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 are willing to look for spiritual solutions to physical distress. 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, has not been imaginative enough. Healing remains a draw in US charismatic networks that are (according to data) 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.
The first section discusses how affluent Texas megachurches construct their offering for healing prayers today. First person participant observations, youtube recordings of services, and online materials offered by these megachurches, reveal the manners in which healing is articulated in present day as a reasonable, good faith, church offering. Churches facilitate the construction of a time-space for accessing divine healing that is intimate and sacred, but still considered appropriate for media circulation. In comparison to denominational Pentecostal churches, data shows megachurch attenders to be higher in college attainment and financial resources. Affluent megachurch practices reveal how healing readily fits into a wide array of existential concerns and spiritual ambitions of the 21st century US adherents.
Part two sets healing rhetoric and practice within the wider contexts of megachurch rhetoric about Covid-19. Recourse to this time period allows emergent doctrine about healing to be supplemented with its coordinating doctrine of disease. Texas megachurches formed part of a brigade of churches that successfully resisted church closures during the Covid pandemic. San Antonio megachurch minister and New York Times’ bestseller John Hagee, upon his return to the pulpit after hospitalization for double pneumonia, proclaimed: "I bring under the authority of Jesus Christ every sickness and every disease and especially the COVID thing that’s sweeping this nation. We have a vaccine. The name is Jesus Christ, the son of the living God.” Hagee successfully sued his county for forcing closures on Cornerstone Church. By June 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had issued directives against gatherings of any more than 10 persons, including in churches, tweeted out an about-face:
“:I just signed a law that prohibits any government agency or public official
from issuing an order that closes places of worship.
The First Amendment right to freedom of religion shall never be infringed.”
Texas House Bill 1239 prohibits the “suspension of laws protecting religious freedom and prohibited closure of places of worship.”
The third part of this paper reads charismatic healing practices in dramatic dialogue with charismatic church legal discourse about religious freedom. Bids for freedom from disease, performed by traversing into altar space and receiving prayer even during mandated church closures, turn out to be predicated on real, durable religious authority that surpasses scientific authority; bodily religious freedoms in turn form a performative base for charismatics’ material mobilization of religious freedom. This powerful dual construction of freedom and authority, I argue, are themselves desirable religious goods for affluent charismatic adherents.
In the final section of my paper, I wrestle with what religiously protected medical autonomy demonstrates about the limits of science to produce a secular public square. The pandemic, I argue, occasioned a clear view of the competing pressures of secularity and religious freedom on the body politic and on physical bodies. Given that legal challenges were often sustained in favor of church liberties and the subsequent election of Donald Trump (with Robert F Kennedy as health minister) to the presidency, again, US legal doctrine about religious freedom has proven durable, and may have played a strong part in the outcomes of this past election. Religious biopolitics are demonstrating a shaping power in public discourse, public life, and have obvious electoral consequences. Might they also shape geopolitical currents? Soon after his inauguration as 47th president of the United States on Jan. 20, Donald Trump signed an executive order that withdrew the U.S. from membership in the World Health Organization. Charismatic healing practices, as part of the motivation for their support of Donald Trump, have global impacts that deserve interrogation.
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.