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Curtis is to be commended, especially, for bringing together practice and theology. Although she is centrally interested in the practices of faith healing—the laying on of hands, and so forth—she always situates her consideration of these practices in the story of 19th-century theology. Curtis teases out the connections between the new emphasis on healing and the holiness and Higher Life movements, and she also explores the impact of premillennialism: the imminence of Christ's return was one reason that proponents of faith healing insisted that "passive resignation was not an appropriate posture for Christians to adopt when confronted with the problem of sickness or pain." Rather than languishing in bed, Christ's footsoldiers needed to get out there and spread the Gospel to the unconverted world, before it was too late.
Curtis also fruitfully attends to gender at almost every turn. In discussing the era of passive resignation to illness, she makes the point that although women were expected to quietly embrace the rest cure, men were not: they might take to the bed for a day or two, but then the imperatives of earning a living got them out of the sickroom and back to the factory. Similarly, faith healing allowed women to at once flout and abide by gender conventions. In praying and then rising from their beds, women challenged assumptions about women's natural weakness and contravened doctors orders to rest quietly in bed. But at the same time, women who subscribed to faith healing were allowed to remain, in a sense, passive: faith healing called for women not to rely on their own will or their own strength, but rather to walk through God's power. Even as they got out of bed, women were still, at least discursively, refusing to exercise their own will—thus, in a rather roundabout way, they were able to "arise and walk without overstepping the medical theories and gender norms that required [women] to remain passive in the curative process." The very language about walking through God's power that made faith healing a plausible choice for women turned off some men. To assuage men's concerns that faith healing required them to abandon active masculinity, male proponents focused on the energy and power that a newly healed person found once he had submitted to God and received healing.
Where did this 19th-century movement lead? Although the Pentecostal embrace of divine healing in the 20th century is outside of the scope of Curtis' study, she suggests some of the ways that Pentecostalism both borrowed from and reshaped the 19th-century tradition of faith healing. And Curtis also pokes, gently, at some of the subtle, and subtly pernicious, effects the faith healing movement might have had on the larger American cultural imagination. She suggests, intriguingly, that perhaps one of the more worrying fruits of the movement was the stigmatizing of invalids: in the context of a God who promised health, "chronic illness or infirmity became increasingly problematic." Thus, likely unintentionally, the faith cure movement may have "helped foster disparaging attitudes toward the body in pain that have persisted" to the present. The faith healing movement, in other words, contributed to our culture's assumption that God prefers the able-bodied to the infirm, the vigorous to the halt and the lame.
Heather Curtis has done both the historical guild and the church a great favor in so elegantly narrating the history of a movement that challenged long-standing assumptions about the spiritual utility of corporal pain—and, in so doing, remapped our imaginations and transformed our understanding of suffering.
Lauren F. Winner holds a Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University, and is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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