This session contextualizes twenty-first-century healing, deliverance, and resurrection claims within global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian traditions. Each paper considers religio-cultural, historical, and political contexts to examine the methods, theologies, and social consequences of miracle claims. More specifically, the papers will offer general understandings of Charismatic beliefs, rituals, and practices of healing, deliverance, and resurrections to draw insights into our understanding of academic engagement with communities, archives, and spiritual authorities. Our underlying questions are: what is the Pentecostal-Charismatic distinctive when it comes to healing, deliverance, and resurrection? What happens to our understanding of the contemporary Pentecostal-Charismatic movement when we look at it through the analytical lens of miracles? Given the paucity of scholarly understanding of healing, deliverance, and resurrection claims, specifically among Pentecostal-Charismatics, how can fresh approaches in history, sociology, and ethnography refocus scholarly attention away from a flattening preoccupation with determining veracity and toward the impact on local and global cultural processes?
Healing practices, especially resurrection claims, are critical extensions of Pentecostal piety. As the analytical lens for this paper, I argue that piety—understood as that which attests to how adherents subversively use a distinct set of religio-cultural norms—specifically, Pentecostal piety performed by Black Pentecostal women like Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, solidified them as trusted practitioners and producers of supernatural occurrences. This paper uses the “heavenly experience” of Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, founder of the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, to elucidate the logics inherent to relationships articulated between religious authority, belief, and practice. As such, it interrogates Pentecostal piety's religio-cultural, -social, and -economic discourses within predominantly Black and women-led congregations in the early to mid-twentieth century. This paper emphasizes how Black Pentecostal women’s demonstration of Pentecostal piety—e.g., authority over sickness and death—went beyond the confines of the liturgy and worship to have practical importance.
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.
This paper examines resurrection miracles—forms of divine healing prayer intended to bring dead bodies back to life. Resurrections (also called “raisings” and “resuscitations”) have appeared across the history of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Reports of raisings surfaced at the Azusa Street Revival, in the healing and deliverance revivals of the mid-twentieth century, and in later fires of independent Charismatic Christianity. In each iteration, dead-raising has been a transnational phenomenon subject to variation and debate. It is simultaneously empirically exceptional, perennially entangled in theological questions central to the history of Christianity, and has served as a source of Pentecostalism’s appeal. Dead-raising is a limit case of divine healing through which scholars of religion can look afresh on Pentecostal-Charismatic biblical hermeneutics, theodicies, and atonement theories. Examining resurrection sheds new light on approaches to prayer, modern medical technology, spiritual warfare, time, the body, and conceptualizing the meaning of human life and death.
This paper explains why practices aimed at “freedom from demons” play a significant, poorly understood role in Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity, and it illuminates how U.S. practices emerged though multi-staged, cross-cultural interactions. Despite the centrality of exorcism/deliverance to the ministry of Jesus—and widespread popular belief in demons today—the subject is controversial, or ignored, in most U.S. churches. A U.S. leadership vacuum is filled by maverick, self-styled exorcists whose sensationalism exacerbates suffering. Meanwhile, deliverance is well-integrated into many Global South churches. Spiritual cosmologies can obscure or facilitate awareness of structural injustices. The same term—liberación in Spanish, liberação in Portuguese—can denote spiritual and social freedom. Historically, as U.S. missionaries observed indigenous evangelists perform exorcisms, some missionaries became convinced of the reality of demons. At first discounting the problem as irrelevant to “civilized Americans,” later encounters with similar phenomena in the United States convinced missionaries that North Americans also need deliverance.