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From Tent Meetings and Store-front Healing Rooms to Walmarts and the Internet: Healing Spaces in the United States, the Americas, and the World, 1906–2006

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Candy Gunther Brown
Candy Gunther Brown
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

The centennial of the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 provides us with convenient poles for charting shifts in the landscape of Christian spiritual healing practices during the past century. Alongside unprecedented achievements in medical science, nearly 80 percent of Americans report believing that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer. Individuals who need healing, even after trying the best medical cures, readily transgress ecclesiastical, physical, and social boundaries in their quest for health and wholeness. The promise of a tangible experience of divine power, moreover, presents an attractive alternative to seekers disillusioned with what they perceive as the callous materialism of medical science and the religious legalism of traditional Christian churches. This essay calls for new narratives of sacred space that map the ways that pentecostal and charismatic healing practices have proliferated, diversified, and sacralized a growing number and variety of physical, social, and linguistic spaces in the past hundred years. At the turn of the twentieth century, modernist epistemological assumptions that privileged reason over experience encouraged fine intellectual distinctions between the sacred and the secular. In esteeming bodily experience as more trustworthy than disembodied doctrine and in resisting linguistic binaries as culturally constructed, postmodern epistemologies have multiplied the number and range of places available to be endowed with sacred meanings. I argue that boundaries between the sacred and the secular are dissolving at the same time that new boundaries are being established, privileging particular places and defining a new relationship among the United States, the Americas, and the world.

Type
Forum on Sacred Spaces of Healing in Modern American Christianity
Information
Church History , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , September 2006 , pp. 631 - 647
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

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References

1. A 2003 Newsweek poll found 72 percent of Americans believing that “praying to God can cure someone—even if science says the person doesn't stand a chance”: Claudia Kaib and others, “Faith and Healing,” Newsweek, 10 November 2003. A 1996 Gallup Poll showed 82 percent believing “in the healing power of personal prayer,” and 77 percent agreeing that “God sometimes intervenes to cure people who have a serious illness:” John, Cole, “Gallup Poll Again Shows Confusion,” NCSE Reports (spring 1996): 9Google Scholar; and Claudia, Wallis, “Faith and Healing,” Time, 24 06 1996, 63Google Scholar, quoted in Numbers, Ronald L., “Science Without God: Natural Laws and Christian Beliefs,” in When Science and Christianity Meet, ed. Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 284Google Scholar. Other polls suggest that 61 percent–80 percent believe in miracles: Mullin, Robert Bruce, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 262Google Scholar; Pullum, Stephen J., “Foul Demons, Come Out!”: The Rhetoric of Twentieth-Century American Faith Healing (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), 150.Google Scholar

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