A friend of mine who pastors a large church in North Carolina recently totted up the prayer requests he gets from his parishioners. When they ask him for prayer, what do they want him to pray for? In short, healing. He realized what prompts the vast majority of these prayer requests is illness—something like 95 percent of their prayers are for healing, either for themselves or for someone else.
It’s a safe bet that surveys of your church would turn up similar results. How did we come to pray so fervently for recovery from illness? As Heather Curtis notes at the outset of her fascinating first monograph, it has not been ever thus. Although one can certainly find prayer for healing popping up throughout church history, for much of the last 2,000 years those prayerful desires for healing went hand in hand with a certain veneration of bodily affliction. Suffering was seen as a privileged spiritual state: bodily pain presented the believer an opportunity to identify in an especially intense way with the suffering Christ. Hence the many medieval women mystics who actively sought bodily affliction.
By the 1850s, the long tradition of sanctified suffering had combined with Victorian etiquette and gender roles to produce a norm of “passive resignation” in the face of illness. Sick people, in particular female invalids, believed that their sickness was God’s will, and the most faithful response was humble submission. Women who patiently bore illness that kept them confined to bed for decades were understood as “spiritual virtuosos,” who were often blessed by God with special visions that would sustain them through their trials. Their very bodies, passively propped up on pillows, were tokens of faith in the sufficiency of God’s grace.
Between that assumption of sanctified suffering and the characteristic outlook of American Christians early in the 21st century lies a great gulf. How did we arrive at a Christian idiom in which praying for healing is the most natural thing in the world, and where “passive resignation” is often seen as positively unfaithful? Curtis locates the beginnings of the change in the second half of the 19th century, when countless evangelicals challenged the norm of humble submission to illness and created the so-called “faith cure” or “divine healing” movement.
Taking their inspiration from Scripture passages such as James 5:15 (“The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up”), women like Sarah Mix and men like Charles Cullis suggested that God’s will was to heal people; indeed, “ongoing invalidism was not an appropriate posture for believers.” Rather, sick people were to “act faith.” That is, they were to participate in ritual practices that were understood to be efficacious conduits of God’s healing power—prayer, the laying on of hands—and then they were to get out of their sickbeds and walk.
One of the most fascinating discussions, in a book full of fascinating discussions, is Curtis’ consideration of what it meant to be healed. Many people who were cured by “acting faith” continued to manifest somatic symptoms of their illnesses. They were not necessarily freed of pain. Rather, they were freed from invalidism—they got out of bed, even if doing so was terrifically painful. Being healed, in other words, did not involve only a change of physical state. It also involved an “epistemological reorientation” in which, even though workaday sensory perception might suggest that healing had not occurred, the eyes of faith saw healing. Thus, making sense of suffering and managing pain were as much interpretive acts as biological facts.
Curtis is to be commended, especially, for bringing together practice and theology. Although she is centrally interested in the practices of faith healing—the laying on of hands, and so forth—she always situates her consideration of these practices in the story of 19th-century theology. Curtis teases out the connections between the new emphasis on healing and the holiness and Higher Life movements, and she also explores the impact of premillennialism: the imminence of Christ’s return was one reason that proponents of faith healing insisted that “passive resignation was not an appropriate posture for Christians to adopt when confronted with the problem of sickness or pain.” Rather than languishing in bed, Christ’s footsoldiers needed to get out there and spread the Gospel to the unconverted world, before it was too late.
Curtis also fruitfully attends to gender at almost every turn. In discussing the era of passive resignation to illness, she makes the point that although women were expected to quietly embrace the rest cure, men were not: they might take to the bed for a day or two, but then the imperatives of earning a living got them out of the sickroom and back to the factory. Similarly, faith healing allowed women to at once flout and abide by gender conventions. In praying and then rising from their beds, women challenged assumptions about women’s natural weakness and contravened doctors orders to rest quietly in bed. But at the same time, women who subscribed to faith healing were allowed to remain, in a sense, passive: faith healing called for women not to rely on their own will or their own strength, but rather to walk through God’s power. Even as they got out of bed, women were still, at least discursively, refusing to exercise their own will—thus, in a rather roundabout way, they were able to “arise and walk without overstepping the medical theories and gender norms that required [women] to remain passive in the curative process.” The very language about walking through God’s power that made faith healing a plausible choice for women turned off some men. To assuage men’s concerns that faith healing required them to abandon active masculinity, male proponents focused on the energy and power that a newly healed person found once he had submitted to God and received healing.
Where did this 19th-century movement lead? Although the Pentecostal embrace of divine healing in the 20th century is outside of the scope of Curtis’ study, she suggests some of the ways that Pentecostalism both borrowed from and reshaped the 19th-century tradition of faith healing. And Curtis also pokes, gently, at some of the subtle, and subtly pernicious, effects the faith healing movement might have had on the larger American cultural imagination. She suggests, intriguingly, that perhaps one of the more worrying fruits of the movement was the stigmatizing of invalids: in the context of a God who promised health, “chronic illness or infirmity became increasingly problematic.” Thus, likely unintentionally, the faith cure movement may have “helped foster disparaging attitudes toward the body in pain that have persisted” to the present. The faith healing movement, in other words, contributed to our culture’s assumption that God prefers the able-bodied to the infirm, the vigorous to the halt and the lame.
Heather Curtis has done both the historical guild and the church a great favor in so elegantly narrating the history of a movement that challenged long-standing assumptions about the spiritual utility of corporal pain—and, in so doing, remapped our imaginations and transformed our understanding of suffering.
Lauren F. Winner holds a Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University, and is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
