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Revisiting classic ethnological theories on the contagious transmission of force, this chapter explores the place of material objects in the performance of divine communication and the practice of faith. Tracking between the devotional specificities of the practice of “standin’-in” within the context of southern Appalachia and the broader mass-mediated performances of healing prayer during the Charismatic Renewal, this section also articulates Oral Roberts’s famous notion of “the point of contact” as a physical conduit for the transmission of healing power.

This chapter highlights pentecostal healers' efforts to spiritualize medicine and their growing attunement to holistic healing paradigms, which circulated with increasing regularity in U.S. culture beginning in the 1960s. While these changes served as further evidence of the improved socioeconomic standing of the average pentecostal, they also revealed the growing influence of charismatics such as Agnes Sanford, Kathryn Kuhlman, and William Standish Reed on the trajectory of pentecostalism. The most visible advocate for a merger of mainstream medicine and divine healing in the pentecostal-charismatic movement was Oral Roberts. His City of Faith medical complex in Tulsa served as vivid evidence of the revised relationship between pentecostals and orthodox medicine. The chapter concludes with discussion of later examples of pentecostals and charismatics' revised attitude toward medicine, including the Assemblies of God's HealthCare Ministries and the Medical Services Program associated with Pat Robertson's Virginia-based Operation Blessing.

This chapter shows how the prosperity gospel was born out of from the postwar pentecostal revivals and spread far beyond it a decade later. It traces three important shifts. First, it examines the rise of pentecostal confidence in the power of the faith to make words works. Second, it illustrates how as more and more preachers (like Kenneth Hagin, Oral Roberts, A. A. Allen, and T. L. Osborn) began to add money and happiness to the list of things that God could do. It paralleled the wider turn to positive thinking represented by preachers like Norman Vincent Peale. Third, the prosperity gospel gained momentum throughout the 1950s and 1960s as the healing revival spilled into a new revival, what became known as the charismatic movement. The prosperity gospel, in one generation, had outgrown pentecostalism with an expanding network of magazines, radio and television shows, conferences, crusades, bible schools, and fellowships.

This chapter describes how the prosperity gospel resolved the persistent tension between differing attitudes to modern medicine and divine healing. Led by Oral Roberts and his City of Faith medical center, the movement harmonized ideas of healing, treating the supernatural and the natural as complementary tools. Resistance to modern medicine survived in pentecostalism, but as a minority strain. Nonetheless the demonization of disease was emphasized and deliverance demanded a spiritual response. Because a true believer would always be healed, difficulties arose in producing convincing explanations for suffering and death.

This book presents the history of Campus Crusade for Christ as a window into the world of American evangelicalism since 1945. Campus Crusade, founded by Bill Bright at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1951, had, by the century's end, grown into a global evangelical empire. The ministry's staff talked about Jesus Christ at fraternity meetings, evangelized students from Daytona to Balboa on spring break trips, organized evangelistic advertising campaigns in American cities, brought a film about Jesus to remote overseas villages, and hosted conferences designed to “rekindle the fire” of Christian marriages. Alongside Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, Bright was one of the most influential evangelical power brokers of the late twentieth century, able to mobilize large coalitions of conservative Christians for both evangelistic and partisan ends.

This book concludes with a discussion of the Crusade's 2003 staff conference, which marked an indelible turning point in the organization's history. Shortly before the end of the conference, Bill Bright died in his Orlando condominium. Over the last decade of his life, he gradually evidenced his mortality, starting with treatment for prostate cancer in 1993. In 2000, beginning to lose his energy, Bright was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable disease that slowly diminishes lung capacity. Unlike Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts, he did not groom one of his sons as his handpicked successor, instead turning over Crusade's presidency to Steve Douglass in 2001. Over his last two decades at the helm of Campus Crusade, Bright became an evangelical elder statesman.