One summer not long ago I passed many hours in a public library reading through shelves of popular books on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Before long, their arguments became recognizable and familiar as positions in a high stakes discursive field. Were “alternative” and “integrative” modalities—herbs, homeopathy, yoga, Reiki, Alexander Technique, acupuncture—scientifically or medically sound? Liberating or harmful? Religious or spiritual? Helpful or harmful? Authors sporting “expert” letters after their last names (M.D., Ph.D., MSW, M.Div., etc.) occupy the various agreed-upon positions in this field. There were debunkers, the voices of reason, true believers, feminist and scientific and religious critics of “biomedical excess,” and cautionary skeptics. Despite their differences in opinion they all agreed broadly on what CAM was and what they were arguing about. There was also broad agreement in the genre on what expertise entailed, how scientific, popular, and historical literature could be used, and even on favored interpretive tropes and themes. It was an interesting exercise to read these books and I learned quite a bit about the stakes of contemporary health and body politics in the United States. But it taught me little about the history, religion, or sociology of complementary and alternative medicine.
Candy Gunther Brown's Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America falls squarely within this genre of popular writing about CAM. It exemplifies the “caveat emptor” genre. Brown inhabits the role of a scholarly expert who exposes the hidden religious origins of alternative medicine and explains why knowing about these origins matter. In participating in this genre, Brown also adopts its language of expertise, choosing to shed the historian's métier of close reading and textual analysis in favor of more expansive claims to knowledge. As a consequence, Healing Gods has little to offer to a scholarly audience interested in learning more about American Christians' uses or experience with complementary and alternative medicine. Scholars of American religious history, yoga and traditional Chinese medicine, the history of medicine and science, constitutional law or patients' rights will find Brown's treatment of these topics inadequately supported by conventional scholarly argumentation or interpretation. This is not the only measure for a book (and arguably not the appropriate measure for this one) but its publication by Oxford University Press suggests that such an assessment is not completely inappropriate.
Brown's argument can be summarized as such: Complementary and alternative medicine is religious (chapter 1) and, moreover, not Christian in its origins (chapter 3). These non-religious CAM therapies were banished from the halls of medicine in the early twentieth century but have been revived and brought into mainstream biomedicine (introduction, chapter 7). This has happened as promoters of CAM have repackaged and “marketed” CAM to unsuspecting Americans who are unaware of their real religious roots (introduction, conclusion). CAM continues to thrive even as most CAM therapies have been shown to have little or no positive effect in medical studies (chapter 5). Brown states that Americans are largely unaware of their religious origins, and she thus offers in her even-numbered chapters brief historical overviews of yoga, acupuncture, energy medicine, and chiropractic therapy. Brown further argues however that knowing this history is not enough. She argues that because Americans tend to associate religion with belief and doctrine rather than the body or action, they are unaware of the ways that CAM can carry religious meaning through enactment. Since CAM can in itself potentially alter the worldviews of those who use them, Americans who use CAM are unwittingly placing their minds, bodies, and possibly souls at risk. Caveat emptor!
Brown draws on a wide range of sources to make this argument, but as is common in this popular genre she does not engage in close reading or interpretive reflection. Rather, she mines her sources for anecdotes and evidence that appear to support her claims. The book's citational apparatus is likewise problematic, as it further obscures the context and content of her sources—and also raises questions and alarms for the scholarly reader. Take, for example, the paragraph where Brown defines religion for the purposes of the book (23) which she wants to be “broad” and “including not only theistic beliefs but also bodily practices perceived as connecting individuals with suprahuman energies, beings, or transcendent realities or as inducing heightened spiritual awareness or virtue.” Brown then notes in two following sentences that the benefits of this definition are that it doesn't distinguish between religion and spirituality, and that it accounts for a wide variety of human experience. The paragraph has a footnote which reads in its entirety, “Durkheim 1933, 131; Albanese 2013, 2–9; Pals 1996, 10–12; Smith 2004, 179–196; Orsi 2005, 183–198; Tweed 2006, 73; Kunin 2003, 3; Barnes and Sered 2005.”
Anyone holding passing familiarity with these volumes will be puzzled. They share no clear connection with Brown's therapeutic and individualized definition. Questions start to bubble up. Brown's definition emphasizes the individual and the suprahuman, so what does Durkheim have to do with this—does she want to engage in an argument with him? Does she think his definition supports hers? How is she reading Durkheim? Then the same set of questions can be taken in turn with the others. And, why is William James (with whom this definition appears to share more) not on this list? And, what does she mean by “practice?” Reading further, and noting that Brown uses her even-numbered chapters to explain the history of various CAM modalities and their theological bases, it furthermore seems odd that her definition includes nothing about transmission of tradition. The question resurfaces: what function does her definition of religion serve? And moreover, what function is this footnote supposed to serve? Alas, Brown provides no guidance. We are left without any insight into how Brown wants us to think about or read these texts, and we are left with a definition of religion that has little bearing on the way she employs it.
Every paragraph in Healing Gods is written in this register and thus invites similar concerns. As Brown neither engages her sources nor indicates where the work that she cites might offer an alternative interpretation to the one she gives, we are left with a book of inadequately supported claims. While it might be expected that Brown, a historian of American religions, glosses and streamlines the meaning, origins and history of yoga, acupuncture, and Reiki in a way that would cause experts in those fields to pause, it is more surprising that “American Christianity” receives a similar gloss. Brown pays scant attention to the historically distinctive and critical differences in the manner in which liberal protestants, Catholics, pentecostals and other evangelicals have grappled with and sometimes adopted or translated alternative healing, energy medicine, and “Asian” religious traditions throughout the twentieth century. Arguably, attention to these histories would destabilize her explicit claims that CAM is non-Christian and non-American. It should be noted that neither position is supported by the scholarship and histories she cites.
Given this volume's basic structural problems and generically-derived limitations, I hesitate to do more than comment on what I find to be its strangest claim. As it has surfaced in arguments Brown made as an expert witness in a 2013 court case regarding the teaching of yoga in a California public school and connects to her arguments about the science of prayer developed in her 2012 volume Testing Prayer, I believe it is worth noting.
As I have said, Brown argues that religion is not only embodied but that embodied actions carry theological meaning regardless of the context in which they are enacted or taught. To be clear, Brown is not arguing (as anthropologists and theorists of embodiment do) that religious meaning becomes durably connected to our actions, body, habitus, and emotions through social interactions, discipline, relationships, memory, experience, or habitus, and so on. In other words, these are not “practices” in the ways that we have come to understand practice, as durable yet changing intersections of the body and the social. Rather, Brown is arguing that embodied religious meaning is beyond the social and stands outside of it. It doesn't matter whether Christians decide to translate yoga into “Christoga” or whether acupuncture is administered by an atheist resident in training at a public hospital, because yoga and acupuncture actions in themselves carry the religious capacity to change the body and spirit of the practitioner or the patient.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this claim means not only that yoga postures can never be Christian or secular (or Muslim, or Jewish) or that acupuncture can never be understood as a process of directing currents in the body's neural system. It also means that there are real, non-culturally-derived, embodied boundaries between Christianity, medicine, yoga—and presumably between all the rest of the religious and medical traditions in the world. I leave it to the readers of Church History to consider the intellectual and historical antecedents of this disturbing claim. Caveat emptor.
