Religious Healing Research Paper

1. Types Of Religious Healing

The widely used concept of shaman is a precise one, having been crystallized in a classic work by Mircea Eliade in the 1960s. A shaman is a person who enters a state of abnormal consciousness, being induced either by rhythmic music of by psychedelic drugs in the form of snuff or mushrooms. As a functionary in the business of healing, the shaman may be distinguished from looser and more popular concepts such as witch doctor and medicine man that suggest skills in the use of locally available medications without the element of trance or ecstasy. Again, the role of the shaman in healing is not that of magician: whereas the magician uses ritual or other mysterious means to control the course of natural events, the shaman is merely a channel or borrower of the powers of the universe through whom some benign outcome is effected. The word shaman is taken from a tribe in north Siberia but shamanism within this narrow conception may be found also in, for example, the upper Amazon, the Orinoco basin, Australia, and in south-east Asia.

Mental healing, which is based on the diagnosis of illness as a condition of the mind, may be traced within modern Christian practice to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a Swedish scientist and initiator of the religious sect which bears his name. He perceived healing as a harmony of physical and spiritual realities, achievable by the adjustment of the body to the mind, the mind to the soul, and the soul to the angelic order. In mid-nineteenth century America the Swedenborgian idea of mental adjustment was current in the fashionable mesmerism of Charles Poyen, in the teachings of Phineas Quinby, and subsequently in the writings of his most famous patient, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. In her seminal Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875) she turned to Matthew 9, 2–8 to demonstrate the central tenet that sickness and pain were delusions curable by the correction of mental error.

The notion of faith healing implies a degree of prior belief, even confident expectation, either in the seeker or in the healer. Healing which is reckoned to depend on the commitment of the patient lends itself to explanations in terms of the will power of the individual and other psychological factors. But the term faith healing is sometimes applied also to practices in which the healer claims authority over evil spirits or practices the laying on of hands in confidence of a miraculous outcome.

Divine healing, by contrast, is believed to be an intervention that does not rely on the faith of those involved. These conceptions of healing are prevalent in various of the Christian sects though not exclusive to them. Most notable among these are the ‘Foursquare’ pentecostal churches of north America, one of the four squares being ‘Christ the Healer.’

In recent years there has been a burgeoning interest in healing in the mainstream churches in which the term healing is used in a more general way to include acts of reconciliation of individuals or groups, either as a result of conflicts between themselves or in changing circumstances such as tragedy and bereavement. The ministry of healing which is particularly associated with the Church of England does not connote the sense of the miraculous which distinguish divine healing and faith healing. It recognizes the skills of the minister who will accordingly remain conscious during the consultation.

The conciliation of mind and spirit that takes a variety of forms and is pursued by a still greater variety of methods is the essence of spiritual healing. It is not to be confused with spiritualist healing in which the practitioner is said to be in contact with spirits in another domain, such as that of the dead.

2. The Social Context Of Faith And Healing

The pentecostal churches have flourished lately among the dispossessed of central and south America (Martin 1990, Chesnut 1997). The routine Marxist explanation is that the hope of a life hereafter enables the faithful to endure the discomforts of the present world. In Brazil, however, Chesnut found relatively less conviction in remote consolation than hope of immediate relief from the illnesses that attend poverty. The gravitation to the Pentecostal churches may to that extent be compared with the pilgrimages to Lourdes, to the sacred waters of the Ganges, and to the healing shrines and centers that abound in India and in the Catholic world.

What is more distinctive of recent years is the interest in ritual healing among the American middle class. Maguire (1988) recognizes in ‘the metaphysical movement’ the confluence of a number of nominally Christian traditions from New Thought, mesmerism, the mind-cure groups of the 1880s, Spiritualism and Christian Science, and an experimental interest in currents of spirituality that are or were native American, Latin American, Caribbean, and Polynesian. The turning to metaphysical healing in the suburbs has an intellectual basis involving an alternative pathology, a redefinition of illness and disharmony, and an open-minded disposition to eastern thought emanating from student subcultural movements in the late 1960s.

The host of life and death concerns which are addressed by hands-on therapy rituals in the religious life of middle America provide the agenda too for the ministry of healing in the Church of England. This neither trades on the expectation of the spectacular nor publishes its results against those of the medical services. The ministry operates, for example, in the rehabilitation of counseling and psychotherapy within the sacred domain, in the hospice movement pioneered in Britain by Dr Cicely Saunders, and in the provision of healing services within the regular ministrations of the mainstream churches.

Church-type healing is distinguishable from that of the sects in a number of ways: (a) the sectarian cult of the personality tends to elude church-type practitioners; (b) the expectation is not of the miraculous, nor are successes celebrated; (c) ministry to the dying will have the purpose of enabling them to die well, not to recover to full health; (d) needs and benefits are largely reserved within the private domain; (e) the ministry is integrated with the Church’s sacraments; (f) practitioners tend not to claim divine gifts so much as seek to enhance their effectiveness through conventional training of knowledge and skills; (g) the Church’s ministry of healing is reckoned to complement conventional medicine and not to supplant it. While the miraculous healing tradition is rooted in the Pauline formulation of spiritual gifts—notably in Corinthians 1, 12—and denotes the healer as a direct agent of divine power, the Churches’ ministry of healing looks to the Gospel for a motivation but to contemporary science for a method.

This movement by the mainstream churches may be seen as an attempt to evolve a new role and purpose in a secularizing world. In Mexican folk religion, too, curanderismo has adapted to address current issues and aspirations such as love, marriage, and happiness.

Some religious communities in which the practice of healing is central may stand/or fall by their results. Others, however, lay hands on the sick because they are directed to do so (Mark 16, 18) and not with the primary purpose of a validating outcome. In an age of accountability, of the perception of an audience as a market, and of the importance of reputation and the fear of litigation, there has been a systematic movement to professionalize the alternative practice of healing. Practitioners have formed themselves into associations, established courses of study and qualifications, written ethical codes, and introduced a corporate discipline. These developments have been much more evident within complementary medicine outside the churches than within them.

3. The Charisma Of The Healer

There is a tendency for the personalities of those involved in healing in sects and new religious movements to be rather higher in public profile than those who practice therapy in the suburbs and within the ministrations of the churches. Their names and faces are better known and are used in drawing crowds to religious meetings. The consequences of divine workings through them are more spectacular. Their disposition to secular medicine is more rejectionist and there is a triumphalism about their healing stories. When Melvin Banks testifies to the miracles God has worked through him, he shows the picture of a woman holding aloft her walking stick in defiance of the doctors who said she would always need it. Similarly, Her Holiness Mataji Nirmala Devi Srivastava, the ‘Divine Mother’ and teacher of Sahaja Yoga passes on to her disciples healing skills, including the use of vibration therapy in the cure of cancer. In the rhetoric, if not always in the understanding of the faithful, it is made explicit that the power is divine and the healer a mere agent. The claim to be a channel of divine power is of course a greater enhancement of charisma than the claim to possess skills. The shaman possesses knowledge about healing which is not available to the community and which signifies an exclusive relationship with the spiritual domain. However, no man or woman would describe himself of herself as a shaman: the sense is that the power is invested in the shaman and an ethic of humility restrains self-promotion (Doore 1988). Of course, humility can itself be an element of charisma. Many curanderos, the folkhealers of Mexico, believe their healing powers to be a gift from God, invested in them and giving them certain responsibilities to alleviate misery. They claim no credit for themselves and, far from rejoicing in their powers, they may even regret the burden of their responsibilities: albeit they are full-time and charge fees.

But charisma invites suspicion from the secular world and from mainstream churches. It is in view of the capacity to exploit the charisma in the role of healer, both Church and the medical establishment distance themselves from alternative healing practices of new religious movements.

4. Conflicts Of Faith And Secular Practice

It is reported (2 Chronicles 16, 12) that King Asa ‘in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet, until his disease was exceeding great: yet sought he not unto the Lord but the physicians: … and in the one and fortieth year of his reign Asa slept with his fathers.’ The Chronicler implies an error of judgement on Asa’s part with a fatal consequence. Asa lacked faith. In modern times the resort to secular medicine frequently is perceived to compromise religious conviction.

The curanderos are condemned with suspicion by the fundamentalist churches which attribute to the devil the mysterious source of their power. For its part the medical establishment has invoked both research and the law to counter the rising tide of religious healing. The British Medical Association (1986) issued a report warning against the use of healing in new religious movements to confirm allegiance; it contended that they had caused harm to recruits and their families. The report was not well received, either by politicians or by the BMA’s own members, but it survives as a significant expression at the high point of a conflict between the medical profession and alternative practitioners.

In the tradition of King Asa, Christian Scientists and the Peculiar People in England and others have at various times appeared in courts of law for refusing medical attention to the children. One of the more publicized conflicts between secular medicine and religious principle relates to the belief of Jehovah’s Witnesses that blood transfusions are unscriptural and dangerous; in the United States, Canada, and Australia medical decisions to transfuse children without parental consent—for example, by making children wards of court—have been more frequent than in the United Kingdom.

The rejection of secular medicine is, for some groups, axiomatic in the rejection of the world and its wisdom. For others, medicine does not need to be rejected with the world: the boundaries that exclude electricity and the motor car from Amish territory do not resist conventional medicine.

The conflict of religious and secular may be overcome by a strategy of incorporation: the religious organization may reckon to control not only its own ministrations but also those which are conducted outside it. So Christians in the church tradition may pray for those in hospital ‘that by thy blessing upon them and upon those who minister to them they may be restored …’ while those in the Pentecostal church may ask, ‘We pray thee, use that surgeon Lord to thy great glory.’ And again, ‘We prayed about the medicine and it began to work.’

5. Conclusion

The process by which religious organizations lose control of aspects of human life is familiar to students of religion as secularization. In recent years conventional medicine has suffered a similar attrition and the revival of religious healing has traded upon it.

There have emerged in the western world two movements that function as alternatives to conventional medicine and compare themselves with it. The religious tradition typified by but not exclusive to the practice of the Pentecostal churches has compelling parallels with shamanism from which it does not directly draw. The second tradition is that of complementary or alternative medicine which has burgeoned since the 1960s. The alternative is distinguished by the claim of its therapists to understand and control the process of cure while the religious involves the engagement of rituals in the expectation of a miraculous effect. There are several features common to both movements, including a suspicion if not rejection of conventional medicine and the role of physical contact between the healer and the healed, be it in the form of massage or manipulation or of the ritual laying on of hands. However, there are significant differences between the two movements. Complementary medicine has highly organized professional structures and the authority to practice comes from formal study and qualification. Clients of alternative medicine seek practitioners because of their methods, not for their charisma or personal reputation.

Such a typification highlights the peculiar case of the Church’s Ministry of Healing which conforms much more to the secular alternative model than to the religious: its practitioners cultivate skills that have been developed in secular practice: it draws on the Gospel for the spirit of its ministry but not for the letter of its technique.

Bibliography:

1. British Medical Association 1986 Alternative Therapy. BMA, London
2. Chesnut R A 1997 Born Again in Brazil. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
3. Doore G (ed.) 1988 Shaman’s Path: Healing, Personal Growth and Empowerment. Shambhala, Boston
4. Eliade M 1964 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (trans. Trask W R, Bollingen Series no. 76). Bollingen Foundation, New York
5. Maddocks M 1981 The Christian Healing Ministry. SPCK, London
6. Maguire M B 1988 Ritual Healing in Suburban America. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
7. Martin D 1990 Tongues of Fire. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
8. Pullar P 1988 Spiritual and Lay Healing. Penguin, London
9. Trotter R T II, Chavira J A 1997 Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing, 2nd edn. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA