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This chapter recounts the religion-based medical neglect-related deaths of several children in Oregon, including seven-year-old Tony Hays, who died in 1995 after his parents, members of a Fundamentalist sect known as the Church of the First Born, elected to treat his leukemia solely with prayer. A close study of events in Oregon – and of the religious beliefs of those involved – is especially fruitful because the state is home to one of the largest concentrations of faith-based neglect deaths in the country. Central to this section is a discussion of how prosecutors, judges, and lawmakers in Oregon struggled to balance statutory protections for the religious liberty of faith-healing parents against the state's obligation to safeguard the rights and welfare of children.

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.

In some of the more colorful groups on the American religious spectrum, the religious faith of believers involves a willingness to take substantial physical risks — risks to health, physical functioning, and even the risk of death. This chapter takes a closer look at the influence of religion on high-risk decision making that can result in death. In addressing these issues, it casts a morally inquiring eye on the way in which religious institutions engender these sincere, devout beliefs. This chapter discusses informed consent in faith healing, serpent handling, and refusing medical treatment, along with risk budget and risk style. It also examines three religious groups that participate in practices that impose varying degrees of indirect risk of death by refusal of medical treatment or some component of it: Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Faith Assembly. The practices of a fourth group impose, in addition, a direct threat of death — the various serpent-handling, strychnine-drinking pentecostal groups within the Holiness churches.

“Jesus is my doctor”, a claim made by many black women, raises a rich mélange of culturally resonant issues. Faith is articulated as an active, powerful, protective, creative partnership with a God who loves completely and without reservation. Lived in the body, community, and world, African American women's faith often extends to hope for the healing of all people as a natural corollary of envisioning a new, more perfect world. Faith in “Doctor” Jesus is neither superstitious nor contradictory when grounded in such social and ideological understandings. This chapter explores black women's beliefs in faith healing. It is based on interviews of black women, mostly in the Detroit area, conducted between 1996 and 2003 about their understandings of faith, health, healing, and spirituality. First, it considers some of the basic issues when gender and health cross in black women's lives. Then, it looks at the crossings of medicine with the lives of African American women. Finally, it examines accounts from members of the grassroots Detroit Metropolitan Black Women's Health Project.

This chapter explores the life and ministry of one of the most famous Pentecostal healing evangelists, Francisco Olazábal (1886–1937). The Latino Pentecostal and Charismatic movement that he helped propagate has grown from one Mexican participant at the Azusa Street Revival in 1906 to more than nine million Latino practitioners in 2002. The key to Olazábal's ministry and those of other Latino Pentecostal evangelists engaged in faith healing lie in their emphasis on the holistic relationship between body, mind, and spirit, and their conviction that sickness, disease, and illness are the result of supernatural forces. This conviction is prevalent throughout popular Catholicism, curanderismo or folk healing, spiritualism, spiritism, and some other Latino metaphysical traditions. This chapter also traces the history of Latinos' participation at the Azusa Street Revival and the emergence of American Pentecostalism focused on healing, empowerment, and cultural liberation.

This chapter observes and interprets new forms of independent Pentecostal Christianity emerging in Ghana, West Africa. The new churches emphasize faith healing, a prosperity gospel, and deliverance from demons. Some of the pastors have become prominent on local media outlets with their own television and radio programs, and in some cases, broadcasting stations. One group established a private university. These groups compete and contend with more traditional churches, but some have begun to shift toward more classically Christian approaches to social ministry and personal spirituality. The current popularity of prosperity gospel teaching suggests that materialism and an instrumental approach to religion may be integral to African traditional values and worldviews.

This chapter examines the emergence of spirit-filled religious movement in the United States during the 1960s and the 1970s. This movement significantly shaped modern ministry on several fronts for the next few decades. The impact of this movement in the West is seen with the Jesus people movement and in the South and in the Midwest with the new currents and developments in classical Pentecostalism and faith healing. This movement has not been welcomed the clergy of mainline churches who considered this change more like counterculture than religion.

This chapter discusses the key activity of the girl evangelists – preaching. Various newspaper reports mention the skill of the girl as a speaker, the length of the sermon (often long), and the attention of the audience. The sermon topics are drawn from the stock sermons of revivalist preachers: sin and salvation, the Second Coming of Jesus, attacks on religious modernism and secularism, in particular, the theory of evolution. Girls also spoke against modern fashions and morals, though often they were too young to have experienced much of life themselves. Ands almost always, one sermon dealt with their life story and their call. This would have given them unique sermon material and set them apart from other revivalists – young or old. Sometimes the girls address faith healing too. The chapter also discusses the style of the girls’ preaching.

This chapter examines the unanticipated centrality of tactile experience within what is often asummed to be an exclusively auditory phenomenon: listening to prayer over the radio. Focusing on Appalachian radio faith healers, the chapter considers how the faithful listener in “radioland” must put his or her hand on the radio apparatus in order to receive the healing power of the Holy Ghost. It describes charismatic practices such as skein prayer and radio tactility as performative negotiations of a specific technologically mediated environment just as much as attempts to influence and instantiate supernatural power. It also shows how the performance of prayer and the technical apparatus of radio become indistinguishable and argues that the phenomenon of radio tactility reflects the role of radio technology as a “prosthesis of prayer” and an “apparatus of faith” that supplements and extends the spiritualized language practices and rhetoric of faith healing.

One of the claims commonly made against Indian Christianity is that the physical healing provided in its medical hospitals has served as an illegitimate inducement to Christian faith, either because non-Christians who receive healing feel obligated toward the Christians who provided it, or because non-Christians are impressed and attracted by the great displays of western wealth and technological power on display in Indian Christian hospitals. This claim is in many ways undermined by the growing prevalence of Christian faith healing, and what the chapter calls “recuperative conversions,” that is, conversions to Christianity brought about by spiritual or physical healing wrought by the prayerful interventions of Christian thaumaturges, many of them Pentecostal. Whatever else they may be, these healings are not dependent on displays of western wealth and power, and so they alter the contours of the debate about inducement in significant ways.

This chapter canvasses the various meanings of modernity and secularization, and develops a partial typology of Protestant reactions to these key themes of the twentieth century. Through the author’s expertise in global charismatic and divine healing movements, and shifting interpretations of sacred texts and religious practice, the chapter notes six categories of Protestant responses, which are to: (1) reinterpret the Bible in light of modern scholarship; (2) reaffirm the Bible’s authoritative status; (3) recontextualize the Bible in light of modern society and culture; (4) reinterpret medical materialism through the prism of biblical supernaturalism; (5) reassess the Bible’s compatibility with a plurality of spiritual healing resources; and (6) reappropriate modern technologies for traditional biblical ends. The chapter notes the challenges to the standard secularization theory, and to the self-definition of Protestant dissenting movements, as they move around the world. It illustrates these points with particular reference to the rise of African indigenous charismatic dissenting practice, starting with key figures such as William Wadé Harris.

This chapter traces the history of American metaphysical religion, including the development and practice of astrology, witchcraft, the occult, alternative therapies, mind cure, New Thought, Christian Science, faith healing, and the New Age. It first considers early experiences of metaphysical religious healing among Anglo Americans before turning to some of the most prominent characters and important movements known to have practiced metaphysical and religious healing arts in the American West and Southwest. Using Catherine Albanese's term “metaphysical religions” as well as her definition of the same, it then examines the narrative assumptions of many white settlers concerning health in relation to Mexican Americans' notions of healing and sickness.

This chapter discusses how madness was understood and treated in late imperial China. Arguing that madness was considered a simultaneously biological, social, supernatural, and moral issue, it shows how the insane were cared for by a range of healers, including literati physicians, herbalists, shamans, and faith healers. The chapter begins with a discussion of Qing dynasty legal codes, which mandated that the insane be confined within the home. The remainder of the chapter explores different modes of understanding, explaining, and treating the mad condition during the late imperial period. Practitioners of Chinese medicine traced madness to biological, environmental, gendered, and emotional causes. Supernatural healers posited a relationship between madness, demonic possession, and the displeasure of deceased ancestors or gods. Finally, many families attributed the onset of madness to social causes, such as financial insecurity, heartbreak, or the pressure of preparing for the civil service examinations.