Faith healing. Spirit workers who channel the healing power of God? Or charlatans who scam sums from society’s most susceptible?
Or — third option here — neither?
It’s more with a sense of academic curiosity than pious conviction that I drive to an event billed as the “Holy Spirit Supernatural Experience.”
The event flier promises to heal cancer, remove paralysis, and bring the dead back to life, among other things.
I didn’t grow up around the church. As a child I was pretty smug in my iron-clad stance against the Bible, on the grounds that the text was “made up.”
(I hadn’t yet accepted that pretty much everything we’re doing as humans is “made up.”)
It was a pretty simple — and for a child, edgy — stance to take. Later in life though, I would dive deeply enough into Eastern spiritual traditions to wind up full circle, acknowledging Jesus as an early enlightened individual and influential prophet in the Western world.
Above: promotional text for the event
The last piece of the puzzle is my lifelong fascination with mystery and magic. I grew up doing magic tricks, and then moved into studying mentalism and hypnosis. Hypnosis, we’ll come to see, provides a useful analogue through which to understand the phenomenon of faith healing.
While I’ve come to view Jesus as a pretty rad guy, the question of what we’ve done with his teachings in the years since 33 AD is a different matter entirely — and that’s how we wind up here, in this small, dimly-lit room, waiting to experience the supernatural power of God.
The Faith Healer
The faith healer himself is a tightly-wound man in a crisp suit. He seems to have bottomless wellsprings of energy, which aid the continuous stream of praise exiting him at high velocity.
His accent is nebulous, as he relates tales of God’s healing power.
“People were coming (amen) to the church who were Hindus,” he proclaimed. “Staunch Hindus, came to the church, stood right in front of me, the power of God HIT THEM, and they fell down.”
Left: Conversion in Chandigarh, India, Right: televangelist Benny Hinn
While researching for this article, I learned that there’s a particular dynamic between Christian faith healers and (especially rural) Indian communities. Many areas in India remain steeped in traditions of magic, and having never encountered the charismatic suggestion of faith healing, the people there can be particularly vulnerable to the work of evangelical missionary groups. Some Christian faith healers take issue with Hinduism’s wide pantheon of colorful deities, even “exorcising” important gods in the name of Jesus.
The healer gesticulates wildly with his hands as he speaks. There are murmurs of awe and approval amongst the audience.
“That tells you that their psychology is not programmed for a church response! It’s the power of God!”
(This line is cleverly placed, driving a stake through any burgeoning thoughts of suggestion.)
When the healer anoints the floor with a mystical oil that will “bring God into the room,” to the audience, it feels real. They can see and smell the oil, and the man on stage is telling them what that means.
The healer has styled himself an Apostle, and his wife a Prophetess. He tells the story of the Prophetess preaching from a glass pulpit, when she leaned in and went toppling with the pulpit to the ground. The shattered glass severed her hand, leaving it dangling by a thread of sinew. I know, because an iPhone was passed around showing a photo of the carnage.
As the healer tells it, although the Prophetess was rushed to the hospital, she was pronounced dead by doctors. The healer began to pray from thousands of miles away in the United States, he says, and started to speak in tongues. That’s when his wife felt herself being sucked back from the void into her body. She heard a booming voice, reportedly, saying “your time has not yet come.”
At first they were told the hand would have to be amputated, but through the power of prayer, top doctors reattached it. Then they were told that the hand would not function, until the healer prayed over it. Finger by finger, the story goes, his wife’s hand regained its function. She demonstrates this to the service by casually passing a Macbook from one hand to the other.
At this, the service bursts into an emphatic outpouring of praise for the miracles of God. It’s not about anything happening in the room right now — it’s about the stories we tell ourselves.
Faith Healing and Suggestion
Surely to the displeasure of atheists around the world, we must acknowledge that faith healing often yields powerful results.
Faith healing, hypnosis, and the placebo effect all draw on the same mysterious force — the untapped power of the human mind.
In a hypnotherapist’s office, you show up to the waiting room. There, the hypnotic encounter begins when you interact with a very professional secretary. Wow, what a professional operation, you think to yourself. When you go to meet the hypnotist, he asks you to sit down. He might say something like, so you’ve come here to…quit smoking? Ah yes, I see you’ve tried other strategies but haven’t quite found the solution. Well, it’s good you decided to get this done with hypnotherapy. Each week, people come in here, and they find themselves letting go of bad habits quickly and easily. So shall we get started?
The belief and expectation, ultimately, are the on-ramps that allow the patient to access new mental resources and accomplish their goal, in this case, quitting smoking.
Meanwhile, as I enter the faith healing service, I’m ushered to my seat by a lady who works with the church. So what are you here for, she asks me. I tell her I’ve been looking for a service like this, which is technically true. Well, you are just going to love it, she says. You are going to be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. Please, sit down here in one of the first four rows.
I sit down in one of those rows. The room isn’t filled, but with everyone crammed together you can begin to feel the pull of the greater groupthink. It’s similar to the feeling of anonymity you’d experience in the throng of a dance floor, which evaporates when you move to the periphery and observe the party from the sidelines.
When the healer speaks, it doesn’t sound too different from the hypnotist…although the clinical, professional tone has been exchanged for prayerful charisma.
People everywhere come to me, they come to me because they’re feeling something. They know that a change is coming, and that God is coming here TONIGHT! The Power of God is all around us, and let me tell you, for those who BELIEVE, the HEALING is here. There is no obstacle that God can’t remove, now let the supernatural Power of God move through you!
Again, we can see this theme of belief plus expectation.
Compared to the other attendees, I’m probably rather low in my reserves of belief, and I don’t really know what to expect. When the healer points and tells us to speak in tongues, NOW, I’m not sure how it’s supposed to sound.
“Shabba-dabba-ya,” I offer, which elicits a few uncertain glances from my newfound peers.
Indeed, when I stop my gentle, rhythmic swaying long enough to peek around, the woman who had ushered me to my seat is peering directly at me, her eyes narrowed into focused slits of suspicion. I retreat back under the cover of the music, and soon enough I had camouflaged into the swirling atmosphere of the room.
For me, this is a unique and interesting cultural experience. But for others here, it’s about to become much more than that.
(Suggestion is a deep rabbit hole — the force that runs “demonic possession” is the same thing that runs Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s an extension of the mind’s free associative capacity, sometimes uncovered by trauma, which has become empowered by belief. If you’re interested in this phenomenon, I wrote an in-depth look at it above.)
The Performance of Faith
While some aspects of the event seem to mirror a hypnotherapist’s office (the healing, the secretary), other aspects more closely resemble the performance of a stage hypnotist (the music, the seating, the showbiz).
One interesting moment occurred at the beginning of the event, when the healer stopped for a moment and said, “yes, the Holy Spirit is whispering something to me right now. It says that someone here doesn’t hear well…in their right ear? Yes, that’s been healed right now, right this moment, praise God!”
Later, when people came to the stage to share testimonials of their healing, one man from West Africa told how the healer’s blessing had solved his stomach pains.
“And one more thing,” he added. “I haven’t been hearing well in my right ear. So when I heard you say that today, I knew I had to claim it! I have to agree with God!”
So what happened there? How did the healer know about the right ear?
From a mystery performer’s point of view, this would be classified as either “cold reading” or “hot reading.”
Cold reading is when a performer goes in “cold,” without any information about the querent. They use psychology, probability, and some good old-fashioned guessing to appear as if they know detailed, private information.
Hot reading is where the performer goes in “hot,” with some kind of prepared knowledge. They reveal this information as though it were coming from a supernatural source. In fact, at the service, I was asked to write down any afflictions on a small contact card so the church could pray for me.
Who’s to say if any given faith healer is drawing on information like this?
Is Faith Healing Real or a Scam?
The deeper you dive into this question, the less clear the answer becomes.
I spent most of my life as a purely scientific atheist, so I know the image of the skeezy snake oil salesman preacher, working his congregation into an emotional tizzy and collecting hefty donations. But things are rarely that cut-and-dry.
If you don’t believe in psychics, you may picture them scamming vulnerable people out of their money, without considering that both parties have agreed on the service. The psychic likely takes their craft quite seriously, and customers may find genuine comfort in the readings.
Now, in the case of the specific healing I attended, the healer did directly claim that he would heal cancer and necromance the dead back to life. That’s gonna put you in the skeezy snake oil category pretty fast.
But there’s one reason why faith healing isn’t an open-and-shut case — it can actually work. Indeed, faith healing delivers results at a truly surprising rate.
Yes, this is another example of the placebo effect. But the linked Psychology Today article posits that placebos could account for more than half of the successes of non-surgical medicine. It might be time for us to start thinking more deeply about the effects of belief and thought on our physical bodies.
Some people want to feel the presence of God, more than they want to hear or think about it. Obviously, this can pose problems if it prevents you from getting real, necessary medical care.
But at the same time, at its core, the desire to feel God on an intuitive, sensory level lines up with the science of placebo effects and neuroplasticity.
History of Faith Healing and Suggestion
In 18th century Paris, Franz Anton Mesmer caused a stir with his “animal magnetism” theory of magnetic healing. When Benjamin Franklin himself crossed the Atlantic to investigate, it led to the first ever double-blind placebo controlled trial, as well as the birth of hypnosis.
Mesmer was a sort of faith healer in his own right, although he considered his work to be purely scientific. He ditched his magnets early on and healed people with “magnetic passes” of his hands, combined with a piercing, impossible-to-describe gaze. There was no language at all, no verbal suggestions — even so, many of his patients experienced miraculous, lasting healing.
European interest in animal magnetism waned in the years after Mesmer, but the idea found a new audience in the United States. Americans were becoming very interested in pseudosciences such as homeopathy (which aimed to treat illnesses with water) and phrenology (which aimed to understand people’s characteristics and intelligence through the size and shape of their skulls, and was often used to justify white supremacist racial theory).
Arguably the biggest institution to rise at this time was Spiritualism.
Spiritualism was a new, social take on Christianity which believed people on Earth could physically interact with spirits in the afterlife. The movement was catalyzed by the Fox sisters, who reported supernatural knocking sounds in their home. The sounds were identified as “spirit rappings” of a deceased soul.
The Fox sisters became instant celebrity mediums, and their public séances were a hit. The only problem is that it was all a hoax.
The Fox sisters laters admitted that their first rappings were made by tying a string to an apple and pulling it down the stairs. They produced later sounds by cracking the joints of their toes.
By then it was too late, and Spiritualism had seized the spotlight of public attention. This is where we get floating tables, crystal balls, and all the trappings of the classical séance image, as people around the country gathered into small rooms to try these things for themselves.
While plenty of practitioners held genuine intentions and ended up deceiving themselves, there were also plenty of frauds looking to capitalize on the growing trend. The nation was captivated by Spiritualism, and anyone who could demonstrate it for audiences stood to make a lot of money.
This is actually the origin of mentalism! The first generation of mentalists all posed as genuine psychics. They used tricks to prove their abilities for large audiences, and were constantly trying to expose each other as frauds.
Early mentalists used sleight of hand and magic tricks to accomplish their feats, while faith healers and spirit mediums used the protohypnotic groundwork laid out by Mesmer. This is the true birth of the charismatic Christian faith healing spectacle that we know today.
The whole phenomenon didn’t slow down until Houdini started dedicating one-third of his stage time to exposing fraudulent Spiritualists. It’s truly crazy to think of all the ways that these things intersect.
***
Hypnosis heals people by helping them access untapped mental resources. Those shifts can create incredible results, from dissolving someone’s urge to smoke, to permanently removing their chronic allergies. It does all this with the power of focused attention and belief.
If amplitude of the focused attention, and depth of the belief itself have anything to do with it, we must consider that for certain audiences, Christian faith healing could actually yield more powerful results than traditional clinical hypnosis.
The answer to the question of faith healing is a spectrum. Some people will abuse it, while others will find a balance that works. We need to understand when it’s time to pray or meditate, and when it’s time to go to the hospital.
But our modern medical system is also missing several pieces to the puzzle of human life. One of those pieces may be the real, physical implications of faith and belief on healing.
I’m not the first magician-type guy to dial in on the question of faith healing.
UK mentalist Derren Brown famously blew the lid off the subject when he posed as a faith healer in Messiah, his TV special investigating the relationship between suggestion and “supernatural” phenomena in the United States. He called himself James Lawrence, a healer who had been anointed by God with the power to convert atheists to Christianity via a single touch.
Surprisingly, the demonstration caused several avowed atheists to suddenly accept God (is it any wonder that religious communities in India are upset about this kind of trick being used on people?)
Later in his stage show Miracle, Derren performed a demonstration of “secular faith healing.” He told the audience that he was unabashedly atheist, and that he would use the language of Christianity to demonstrate the effect. After a tongue-in-cheek performance of classical faith healing techniques, scores of audience members were stunned to report deep feelings of healing in parts of their bodies that had been weak or damaged for years.
“You realize how these performers start to go mad,” he later said in an interview with Joe Rogan. “You think, well I’ve got this special gift. I could pack out stadia doing this.”
“I did think at one point, why don’t I do a secular healing show? And say, well you know, it doesn’t work on everybody, and it may only work for ten minutes, but it certainly works in some meaning of the word! Anyway, I didn’t do that, but you know…you can start to go mad.”
If you’re really interested in this subject, you can even dive into this fascinating academic study by skeptic and magician James Randi.
All that to say, it was never my plan to write something about this experience. I went to the service out of pure curiosity and intrigue, and it’s not my intention to write a hit piece about this unnamed faith healer. Nonetheless, after several friends urged me to pen down some thoughts, I eventually did.
I certainly don’t have all the answers on this subject. I’m just one guy, with a weirdly intense interest in questions of consciousness and the mystery arts.
But I hope this anecdotal write-up has been thought provoking in one way or another. I hope it inspires us to ask questions about the supernatural in the everyday, and the mind-arrangements that allow us to access it.