The present paper puts in dialogue religion, migration, and medicine by examining how Brazilian immigrants living in the USA who frequently participate in Pentecostal faith healing rituals understand health and illness. The investigation on which the paper is based was guided by two main research questions. First, how do health and illness are defined during Pentecostal healing practices? Secondly, how do the immigrants who frequently participate in these rituals comprehend and take care of their own health? The questions aimed at examining how faith healing practices shaped the way these individuals understand health and illness while living as immigrants in a heavily medicalized society in which they have access to medical treatment through government programs (MassHealth). They express an interest in grasping if practicing faith healing influences them to relate to the dominant medical discourse in a particular Pentecostal way. To answer the research questions, I conducted 114 hours of ethnographic research in a temple of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in Greater Boston. I also interviewed 11 members who weakly participated in the church`s healing practices during the period of fieldwork. The findings demonstrated that participants resist the total spiritualization of health promoted by the healing practices and the total medicalization of society pushed by medical institutions by taking care of their health through practices that engage both their religious beliefs and medical knowledge.
The study of Pentecostal faith healing practices is strongly present in the sociological literature about Pentecostalism in Latin America. Most studies highlight the relevance of faith healing to the expansion of this religious strand in the region and try to explain why these practices appeal to the population. For some authors, Pentecostal healing is appealing because it can remedy the “disease of poverty” and the lack of access to medical care that affects individuals of lower socioeconomic status (Bomann, 1999; Chestnut, 1997; Mariz, 1994). Others argue that it provides a sense of agency and power through the mobilization of the notion of total dependency on a God that is capable of everything (Lindhart, 2012); or creates a web of relationships based on a double bind through the promise of healing (Lehmann, 2024). The present paper complicates this literature by pushing forward the Enchanted Modernity framework (Morello, 2021). This theoretical framework argues that the best way to study religion in Latin America is through the lived religion approach, which focuses on investigating how religion happens in everyday life through the examination of people's religious practices. While previous studies have concentrated mainly on beliefs and cognitive aspects, I argue that the lived religion approach can provide more nuance to the study of Pentecostal faith healing in Latin America as it examines how individuals mobilize their own perspectives about religion and medicine in the daily practices they undertake to take care of their health in the context of migration.
The idea of Enchanted Modernity proposed (Morello, 2021) starts from the assumption that the interaction between religion and modernity in Latin America transformed how individuals practice religion. The author argues that, in the region, “there is more religion than what secularists expect, but of a different kind than the religious leader would wish” (Morello, 2021, p.3). In Latin America, religion is not confined to the religious sphere; it penetrates and is historically interrelated with secular institutions (Morello, 2021). This shapes how subjects in the region practice their religiosity but it does not mean there is no tension between religious and secular discourses. Individuals still have to manage this tension while navigating social institutions. However, this does not happen as a clear “alternation”. The religious and secular spheres are more intertwined than Western secularists would expect. This is true for the relationship between religion and medicine, areas that are historically connected in the region (Armus; Gomez, 2021; Low, 1988).
Failing to grasp this interconnection between the religious and the medical spheres can lead sociologists to naturalize the medical paradigm of healing and illness while researching religious healing in the region. This naturalization suggests that the medical worldview primarily orients the individuals’ actions regarding their health. In contrast and aligned with the lived religion approach, I adopt a meaning-centered medical sociology that takes an interpretative approach to medicine. As Danforth (1989, p. 51) states, in this perspective, “medicine is seen as a cultural system that can only be understood holistically in the context of other social and cultural systems”. The interpretative approach questions the authority of the medical paradigm of health and illness. It also proposes that people construct their own meanings regarding these concepts based on their specific cultural reality (Lupton, 2012). It defends that the idea of health is a complex construction that cannot be comprehended apart from the non-medical aspects of the social system. Therefore, explaining the adherence to Pentecostal faith healing in Latin America only through poverty, lack of agency, and the obstacles to accessing medical care in the region ignores the cultural aspect of health, illness, and healing.
The ethnographic research showed that the church’s healing system is based on a dualistic and hierarchical perspective on health that promotes the total spiritualization of medicine. However, the interviews demonstrated that members exercise their agency by conducting daily practices that resist both the spiritualization of medicine and the medicalization of society through the construction of a dualistic and horizontal interpretation of health and illness that is simultaneously based on religious and medical definitions. I argue that the empirical evidence collected reinforces the theoretical premises proposed by the Enchanted Modernity perspective (Morello, 2021). The results show that the Pentecostal subjects manage the tension between religion and medicine to navigate the medical and the religious worlds without contradictions that would weaken their faith or lead them to medical denialism. This provides more nuance to the claim that these individuals only engage in faith healing practices because they do not have access to medical care.
Faith healing has been central to Pentecostalism expansion in Latin America. However, most sociological studies that investigate this practice in the region start from theoretical assumptions that do not reflect the region’s religious reality. Using a lived religion approach, I explore how members of a Brazilian Pentecostal church in greater Boston make sense of this religious institution's healing system to construct their own definitions of illness and health. The research draws from 114 hours of ethnographic observation of the church’s practices and 11 interviews. The results show that the church’s healing system is based on a dualistic and hierarchical perspective on health that promotes the total spiritualization of medicine. However, members exercise their agency by resisting both the spiritualization of medicine and the medicalization of society through the construction of a dualistic and horizontal interpretation of health and illness that is simultaneously based on religious and medical definitions