformation
may fail to recognize as religious those religions that focus less on doctrines
and institutions than on personal, experiential knowledge of the sacred. There
is no Protestant parallel to official Catholic statements warning against reli-
gious dangers of CAMthough many individual Catholics embrace CAM for
similar reasons as do Protestants.2
Practice/experience-oriented CAM providers seeking a clientele sometimes
find it tactically advantageous to downplay religiousness in favor of nonsec-

SPIRITUS | 14.1
tarian, universally adoptable spiritualityand may resort to self-censorship,
camouflage, or even deception and fraud. The term spirituality often serves
as a euphemism for religion to avoid negative associations with Christian
dogmatism or to reassure Christians that they can engage in spiritual practices
without committing apostasy. Nevertheless, religion and spirituality share
metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality, function to address
ultimate questions, and offer purpose, meaning, and hope. Spirituality, like re-
ligion, often involves bodily practices perceived as connecting individuals with
suprahuman energies, beings, or transcendent realities or inducing heightened
spiritual awareness or virtues of ethical and moral character. For definitional
purposes, spirituality is better understood as one kind of religion rather than as 63
something other than religion.

Combining Medicine, Prayer, and CAM

Christian prayer and CAM appeal to postmodern Americans for similar rea-
sons. The 1960s-era disillusionment with medical and religious institutions
birthed both Charismatic-renewal and holistic-healthcare movements. Despite
medical advances, surveys indicate that most Americans live with chronic or
recurrent pain and are dissatisfied with doctors and churches, both of which
fail to address all their needs and may cause discouragement by rendering
negative prognoses or postponing hope of relief to the afterlife. Touch-oriented
therapies validate the legitimacy of subjective symptoms; offer appealing
explanations of the causes and remedies of sickness; do something actively to
promote relief; and promise tangible, this-worldly improvement. In an age of
high technology and communal fragmentation, many people spend much of
their time in solitary activities such as internet surfing and may even engage in
once quintessentially social activities, such as bowling, alone.3
More than ever, people long for physical, emotional, and spiritual con-
nectedness through meaningful touch. What is more, people learn from tactile
sensations and from emotionally processing those experiences. Although the
meanings of touch are difficult to articulate in words, tactility shapes religious
dispositions. People may conclude that what feels good, because it relieves
pain or produces pleasurable sensations, is morally good. Sensory experience
may seem to offer evidence of the reality and proximity of sacred power and
love. Modern hierarchies of the senses placed sight at the apex and touch at
the nadir. By contrast, postmodern Christians may disdain medical evidence of
healing on the premise that sight and faith conflict, yet privilege tactile sensa-
tions as divinely ordained signs of Gods healing presence. Such Christians
worry that human demand for visual evidence breeds doubt, and reason that
feeling God-given sensations cultivates belief.4

Brown | Feeling is Believing

 Earlier generations of acting faith or Word of Faith healing evange-
lists urged prayer recipients to prove their faith by claiming healing based on
promises in Gods Word regardless of symptoms. Postmodern healing evange-
lists ask only that recipients try to act in ways they could not before without
pain. The older model presumes the hierarchical superiority of the Word over
the unreliable evidence of the senses, whereas the newer model posits that the
senses, particularly tactility, are an accurate gauge of whether one is really
healed. The new emphasis is on trying it out (rather than mustering up suf-
ficient faith to act healthy despite feeling terrible), much like taking a test drive
when buying a new car.
64 And encouragements to try it out often are just that light-hearted. For
example, participants in a 2009 MorningStar Ministries conference followed
their worship leader in dancing the Holy Ghost Hokie Pokie. (No one
seemed to note the irony that the etymology of hokey pokey is likely hocus po-
cus, a derogatory reference to Catholic mass.) Participants put their right hand,
left hand, whole body, in and out and shook it all abouttesting whether pain
had been healed. Afterwards, several participants testified to relief of chronic
pain. A woman in her twenties reported healing from severe back pain from
scoliosis diagnosed when she was twelve years old: You all said put your self
in, put yourself out, and I put my self in and my back is completely healed,
I can do this [she jumps up and down repeatedly]. . . . Its a miracle. He is
amazing, He healed my back, and He can do it for anybody, He did it for me,
I never thought it was going to end for me and it did . . . . I believe, I believe, I
am saved. I put myself in, I put myself out, and it is healed, my spine is healed!
He is real, He is real, He is real, He is real! For this woman, sensory experi-
ence of pain relief provided evidence not only of healing, but of Gods reality,
saving power, and personal concern for her.5

Rationalizing Religious Combinations

The plot thickens, because the same sorts of Christians who might do the Holy
Ghost Hokie Pokie often combine Christian prayer with CAM. Theologically
conservative Christians shun religious pluralism as contaminating, but feel
comfortable appropriating non-Christian resources for Christian purposes.
Christians reason from perceived efficacy that scientific CAM techniques
are religiously neutral or that universal spiritual practices can strengthen
Christian devotion. Word-oriented Christians use figurative language to ratio-
nalize therapeutic pluralism: insisting that the roots of a desired practice are
consonant with the Bible and that the fruitssuch as pain reliefare good.
The container-contents metaphor envisions CAM as a neutral container that
can be re-filled with Christian content, much like substituting ingredients in a
recipe. Speech acts of denial and affirmation insist: this form of CAM is not

SPIRITUS | 14.1
New Age, it is Christian. Christians can be defensive about their therapeutic
combinations because they strongly desire to participate in therapies that they
perceive as beneficial, yet conservatives still do not want to become tainted by
New Age or Eastern religion or to have others question their orthodoxy.

Practices as A Revolving Door onto Religions

Word/belief-oriented Christians tend to know little about Eastern or New
Age religions, because they fear that ungodly knowledge may be spiritually
dangerous. Paradoxically, fear of investigating suspect beliefs increases the
likelihood of Christians unknowingly participating in practices associated
65
with the very religions they find suspect. Ethnographic research suggests that
if Christians knew more about CAM, some would make different healthcare
choices. For instance, pentecostals Betty and Bob are decades-long chiroprac-
tic clientswho abruptly renounced chiropractic upon discovering its ties to
metaphysical religion. Jim is an evangelical pastor who expressed openness to
acupuncturebut did an about-face upon learning of a medical doctor who
tells her patients that acupuncture is a medical technique, but who personally
believes that acupuncture opens the door to link the spiritual world to the
body.6
Evangelicals assume that ones intent in performing a practice determines
whether that practice is religious or specifically Christian. There is empirical
evidence that religious intentions develop through the performance of prac-
tices, rather than initial intentions determining religious meanings. Practices
can change beliefs. For example, Reiki healer Murielle Marchand acknowl-
edges that using the Reiki symbols drastically changed her understanding of
Christianity as a uniquely salvific religion. It took Catholic Margaret Lee Lyles
eight years to make the jump from wary skepticism of Reiki as inconsistent
with Christianity to embracing the idea of auras and exploring other CAM
practices, such as tai chi, qigong, yoga, acupuncture, and meditation.7
A pattern that emerged from my research is that Christians whose health
needs are not met by doctors or churches experiment with CAM, at first ac-
cepting only physical techniques or replacing non-Christian with Christian
content. Over time, Christians gradually accept metaphysical religious mean-
ings. This process may occur so gradually that Christians can exchange world-
views without making an intentional choice or even noticing.8 If participants
do observe their beliefs shifting, they become increasingly likely to rationalize
rather than reverse their course, as they become more invested in practices that
they perceive as beneficial.
Touch-oriented healing practices can have the effect of confirming ones
religious beliefs. Asking whether tactile practices feel beneficial without asking
why they are presumed to work can instead lead to unreflective religious com-

Brown | Feeling is Believing

Revolving Door, courtesy Mark Estabrook
binations and adoption of new worldviews. Regardless of whether the out-
comes of such religious switching are evaluated positively or negatively, when
such choices are made without reflective consideration of material information,
this process may compromise the values of personal autonomy and self-deter-
mination.

Notes
1. Candy Gunther Brown, Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press).
2. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict VXI), Letter to the Bishops of the Catho-
lic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation, 1989, accessed December 21,
2013, www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfmed.htm; Pontifical Council for Culture and 67
Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of
Life: A Christian Reflection on the New Age, 2003, accessed December 21, 2013,
www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_
doc_20030203_new-age_en.html; William E. Lori, et al. Guidelines for Evaluating
Reiki as an Alternative Therapy (March 25, 2009), accessed February 26, 2013, old.
usccb.org/doctrine/Evaluation_Guidelines_finaltext_2009-03.pdf.
3. Gary Langer, Poll: Americans Searching for Pain Relief (May 9, 2005), ABC
News, accessed December 21, 2013, abcnews.go.com/Health/PainManagement/
story?id=732395; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
4. David Chidester, Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 26.
5. Brian Whalen and Ramie Whalen. Holy Ghost Hokie Pokie, 7:198:27 (October
29, 2009), MorningStar Ministries, Fort Mill, SC, accessed December 21, 2013, www.
youtube.com/watch?v=vTPowYQ-jVU.
6. Candy Gunther Brown, The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine
in Christian America (New York: Oxford University Press), 211212.
7. Brown, Healing Gods, 214.
8. Ruth R. Faden and Tom L. Beauchamp, with Nancy M. P. King, A History and Theory
of Informed Consent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 8 and 14; Tom L.
Beachamp, Autonomy and Consent, in The Ethics of Consent: Theory and Practice,
ed. Franklin G. Miller and Alan Wertheimer (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010), 66.

Brown | Feeling is Believing