Approaching the subject of Christianity and healing in North America is a fraught task for the scholar of religion. In a historical context so profoundly shaped by biomedical models of human physiology, on what grounds, besides materialist reduction, can scholars account for the claims of those who argue that God heals? One measure of this quandary is the shifting terminology used to describe the phenomenon itself—from faith cure, to faith healing, to divine healing. Giving different emphasis to the “faith” of the distressed or the interventions of the “divine,” faith healing and divine healing are categories that, when employed by scholars, themselves indicate a host of implied methodological and theoretical concerns. Keeping in mind that this is not terminology of fixed precision, one could hazard the claim that “faith healing” is a largely etic category used by outsiders to imbue spiritual healing with a hint of quackery. By contrast, “divine healing” is an emic category preferred by practitioners, and scholars, who want to take claims of healing by spiritual means seriously. (In some uses, the divine healing movement can also delineate a particular late nineteenth-century precursor to pentecostalism.) Whether in the specter of charlatanism or of the Holy Ghost, the terminology of modern Christian healing is haunted by convictions about the limits of what is possible when repairing the body in a biomedical age.

Raymond Cunningham, a pioneer of historical research on the intersection of Protestantism and healing in the United States, chose the phrase “faith cure enthusiasm” (512) when writing in Church History in 1974 (“From Holiness to Healing: The Faith Cure in America, 1872–1892” 43:4 [December 1974]: 499–513). Cunningham defined faith cure or faith healing as a late nineteenth-century movement rooted in holiness perfectionism that came to justify supernatural healing through the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement (that is, that Jesus' death bore away not only sin but also bodily disease). Cunningham argued further that faith cure was a response to the concomitant rise of biblical criticism and medical science, as well as to a variety of religiously oriented mental therapeutics such as Christian Science. There is little about Cunningham's remarkably even-handed analysis that has been disputed by later scholars, save for his preference for the term “faith cure enthusiasm.” What distinguishes his research from newer work, however, is his wide-ranging interest in the ways healing was a practice and concern not only of evangelical but also of “liberal” Protestants.

One year later, in 1975, historian David Edwin Harrell published his own pioneering work, All Things are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). For his part, Harrell largely preferred the term “divine healing” when describing the work of mid-century U.S. Protestant healers such as Oral Roberts. Rooting twentieth-century pentecostal divine healing in a longer tradition of “ecstatic Christianity” that included Methodists and Quakers, Harrell argued that healing was key to the popularity of post-war pentecostal revivals, and to the later charismatic revival within “mainstream” Protestant churches. Framing divine healing as reclamation of the “supernatural” via the potent conduit of individual faith, Harrell was careful to avoid either disparaging or endorsing its claims of bodily reparation. This approach to the methodological challenges of studying religious healing led one reviewer, Ernest Sandeen, to bemoan Harrell's book as a mere “catalogue” of charismatic healers (The American Historical Review 81:4 [October 1976]: 1004). Others appreciated Harrell's judicious tone, as did Grant Wacker in a 1975 review, although he remained unconvinced by the importance Harrell attributed to “faith healing” as the key to the rise of mid-century pentecostalism (Church History 45:3 [September 1976]: 397).

The three books under consideration in this review orient themselves differently to what Wacker described as the “grave methodological problems” of the historian of Christian healing. Historians James Opp and Heather Curtis both take the “epistemological gaps” between biomedicine and evangelical healing as their starting point. Opp and Curtis both attend to the ways that biomedicine in North America has become fundamental not only to epistemologies of the body, but also to social, political, and economic structures, thus marginalizing non-biomedical approaches within a complex of overlapping spheres of authority, including “mainstream” Protestantism and the law. Shawn Peters, by contrast, points not to epistemological gaps, but to epistemological affinities, often unintended, between U.S. legal cultures and “faith healing.” Focusing on heart-wrenching cases where Christian parents have watched their children die without seeking medical attention, Peters describes how parental convictions and practices of faith healing have often been effectively supported, or at least forgiven, by the U.S. legal system. Little interested in the epistemological nuances of faith or divine healing, Peters subsumes these categories under his concept of “religion-based medical neglect,” drawn from child health advocate Rita Swan, a former Christian Scientist whose child died of bacterial meningitis. Reading these books together offers an excellent opportunity to ponder truly grave methodological problems, as Opp and Curtis call for methodological empathy with their subjects, while Peters tells a story of “faith-based abuse” (151).

James Opp's prize-winning book, The Lord for the Body, is a groundbreaking work in the history of Christianity in North America, both for its sophisticated theoretical awareness and for its topic. That his focus is Canada adds to the importance of his original contribution, in that scholarship on Christian healing has largely ignored the cross-border flurry of healing evangelists, despite the fact that so many of the healing celebrities and movements of the twentieth century had Canadian roots or connections. Opp describes his task as contributing to a “history of the body,” whereby he situates faith healing as a “cultural practice” with “devotional or transcendental intent” (9). Drawing critically from Michel Foucault, medical anthropology, the history of medicine, and religious studies, Opp argues that the best way to understand the shape of faith healing from 1880–1930 is to understand it as a historical process of countercultural resistance rooted in personal experience: “it is only through the space of personal religious experience that the points of resistance evident within the practice of divine healing could emerge” (8).

Turning to church and secular newspapers, memoirs, archival records, and photographs, Opp masterfully tells a series of local, regional, and cross-border stories about the changing fortunes of divine healing in Canada. He focuses on the faith homes started in the nineteenth century, largely by women; the intensely anti-medical Dowieites and their conflicts with the new coalition between public health and the Canadian legal system; and the rise of the spectacular and highly orchestrated pentecostal healing revivals of the 1920s, largely led by men. Opp focuses throughout his chronological account on three related themes: the gendered aspects of faith healing movements; the significance of the spaces, both domestic and public, in which discourses and practices of faith healing took place; and the competing epistemologies of embodiment that shaped faith healers, their followers, and their Protestant and medical detractors.Footnote ¹

Opp explains that he uses the terms faith healing and divine healing “interchangeably,” with the awareness that the “divine healing movement” was a particular coalition that spanned the 1870s–1900s but which was no longer a cohesive movement by the 1920s and 1930s (12). A movement that attracted—and was led by—some of the most respected public figures of late nineteenth-century Ontario, including a mayor of Toronto, divine healing was eventually discredited by analogy to more vitriolic anti-medical healers, such as John Alexander Dowie, who had a sizable Canadian following. By the time the pentecostal healing revivalists took the stage in Canadian cities after 1910, they had lost the public backing of most “respectable” Canadian Protestants, though that did not stop Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican laypeople from attending their revivals in large numbers. The care with which Opp depicts the conflicting ways of “knowing the body” (209) at work in debates (and fights) over faith healing makes his work a model of methodological and theoretical rigor.

Heather Curtis and James Opp share the honor of having won the Brewer Prize (in 2008 and 2005 respectively) for the dissertations that were the bases for the books under review. Curtis's lyrical and convincing work focuses entirely on the divine healing movement within the United States, broadening Opp's periodization of the movement to 1860–1900. Similarly to Opp, Curtis roots her analysis in questions of epistemology and practice, or, more specifically, on the changing ways that Protestants read the significance of bodily suffering. Arguing that divine healing fostered a “devotional ethics” in which the suffering body was no longer to be endured but instead overcome through “acting faith” (94), Curtis traces this changing theological interpretation of suffering with keen attention to its ritualization and institutionalization. Along with her epistemological framing of healing practices, Curtis also shares with Opp a number of common themes: the complicated ways gender shaped both changing valuations of suffering and the leadership of the divine healing movement; the “social geography” of divine healing, especially in the contours of the faith home; and the significance of personal testimony not only for spreading the message of the divine healing movement, but also for the cultivation of what could be called healing subjectivities. Curtis's last chapter advances a revealing argument about the growing connection in the 1890s between divine healing and social service as evidence for the “working alliance” between evangelicals and liberals that put social reform above theological differences (170).

Describing her approach as a “retrospective ethnography,” Curtis's nuanced attention to the nexus of embodiment, affect, and theological conviction is a welcome antidote to the widespread trope that has limited Protestant subjectivity to a question of belief. Though she does not directly engage with theoretical conversations about how habituation and ritual practice cultivate religious selves and communities—which draw largely from the work of anthropologists such as Talal Asad—Curtis offers compelling evidence that could helpfully complicate the overly simplistic portrayals of Protestant practice often inhabiting (or inspiring) such theories. For example, in her discussion of the controversy around Maria Woodsworth's practice of “trance evangelism,” Curtis clearly demonstrates how even within the divine healing movement there were debates about what constituted appropriate use of emotions, rituals, and bodily states in the service of healing. While outsider Methodist James Buckley condemned Woodsworth and other faith healers as proponents of “religious emotion” that threatened “self-control,” critics from within the divine healing movement, such as Christian and Missionary Alliance founder A. B. Simpson, concluded that the “excesses” of Woodsworth should be contained by both theological and ritual means. In Curtis's words, “rites such as anointing served as the boundary markers that delineated faith cure from the fraudulent performances of medical impresarios as well as from the dangerous exhibitions of demonic power on display at Spiritualist séances” (138).

Curtis's critical empathy with her subjects, along with her attention to conflicts within the movement, are key to the success of her narrative, but at times she edges toward taking her sources too much at face value. As Curtis details, many faith homes worked on the “faith principle of financing” (150), in which God was understood to provide the necessary money in mysterious ways. Ostensibly open to all, faith homes that were guided by the faith principle provoke the suspicion (at least in this reader) that visitors with the means to give more generously might have been more welcome than others. By not explicitly discussing the economic or racial mix of the visitors, Curtis leaves the suspicion to linger: did the women who sought respite from their iatrogenic narcotic addictions at faith homes kick their morphine habits simply by “relying solely on God for healing” (163), or did their status as presumably white, middle-class Protestants (they had doctors and could afford narcotics) help to gain them entry into such homes where they had the leisure to cultivate the required faith?

Curtis succeeds at her goal of drawing a compelling portrait of the “devotional disciplines” of the divine healing movement that both establishes its “orthodox” genealogy and its difference from later movements of divine healing such as pentecostalism (17). She shows that even within the divine healing movement itself, quandaries of categorization bedeviled its leaders, as they distinguished between injuries deserving of medical treatment and illnesses warranting the Great Physician (156). In effect, she demonstrates that proponents of divine healing were just as constrained by grave methodological problems of knowing the suffering body as scholars are today.

Shawn Peters, the author of several books on religion and U.S. law, takes a very different approach from Opp and Curtis, both in terms of method and theoretical starting point. Peters's book is based largely on court cases and newspaper accounts of these cases. Starting with a 1997 example of a U.S. toddler who died of untreated complications from hemophilia, Peters then turns to a brief historical survey of Christian healing. He then engages in more specific analyses, starting with the Peculiar People in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British courts, and then moving to U.S. examples. Beginning with cases drawn from early twentieth-century and present-day Christian Science, Peters then shifts to more recent examples from a Philadelphia church called the Faith Tabernacle, a Massachusetts-based community called The Body, and a small pentecostal church in Oregon. Peters writes vivid accounts of the intense bodily suffering of children who died from a host of causes that could have been treated with biomedicine but were not: hemophilia, bowel obstruction, ruptured appendix, and meningitis. Perhaps the most gut-wrenching account is of the death by asphyxiation of a young autistic boy named Terence Cottrell, Jr., who died while being pinned to the floor by the minister of a storefront church in Milwaukee as he exorcised the boy in front of the congregation and the boy's mother. With such graphic cases, Peters presents a compelling portrait of the tragic extremities of faith healing with more persistence than either Opp or Curtis.

The most compelling aspect of Peters's analysis is his contention that in many ways, the state, through the U.S. federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as well as through the legal system, has been complicit in what he calls “religion-based medical neglect” (6). Christian Scientists have long been active lobbyists for legal exemptions for parents who do not provide their children with medical care, and Peters documents their mixed success in legal contexts. He also shows, however, that even when parents have been found guilty of contributing to the deaths of their children, they were rarely sentenced to jail. In effect, Peters argues that these parents put their faith in God ahead of the lives of their children, as well as ahead of their respect for U.S. law and its sanction of appropriate use of biomedical therapies as a parental responsibility. Furthermore, he contends that the courts have often effectively sided with the parents.

Of all three books, When Prayer Fails comes up against the gravest of methodological problems. Most of Peters's narratives of individual cases are written with a kind of immediacy such that they give the air of being based on direct interviews with the people involved. Instead of his own primary research, however, Peters largely depends on newspaper accounts, as well as court cases, journal articles, or personal communication with Rita Swan, the former Christian Scientist to whom Peters seems to attribute an authority beyond question. Though at times Peters attempts the kind of critical empathy achieved by Curtis and Opp, the layers of interpretation within the sources that stand between his account and the experience of the parents he describes make this virtually impossible. Given the troubling tales Peters is telling, at least a temporary stopping point in critical empathy would be both intensely difficult and necessary—though I am not suggesting that I could achieve it. Even pausing to consider such questions as how class and theology shaped the late twentieth-century alliance between Christian Scientists and pentecostals in pursuit of religious exemptions from the law, or resting longer with questions of how parents can bear to see their children suffer in this way, would allow Peters to make a more persuasive argument.

In a related vein, Peters could have benefited from a range of theoretical contributions that would speak in different ways to the question of the intersection of religion, U.S. law, and medically preventable deaths of children. For example, Winnifred Sullivan's body of research on religious freedom, Carol Delaney's work on sacrifice and, for a comparative perspective, Lori Beaman's research on religious freedom in Canada would have provided helpful interlocutors whose arguments could frame an analysis that did not deny the troubling details of the cases, but that more fully attended to the complexities of the mutual imbrication of U.S. law and Christians seeking legal exemptions for spiritual healing. Perhaps, in the end, Peters directs his critical empathy in another direction; in his back cover blurb, Ronald Numbers describes how Peters “empathetically shows” the struggles of the legal system as it faces such grim cases.

All three books point to the ways that writing about spiritual healing calls for scholars to cultivate openness about their own epistemological starting points. As James Opp argued, scholars cannot (and should not) hope to answer the question of whether faith healing “works.” However, as both Curtis and Opp recognize, neither can scholars who set themselves the task of analyzing spiritual healing hope to avoid such questions entirely, and that terminological and methodological clarity is of great importance in negotiating such terrain. That they have provided us with such cogent arguments and compatible narratives about the rise of Protestant healing in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States is a happy and timely convergence of the best kind of scholarship. Their books are important contributions to the study of North American Christianity even beyond the limits of healing, however one defines it.