In Testing Prayer, Candy Gunther Brown homes in on the healing-prayer practices of pentecostals and isolates what she refers to as “proximal intercessory prayer (PIP).” Brown's book amounts to an effort to convince a skeptical scientific community (and thereby affecting global health professionals) that prayer may be part of a long-term strategy of political redress. “Given the magnitude of global health problems,” writes Brown, “arguments that a priori deny the legitimacy of studying how religious practices such as prayer might affect health are intellectually and ethically problematic” (65).

In her account Brown concludes that perceptions of prayerful healing register their effects upon the individual as well as upon the community around. From this finding Brown argues that intercessory prayer is the hinge of pentecostal success over the last century. She charts the institutional energies that course in, through, and beyond the Toronto Blessing (1994–2006). She maps the spread of global Christianity via nodes within a network of circulating claims of prayerful healing, specifically among those involved in the Apostolic Network of Global Awakening (the “power evangelism” of Randy Clark) and Iris Ministries (centered on the charismatic couple Heidi and Rolland Baker). Moreover, through a series of journalistic anecdotes she relates the stories of leaders and laity alike about how they understand themselves within a vibrant network of circulating healing energy—an experience of the network that does not depend upon the biological truth of miraculous healing. “Participation in network activities,” writes Brown, “notably conferences and international ministry trips, builds a sense of global community” (27).

So when Brown asks, “Can Health Outcomes of Prayer Be Measured?,” her answer is a firm yes—not only qualitatively in that prayer figures prominently in the social imaginary of her subjects, not only textually in that medical records reveal something about the reality of human experience and imagination, but also through biomedical tools deployed wherever prayer might be found. With portable audiometer and eye charts in hand, Brown and her research team set off to sites in Brazil, Mozambique, and the United States in order to set the record straight. Brown concludes that “something is going on in Pentecostal PIP” in all thee countries “and that researchers have an opportunity to learn more about what exactly that is” (232). In Mozambique, for example, pre- and post-prayer tests of hearing and vision were administered during tent revivals staged amidst mud-hut villages. Brown walks us through the laboratory protocol and assures that there was “highly significant improvement in hearing across the eighteen ears of eleven subjects” and “significant visual improvements” (207).

Brown writes that “since the beginning of what scholars term modernity” there have been “great reversals concerning where cultural groups have positioned themselves on these questions” concerning the efficacy of prayer (64). Rather than mine the historicity or discursive economies of such investment, however, Brown chooses to stake out a position within it, seeking to find the sweet spot of “wisdom” (5) that lies between the extremes of science and religion, questions of materiality and meaning, respectively (3). This spot, one gathers, is where there is compatibility and perhaps a hint of future collaboration. “I ask empirical questions,” Brown insists, “about the effects of religious practices on culture and society, including physical health, and I draw insights from theological analysis that are useful in developing more robust scientific inquiries” (5). With proper understanding of the human negotiations with their Gods, prayer will be isolated. This genera of human activity will then be sufficiently taxonomized. In securing the moment when prayer works and why—in body, mind, and soul—Brown assumes that theology is already scientific in its evolving potentiality to survey the material world. Brown's book leaves one with the sneaking suspicion that a system does exist, out there on the horizon, in which everything is recorded, everything is known, and everything redeemed.

Despite Brown's gesture toward the history of testing prayer, the phenomena of pentecostal healing and Brown's study of it occur within a vacuum, shielded from various historical confounds—capital effects, colonial effects, biopolitical effects, the ever-intensifying allure of certainty and assessment not to mention the perceived authority of shiny metal machines measuring parts of a self that you never knew you had.

To be fair, Brown does offer hints about the background mechanics of this present moment. But only hints. She mentions, in passing, the colonial hue of Anglo-pentecostals borrowing, translating, and redistributing the supernaturalism of indigenous cultures. She gives lip but very little service to “white, patriarchal capitalistic, U.S.-dominated policies that subsidize multinational corporations by paying inadequate wages to two-thirds-world workers in substandard working conditions” (61–62). Confounds, however, whether ambient noise, the susceptibility of an informant or scholar, or the felt abstractions of late capitalism are rendered sufficiently null and void so as to produce statistically significant results. And this is unfortunate. For on one hand, it is hard to argue with Brown's claim that there is a “major gap between most research on intercessory prayer and how intercessory prayer tends to be practiced” (98). On the other hand, however, her condemnation of such studies as lacking both construct validity and ecological validity may also be applied to the bulk of her own argument (98).

So even though Brown calls into question the ridiculous humanisms emanating from psychological and neuroscientific laboratories around the world—where concepts of empathy and love and prayer and happiness are conjured from nowhere in particular, often within the hopelessly sterile and air-conditioned confines of the university laboratory—her questioning is complicit rather than severe. “I recognize the complexity of [medical] conditions (for many of which cultural and sociopolitical forces are deeply implicated) and that my categories are artificial and my placement choices debatable” (163). This is refreshing admission. Unfortunately, given her failure to follow up any of her field work with basic anthropological exposition, it is an admission that is forced. Indeed, as Bruno Latour has noted in his work, such dutiful admission of artificiality borders on cynicism if those artificialities—what Latour calls factishes—are never sufficiently questioned or historicized, which is exactly the case with Brown's book. After pointing out the constructed nature of the “authority of modern, medical ‘evidence’ in adjudicating claims of illness and healing” (104), Brown does not follow up on the provocation of the scare quotes. Instead, she doubles down—seeking to wield the power of “science” more benevolently, more capaciously, more scientifically than has been the case with modern biomedicine and global health experts.

In Testing Prayer, the language of scientific experiment signals itself repeatedly, often with italics—randomized, controlled trials, Hernstein's matching law, between-subjects design, pretest-posttest design, wait-list control group, within-subjects design, placebo effects. When Brown writes that “science in its current form is itself a culturally constructed category” (276), it is a tactic of convenience and not criticism. For as you make your way through Testing Prayer, one cannot help but imagine the moment when science becomes real, that is, when there is a convergence between the world, our assessment of the world, and our representations of those assessments.

Yet one wonders about the means. For example, what to make of the admittedly cacophonous scenes in which lily-white missionaries and their native agents swarm an audience with prayerful embrace as Brown's research teams strives to keep up even as they seek to create static spaces in which to set up an eye chart or manipulate the controls of an audiometer. What is happening here? In terms of race? In terms of the fraught history of objectivity? In terms of a romantic pathos of Victorian anthropology? What is happening here? A tremendous amount, of course, which begs a few questions: are these desperate acts of measurement? Measured occlusion? Or both? As Brown reflects upon the universalism of her universalizing gaze, she exhibits pride rather then concern about having rendered invisible all those pesky particularities between self and other in foreign lands: “the presence of the researchers and the introduction of testing procedure seemed to present more of a confound in U.S. settings than in Mozambican and Brazilian contexts. In the latter, prayer for severe auditory and visual impairments is regularly performed in crowded settings, and the presence of a few more people, even with novel mechanical devices, exerts relatively little effect on the behavior of intercessors and prayer recipients. I would like to see further testing in developed countries, but there are important advantages to more natural prayer settings even though the field conditions are difficult” (italics mine, 214). As Brown would have it, the spectacle of colonial encounter is even less of an issue in those places where colonialism registered its most deleterious effects!

According to Brown, our science of prayer is currently incomplete rather than historically loaded. Some might dismiss prayer as an illusion not worthy of scientific consideration. Others might claim that science is not up to the task. But Brown will have neither. For while the science of prayer is imperfect, it does not have to be so. The future is bright according to Brown. Techniques and technologies are in the works that will, finally, cut through the clamor and heat of Mozambique and arrive at a truth that will fit and appeal to everyone in equal measure.