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A friend of mine who pastors a large church in North Carolina recently totted up the prayer requests he gets from his parishioners. When they ask him for prayer, what do they want him to pray for? In short, healing. He realized what prompts the vast majority of these prayer requests is illness—something like 95 percent of their prayers are for healing, either for themselves or for someone else.
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It's a safe bet that surveys of your church would turn up similar results. How did we come to pray so fervently for recovery from illness? As Heather Curtis notes at the outset of her fascinating first monograph, it has not been ever thus. Although one can certainly find prayer for healing popping up throughout church history, for much of the last 2,000 years those prayerful desires for healing went hand in hand with a certain veneration of bodily affliction. Suffering was seen as a privileged spiritual state: bodily pain presented the believer an opportunity to identify in an especially intense way with the suffering Christ. Hence the many medieval women mystics who actively sought bodily affliction.
By the 1850s, the long tradition of sanctified suffering had combined with Victorian etiquette and gender roles to produce a norm of "passive resignation" in the face of illness. Sick people, in particular female invalids, believed that their sickness was God's will, and the most faithful response was humble submission. Women who patiently bore illness that kept them confined to bed for decades were understood as "spiritual virtuosos," who were often blessed by God with special visions that would sustain them through their trials. Their very bodies, passively propped up on pillows, were tokens of faith in the sufficiency of God's grace.
Between that assumption of sanctified suffering and the characteristic outlook of American Christians early in the 21st century lies a great gulf. How did we arrive at a Christian idiom in which praying for healing is the most natural thing in the world, and where "passive resignation" is often seen as positively unfaithful? Curtis locates the beginnings of the change in the second half of the 19th century, when countless evangelicals challenged the norm of humble submission to illness and created the so-called "faith cure" or "divine healing" movement.
Taking their inspiration from Scripture passages such as James 5:15 ("The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up"), women like Sarah Mix and men like Charles Cullis suggested that God's will was to heal people; indeed, "ongoing invalidism was not an appropriate posture for believers." Rather, sick people were to "act faith." That is, they were to participate in ritual practices that were understood to be efficacious conduits of God's healing power—prayer, the laying on of hands—and then they were to get out of their sickbeds and walk.
One of the most fascinating discussions, in a book full of fascinating discussions, is Curtis' consideration of what it meant to be healed. Many people who were cured by "acting faith" continued to manifest somatic symptoms of their illnesses. They were not necessarily freed of pain. Rather, they were freed from invalidism—they got out of bed, even if doing so was terrifically painful. Being healed, in other words, did not involve only a change of physical state. It also involved an "epistemological reorientation" in which, even though workaday sensory perception might suggest that healing had not occurred, the eyes of faith saw healing. Thus, making sense of suffering and managing pain were as much interpretive acts as biological facts.
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