The Biopolitics of Miracles

The persistence of miracles in Pentecostal and Charismatic networks reveals the limits of enlightenment epistemologies in popular, global anthropologies. Traffic in miracles is evidence that most people, across the world, do not understand illness in a strictly scientific manner, but readily look for spiritual solutions to all kinds of distress, including those more flatly understood as “physical.” Scholars have demonstrated that healing and deliverance are core to the appeal of pentecostalisms, globally, but the continued appeal of miraculous interventions in the US religious market, in particular, suggests that many established scholarly explanations for the appeal of miracles such as lack of access to good healthcare or financial resources, have not been capacious enough. Healing remains a draw in US charismatic networks that are surprisingly well-off, well-accessed, and better-educated. This paper interrogates affluent healing for its consonance with wider consumptive and  democratic cultures and wrestles with their political import worldwide.