Historians of pentecostalism have wrestled to understand how a movement that began in the early twentieth century with a pronounced antipathy to many features of modern American culture transformed into one that moves easily in culture's broad terrain, even as it retains distinctive elements. In the realm of healing, in particular, early pentecostals advocated divine healing by faith through Christ's atonement while ardently rejecting physicians, drugs, and all other aspects of modern medicine. But within two generations, leading pentecostals proclaimed God's superintendence of medical advances and promoted a union of spiritual and medical healing. By the turn of the twenty-first century, prominent pentecostal voices urged the faithful to embrace naturopathic healing regiments, weight-loss and other dietary innovations, and mental healing programs with deep roots in metaphysical religiosity, all baptized with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and the ongoing conviction that God could bring healing directly through prayer. What had been a movement radically set apart from the world had come to embrace the world's practices and values and combine them with their own. Or so it seemed.

In Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing, Joseph Williams offers a fresh, nuanced, and dynamic reading of pentecostal healing. Williams argues that the divine healing of early pentecostals was not so separate as the faithful liked to think. Instead, it contained areas of meaningful overlap with alternative healing programs rooted in metaphysical spirituality. The mental healing of New Thought and Christian Science resonated with pentecostals' conviction that divine healing was guaranteed to those who had faith, which entailed pronouncing and acting out healing after prayer despite contrary symptoms. In concert with naturopathic healing, early pentecostals warned against dietary overindulgence and promoted fasting as a spiritual discipline with significant health benefits, including as a preparatory step for divine healing. Like metaphysical believers of various stripes, pentecostals tended to depersonalize the divine and minimize the gulf between nature and supernature. In relation to healing, God's declared intentions to heal the faithful were fixed in his Word, so the issue became how to tap into this source and actualize divine health. The pentecostal conception of the Holy Spirit as an immanent source of power and abundance often relied on natural and impersonal metaphors, like hydraulics and electricity, further emphasizing shared convictions with metaphysical believers. Although early pentecostals routinely anathematized metaphysical healers along with regular doctors, Williams highlights significant commonalities that linked their healing programs.

Many historians have noted that treatment via orthodox medicine in the early twentieth century remained a crapshoot, but by mid-century diagnostic and therapeutic advances had enhanced the social and cultural standing of physicians. Simultaneously, pentecostals were climbing the social ladder and beginning to make peace with the surrounding culture. In this context, Oral Roberts played a crucial mediating role by envisioning the union of divine and medical healing. Even as the Latter Rain movement and postwar healing revivals hearkened back to radical early days of pentecostalism, rife with demonic etiology and anti-medical rhetoric, Roberts represented a larger development in pentecostalism that sought not only peace but union with medicine. As part of his eponymous university, Roberts built a massive medical center and school designed to combine faith and science through teaching, advanced research, and patient care in a prayerful medical context. Though ill-fated in practice, Roberts's vision reflected the reality that by the 1960s and 1970s pentecostals in poor health both went to their doctors and prayed, and they saw good medical care as a blessing from the Lord.

Traditional pentecostal suspicion of mainstream medicine did not disappear entirely amid this convergence. Instead, like a growing number of their fellow Americans, pentecostals in the late twentieth century were drawn to holistic and alternative healing paradigms. To the extent orthodox physicians driven by a biomedical model focused on the body but not the mind or spirit, pentecostals and their charismatic brethren looked for ways to augment healing. Amid this environment, Williams carries forward metaphysical lines of influence in the areas of mental and naturopathic healing. Influential charismatics Agnes Sanford and Ruth Carter Stapleton promoted “inner healing” through visualization, “faith-imagination therapy,” and other techniques drawn from New Thought and the burgeoning field of psychology. Meanwhile, the Word of Faith movement displayed substantial (if unacknowledged and indeed denied) indebtedness to New Thought, particularly through the conduit of E.W. Kenyon. Prominent Word of Faith advocate Kenneth Hagin drew heavily upon Kenyon in teaching the faithful to have a positive mental outlook, take their desires for health and prosperity to God with confidence, and bring reality into being through their faithful words. Often combined with an emphasis on inner healing, this “prosperity gospel” has become influential in the hands of figures like T.D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, and Joel Osteen.

Turn of the century pentecostals also showed a penchant for Christianized versions of the latest diet and exercise programs. Reflecting long-standing naturopathic tendencies, pentecostals combined sensible eating and exercise with the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit to help one resist temptations to gluttony and sloth. Williams highlights several figures who became health gurus among the faithful, including Maureen Salaman and the physicians Reginald Cherry and Don Colbert. Colbert, for instance, stressed dietary measures to avoid toxins and promote detoxification, an approach for which he found abundant biblical justification. Just as prosperity gospel promoters sold products and took in “seed faith” donations, nature-based healers found ways to commodify their claims through supplements and vitamins, books and television programs.

Some observers have decried the developments Williams details as reflecting a broader “evangelicalization” of pentecostalism. They argue pentecostals have turned away from their tradition and embraced modern culture as they have become more a part of the evangelical mainstream. While recognizing that the intersection between the two movements has expanded, Williams finds this thesis wanting when it comes to healing. Instead, he locates the source of convergence with mental and naturopathic healing in the beliefs and practices of early pentecostals themselves. Rather than alien intrusions into the pentecostal realm, these convergences reflect the unfolding of inner dynamics at the heart of pentecostal healing. Williams offers a persuasive argument in this thoroughly researched, sharply written, engaging, and thoughtful book.