Divine Healing

Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review 2018, 79:1 35–57
doi: 10.1093/socrel/srx046
Advance Access Publication 24 October 2017
“In the Lord’s Hands’: Divine Healing

and Embodiment in a Fundamentalist
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Christian Church”
Lindsay W. Glassman*
University of Pennsylvania
At Full Truth Calvary Church, members reject modern medicine, avoid prescription glasses, and even
refuse to wear seatbelts, choosing instead to pray for healing and protection from God. Using three
years of ethnographic data from Full Truth, I show that church members’ rejection of modern medicine
is an embodied, or physically enacted, religious practice shaped by church teachings that assign mean-
ing to the ill or well body. Moreover, I find that when members do receive medical care, they must
negotiate competing institutional logics to frame the incident in religious terms, either as persecution or
as a rejection of Full Truth teachings. These findings extend past research on embodiment to show that
healing practices allow believers to express their faith in ways similar to those who perform religious
identity through dress or diet. They further reveal that embodied practices remain inseparable from
institutional meanings, such that rejecting one is rejecting both.
Key words: embodiment; healing; fundamentalism.
INTRODUCTION
Members of Full Truth Calvary Church (Full Truth)1 reject all forms of mod-
ern medicine, including antibiotics, contraceptives, prescription glasses, and
even safety measures like seatbelts. Instead, the 500 members of this urban fun-
damentalist Christian congregation choose to pray for healing and protection
from God. They claim that by doing so they are demonstrating total faith in God
*Direct correspondence to Lindsay W. Glassman, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust

Walk, Suite 113, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. E-mail: lwglass@sas.upenn.edu.
Full Truth Calvary Church, as well as the names of all respondents, are pseudonyms.
1
© The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association
for the Sociology of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: jour-
nals.permissions@oup.com.
35
36 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION
over interventions promoted by outsiders, or “the world.” Using three years of
ethnographic, interview, and written data I ask: how can we understand health
practices—specifically prayers for God’s intervention to heal (what I call “divine
healing”)—as a form of embodiment, meaning a practice by which believers phys-

ically enact their faith? And furthermore, how do institutions shape such reli-
gious embodiment? I build on past work by McGuire (1988, 1993, 2008) and
others to present three key findings: (1) that health practices are an important
and under-examined form of religious embodiment; (2) that religious institutions
play a crucial role in shaping embodied health practices as spiritually salient by
assigning religious meaning to the ill or well body; and (3) that institutional
membership is inextricably linked to those meanings, such that members who
reject divine healing are rejecting church teachings as a whole.
Sociologists have long found that embodied practices are important to the
performance of religious identity. Specific forms of dress (Bartkowski and Read
2003; Rao 2015; Tavory 2010), diet (Davidman 1991; Griffith 1997), and hygiene
(Avishai 2008; Hartman and Marmon 2004) are all ways that believers bring reli-
gious principles like modesty or purity into their personal experience, strengthen-
ing religious conviction and performing those values for themselves and others.
Studies of divine healing rarely discuss health and religion in the vocabulary
of embodiment, but there is evidence that those who use divine healing prac-
tices, such as prayer, group rituals, or spiritual touch (also called the “laying on
of hands”)2 do so to express their faith in ways similar to those who embody their
religion through dress or diet. An important exception is the seminal work of
McGuire (1988, 1993, 2008), who finds that healing practices are indeed key
to believers’ faith, and serve as a way to physically perform spiritual meaning.
However, McGuire primarily explores divine healing as highly individualis-
tic, revealing practices that exist largely apart from, or even in opposition to,
institutions.
My findings suggest that the relationship between healing and religious
embodiment is more complex than these individualistic accounts would indi-
cate. Church leaders at Full Truth shape the meaning of divine healing, such that
believers experience it as a key way to perform their faith even when most heal-
ing occurs in private spaces. When members do receive care, either by choice or
under pressure from outside institutions like the court system, they must grapple
with competing institutional logics of health and what each logic means for their
faith. I find not only that institutions matter in embodiment, but specifically that
the ways in which they matter depend on individuals’ religious beliefs. Those who
continue to identify as “true believers” stay in the church and frame their medical
care as “forced,” bolstering a longstanding narrative of religious persecution by
outside (often state) institutions. Those who no longer identify with Full Truth
2
See Glik (1988), McGuire (1988), Stolz (2011), and Watts (2011) for fuller case studies
of divine healing practices.
DIVINE HEALING AND EMBODIMENT 37
teachings typically leave the church, framing their decision to do so as part of an

uncoupling process in which they no longer ascribe to the church’s interpretation
of the ill versus well body, even as they continue to consider themselves religious
Christians.

THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL BACKGROUND
Social scientists have described the body as both a site upon which larger
social processes are inscribed (Foucault 1977) and a vehicle through which indi-
viduals perform notions of the self (Butler 1993; Csordas 1994). I find that though
studies of embodiment rarely discuss health practices—including divine heal-
ing—scholars acknowledge healing as the experience of social values and moral-
ity within the body (Brandt and Rozin 2013; Conrad 1994; Saguy and Gruys
2010). Indeed, sociologists of religion reveal that some believers do experience
religious principles, such as conflict between God and Satan, within the body
(Poloma and Green 2010; Stolz 2011). However, studies of both embodiment
and divine healing leave under-examined the role of institutions in shaping such
practices, as well as how believers experience competing institutional meanings
of the ill body.
Embodiment is the study of “the body as a site for the negotiation of identity,
power, and social relations” (Bartkowski 2005: 8). Studies of religious embodi-
ment suggest that what believers wear, eat, and do shapes how they understand
and perform their faith. Scholarship on dress, for example, reveals that specific
clothing items like the hijab (Bartkowski and Read 2003; Rao 2015) or yarmulke
(Tavory 2010), as well as modest clothing (Davidman 1991), are all ways that
religious individuals signal to themselves and others that they are members of a
specific group. Clothing becomes an important method of drawing boundaries, or
“conceptual distinctions” with outsiders (Lamont and Molnár 2002). Research
also suggests that the removal of such markers is an important step in the process
of leaving specific religious groups (Davidman 2015), highlighting the signifi-
cance of embodied practices for religious identity and suggesting that, for believ-
ers, the practice is inextricably linked to the meaning that it signifies.
There is also evidence that specific behaviors or rituals are part of embodi-
ment. For example, Avishai (2008) finds that orthodox Jewish women comply-
ing with complex rules around marital sexuality and menstruation do not see
themselves as passive participants but as actively “doing” their religion and faith
identity (see also Hartman and Marmon 2004). Others find similarly that rules
around sexual purity (Regnerus 2007) and diet (Buckser 1999; Davidman 2015;
Griffith 1997) are ways of doing religion, as the performance of such rituals brings
religious observance into bodily experience.
Research suggests that divine healing practices, including individual and
group prayers for wellness, as well as spiritual touch or the “laying on of hands”
(Barnes and Sered 2005), is tremendously popular in the United States: 70–80
percent of the total U.S. population believe that spiritual or religious practices
may impact healing (Brown 2011; Poloma 1991), and 45 percent report having
prayed about their health (Bell et al. 2005). Among Pentecostals, as many as 98
percent have prayed with others for healing and 93 percent claim to have per-

sonally experienced an “inner or emotional healing” (Poloma and Green 2010).
As practices that “make the invisible visible” (Orsi 2013), elements of divine
healing like prayer, visualization, and group ritual bring religious experience into
the physical body.
Studies of divine healing rarely discuss health and religion in the vocabulary
of embodiment, but there is evidence that those who use divine healing do so to
express their faith in ways similar to those who embody their religion through
dress or diet. Just as elements of religious dress symbolize principles like modesty,
the existing literature suggests that divine healing functions by reconceptualizing
the meaning of illness and recovery for individuals through the conversion of
physical or psychological ailments into what Geertz (1973) would deem “cul-
tural symbols.” These symbols serve as an “expression of [believers’] concerns for
meaning, moral order, and individual effectiveness and power in the social world”
(McGuire 1988:6). Divine healing mirrors other embodied rituals, such as the
ritual baths described by Avishai (2008), as one way that “the sacred is made viv-
idly real and present through the experiencing body” (McGuire 2008:13), and a
key practice by which individuals perform religious meanings for themselves and
others (McGuire 2008; Poloma and Green 2010; Stolz 2011).
McGuire’s work is exceptional in its more explicit discussion of divine heal-
ing as an embodied practice, which she examines through the lens of “lived reli-
gion” (2008). She argues that healing rituals offer an opportunity for “holism” in
modern life, through which believers can integrate a wide variety of practices and
beliefs into a process that feels individually salient (McGuire 2008). However,
though McGuire acknowledges that the experience of health and religious prac-
tice have institutional components, she limits her discussion of the importance
of institutions to the historical process by which health and religion became sep-
arated. One of her most valuable contributions is to show that the institutional
separation of sacred and profane activities during the Protestant Reformation also
severed bodily experience from religious experience, a process reinforced by the
growing professionalization of medicine. In considering modern divine healing
practices, she does not distinguish between practices promoted by “recognized,
official religious groups” and those of a more general spiritual nature (McGuire
2008:120), arguing that both groups craft highly individualized practices that for
some are an active critique of rigid institutional rules. However, in combining
these groups, McGuire gives little attention to the role that established religious
institutions can play in shaping embodied practices around health.
This oversight is important because studies suggest that embodied practices
are intimately tied to the meanings assigned to them by institutions (for examples
of dress, see Davidman 2015 and Rao 2015). Indeed, religious institutions foster
ritual practices and train members in how to perform religious faith (Konieczny
2013; MacGregor 2008; Winchester 2008). There are even hints that institu-
tions are important in shaping healing practices: scholars point to the power of
religious groups to normalize divine healing, and describe the subtle socialization

at work in many healing contexts, particularly those that emphasize charismatic
rituals (Cartledge 2013; Poloma 1991; Singleton 2001) or “social techniques”
that bolster divine healing, such as emotive music and an engaged audience
(Stolz 2011).
There is also evidence that outside, nonreligious institutions can play a
role in shaping the practice and meaning of religious embodiment, particularly
when those institutions are viewed by believers as challenging their faith. To
some extent, any form of divine healing contests outside institutional mean-
ings by proposing theories of illness causation and healing that challenge those
of modern biomedicine (Badaracco 2007; Barnes and Sered 2005; McGaw
1980; McGuire 1988, 2008; Watts 2011), such as the belief that illness is the
result of sin (McGuire 1988) or interference from Satan (Csordas 1988; Glik
1988; Stolz 2011). Studies of groups that actively reject modern medicine in
favor of divine healing find that the process of contesting specific institutions,
including hospitals or the court system, can be a vital way to perform one’s
faith. For example, research suggests that Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse blood
transfusions as both a way to draw boundaries between themselves and other
groups and as a way to maintain an understanding of the body as spiritually
pure of outside intervention (Rajtar 2013; Singelenberg 1990). Christian
Scientists refuse conventional medical interventions in favor of healing tech-
niques administered by trained Christian Science practitioners (Manca 2013;
Nudelman 1986) as part of their belief that physical illness is unreal and can be
ameliorated with prayer (Badaracco 2007; Swan 1983). Believers show convic-
tion by challenging the model of risk used by biomedical experts, instead con-
ceiving of health crises as having an exclusively spiritual purpose (DesAutels
et al. 1999; Poloma 1991).
Ultimately, though sociologists have produced significant research on reli-
gious embodiment through dress and ritual, researchers have not adequately
considered divine healing as an embodied practice. To be sure, studies of divine
healing frame healing practices as giving religious meaning to the believer’s phys-
ical experience, but with the exception of McGuire’s work (1988, 1993, 2008),
such research does not use the theoretical framework of embodiment to do so. As
a result, we miss the opportunity to understand these rituals as a way that believ-
ers actively perform their faith, and, just as importantly, to situate such rituals in
the context of institutional meanings and challenges. The present study seeks to
extend our understanding of embodiment by considering a group that draws on
institutional meanings of the ill and well body to perform divine healing practices
as a reflection of faith, all while negotiating competing meanings put forth by
medical authorities and the state.
METHODS
The following research is based on observations conducted between March

2014 and March 2017 at Full Truth Calvary Church and supplemented with

church publications as well as interviews with current and former members.
For three years, I attended an average of two of the church’s three weekly ser-
vices. Each service lasted about an hour and 15 minutes and followed a set pattern
of prayers, hymns, member-submitted notes of praise read by the assistant pastor,
and a sermon message delivered by the head pastor. Including informal social
time before and after services, each observation session lasted about two hours
in total. In addition to church services, I observed church social events to which
members invited me, such as picnics, bridal showers, and women’s game nights,
and spent time in members’ homes and at outings for activities like miniature
golf. For all observations, I recorded audio-notes on the way home from the event
and wrote detailed notes from my recordings. I coded those notes using ATLAS.ti
software, paying special attention to how and when members and church leaders
discussed healing, the meanings that they attached to healing, and any specific
practices that I witnessed, such as private prayers for improved health.
The second component of my data collection was a review of church litera-
ture in the form of pamphlets, which were written and printed by the pastor and
assistant pastor twice a month. Many were almost direct transcriptions of recent
sermons. I collected pamphlets from display sets at the church and received
new tracts in the mail. I also received older pamphlets from a member who had
saved them from the mid 1990s through the present. Altogether I reviewed and
coded approximately 70 pamphlets, paying particular attention to how they
described health and illness, and the relationship between healing practices and
religious faith.
The third and final component of my research method was interviews, both
formal and informal, with adult church members and former church members. I
recruited respondents for formal interviews by explaining that I was interested
in learning about how they “figure out God’s direction for them,” and empha-
sizing that I was interested in their personal experience. Despite quite positive
relationships with church members, I found that many were hesitant to sit down
for a formal interview, even when assured that responses were confidential and
that there were no “right answers.” Due to the insular nature of church life,
I found that members were not accustomed to discussing their faith—among
insiders, faith is an assumed commonality, while with outsiders, members are
not encouraged to proselytize. Ultimately only one-third of current church
members whom I asked agreed to speak formally, for a total of 11 interviews
with 10 church members. Former members were challenging to locate, as cur-
rent members did not always have or wish to share current contact information
of those who had left. However, once located, former members were much more
willing to speak with me, and I ultimately conducted interviews with eight out
of 10 people I contacted.
Among church members, I conducted formal interviews with seven women

and three men. The women ranged in age from 19 to 60 and were all white. Three
were married, and four were unmarried. The men were between the ages of 40 and
68; two were white and one was black. Two of the male respondents were married

and one was widowed. Six out of the 10 respondents had children. Each interview
lasted between 90 minutes and three hours and all but one were audio recorded
with the respondent’s consent. One respondent did not wish to be recorded, so
I wrote notes during our interview and wrote a lengthy summary of the inter-
view immediately afterward. Among former church members, I conducted formal
interviews with five women and three men. Four out of five women were married;
all were white and ranged in age from 37 to 66. All three of the men were married;
two were white and one was black, and they ranged in age from 41 to 49.
In addition to the 18 formal interviews, I conducted 33 informal interviews
during social time spent with church members. Over the course of my time at Full
Truth, I got to know about 30 people in seven families quite well and spent signif-
icant time with them outside of church. Time spent with these families included
organized group activities such as bridal showers, “girls’ nights” (similar to a bach-
elorette party), church women’s nights (social events meant to help women meet
others from church they might not know well), and semi-annual church picnics,
as well as more intimate social activities such as carol singing, pie baking, minia-
ture golf outings, theater outings, dinners at home or at restaurants, and funerals.
I was invited to participate in these activities and felt welcome at all events. All
church members were familiar with who I was and that I was conducting a study
about religion and family life.
Of these informal interviews, seven occurred with men and 26 occurred with
women. Male respondents ranged in age from their early 20s through late 50s,
while female respondents ranged from their early 20s through mid-80s. In infor-
mal situations, I felt that it was inappropriate to talk to men for long periods of
time unless it was in the context of a conversation that included their girlfriends
or wives, as most social events were either sex-segregated or were intended for
couples and families.
All formal interviews (with the exception of one noted above) were audio
recorded and transcribed, while all informal interviews were recorded in field
notes following the conversation. I coded all interview data using ATLAS.ti soft-
ware. In coding, I paid particular attention to members’ overall beliefs, their prac-
tices around health care, and specific anecdotes regarding health problems.
SETTING
To contextualize my findings, I offer a brief outline of the church’s history and

guiding principles below.
Full Truth Calvary Church was founded in the early 1920s by a man named Julius
Burke (a pseudonym). Mr. Burke started the church as a separatist faction of another
nondenominational Christian church called First Christ Chapel (also a pseudonym)
after being ousted from the leadership over doctrinal differences concerning salva-
tion. About a third of the congregation followed Burke to the new church.
From the start, Full Truth was a strong fundamentalist Christian church, part

of a conservative Christian movement in the 1920s that grew in opposition to the
emerging scientific worldview of mainstream America. By framing modern society
as morally relativistic, church leaders stressed the importance of a literal, unchang-
ing interpretation of biblical morality to which all members should ascribe. As part
of this interpretation, Pastor Julius Burke emphasized that members must avoid
what members call “human means” for getting life’s necessities, meaning anything
that is accomplished by an individual’s own agency rather than that of God. In
practice, avoiding human means meant that members were instructed to trust God
for health, employment, and other basic needs. Thus, instead of seeking care from
a doctor or actively inquiring about jobs, members learned to pray for healing
when they became ill and to pray that others would offer them a job (or inquire as
to whether they were in need of a job) when they were out of work.
Today, leaders at Full Truth Calvary Church maintain the emphasis on reject-
ing human means. Melvin Burke, a grandson to Julius, is the current pastor,
having inherited the position from a succession of his uncles in the early 1990s.
He continues to urge the community’s 500 working class and overwhelmingly
white members to reject all forms of modern medicine. Treatments considered
off-limits are quite wide-ranging, including painkillers, surgery, antibiotics, and
dental care,3 as well as safety precautions like seatbelts or prescription eyeglasses.
Sitting in church, one sees evidence of these prohibitions in the form of growths
that protrude from faces, legs, or abdomens, in missing teeth, and in the hym-
nals held up to compensate for poor eyesight. Members also reject contraception,
leading to large families of commonly 6–12 children. Despite refusing so many
modern developments, however, members have otherwise kept pace with cur-
rent American life, using smart phones, dressing in typical clothing, and working
at jobs in retail, food service, and manufacturing. Members earn their drivers’
licenses as teenagers, eventually commandeering large vans to accommodate their
growing families.4 Members live in small but tidy family homes in a working class
3
Interviews with former members revealed that some members quietly sought dental care
as a matter of hygiene rather than medical care. However, most members considered dentistry
off-limits.
4
Because of the prohibition on corrective lenses, members with severe vision problems
are unable to obtain a driver’s license. In such cases, members arrange rides with other family
members. However, members with only minorly impaired vision may take the written compo-
nent of the driving test (which includes an eye exam) multiple times until they pass. Members
typically submit an anonymous testimony praising God when they pass the driving test, which
the assistant pastor reads during Wednesday evening services. In such testimonies, members
describe their success in the vision exam as due to God’s intervention to heal their eyes. They
typically do not comment on the current state of their vision, though they may acknowledge
that they are continuing to pray for the “full healing” of their eyesight.
neighborhood, remaining close to other church families but by no means separate

from their nonchurch neighbors. Though few members have close friends outside
of Full Truth, they report being comfortable with outsiders, and frequently inter-
act with them in work settings or while out doing errands. Almost all members

are born into the congregation; the few who have joined as adults are former
members of First Christ Chapel, Full Truth’s sister church, which maintains the
same beliefs on divine healing.
Though Full Truth’s doctrine encourages strict practices, the performance of
such practices remains largely a private matter. Members pray alone, typically
apart from even their own families except during mealtimes or prayers with small
children. Youths receive their own Bibles around age 13 and are encouraged to
read and pray alone in the morning and evening. Divine healing practices occur
chiefly in private, outside of communal worship services, whose tone remains
quiet, respectful and even somewhat sleepy. The only shared experience of oth-
ers’ healing is when the assistant pastor reads testimonies of recovery that have
been submitted anonymously through an online form. Full Truth members do not
engage in charismatic worship, such as shouting during the sermon, speaking in
tongues, or writhing on the ground. In fact, they eschew the emotional experi-
ences of collective effervescence (Durkheim [1912] 1995) altogether.
As I will show, however, the private nature of divine healing does not mean
that health practices are not institutionally shaped. Members spend a significant
amount of time in church; because the vast majority of members attend all of
the three weekly services, they hear institutional messages, including those about
divine healing, for at least four hours a week. When combined with time for
private prayers and Bible reading in the morning and evening, as encouraged by
church leaders, it is not uncommon for members to spend 15–20 hours per week
in religious activities. Indeed, as I will show, even when engaged in private devo-
tions, members engage in rituals that closely align with institutional teachings.
FINDINGS
Below, I first demonstrate that members of Full Truth Calvary Church embody
their religion through divine healing practices, specifically the total rejection of
modern medicine in favor of prayer for healing from God. Though individually
enacted, I find that these practices are institutionally shaped, as members use church
teachings to assign religious meaning to the ill versus well body and to interpret their
healing practices as a demonstration of faith. I then show that outside institutions,
including medical organizations and the court system, also influence the practice
and meaning of divine healing by forcing members to negotiate competing insti-
tutional logics during incidents of court-mandated or emergency care. Ultimately,
these competing logics mean that members must align their medical choices with
their religious beliefs: For those who believe in Full Truth teachings, the church can
accommodate challenges from outside institutions by framing such incursions as a
form of religious persecution or a spiritual test. Those who no longer agree with Full
Truth teachings (even those who continue to consider themselves Christians) reject
the church’s interpretation of the sick versus well body, instead of subscribing to
alternative institutional logics of the body. Thus, I find that the process of rejecting

divine healing is a key part of rejecting the group’s religious beliefs more broadly,
making the embodied practice inseparable from institutional meanings.
Embracing Divine Healing: Embodied Practice and Institutional Meaning

Using the language of church leaders and literature, members frame their
decision to reject medicine as a performance of their total trust in God. Members
link their health practices to their religious identity, defining the commitment to
following God’s will as central to what makes them “true believers.” This inter-
pretation of divine healing practices reveals how the church assigns religious
meaning to the ill or well body and ultimately shapes individuals’ behavior.
For example, field notes from one Wednesday evening sermon illustrated the
importance of following God’s will, and highlighted the dire consequences for
those who do not:
Pastor Burke leans forward again, and declares that, “God has provided a message of how we’re
supposed to live through His son, Jesus Christ.” Squinting his eyes and furrowing his brow,
hands on the lectern, he says that “the world wants you to be proud of your accomplishments;
God wants you to be humble… The worldly way is to focus on the self—exclusively!”—here he
raises his eyebrows and lifts his right fist in a motion of emphasis—“while the Godly way is to
focus on others and on the Lord Jesus… Look around, it’s worse now than it’s ever been—almost
every city in the country is a Sodom and Gomorrah!” He continues with a tone of resignation,
“We know that God has wiped out the unrighteous before, as He did through the great flood, and
Sodom and Gomorrah—we know that He will do it again.”
Pastor Burke’s exhortations vividly captured the destruction awaiting those who
fail to follow God’s will. The message was frequently reiterated to communicate
that members must obey biblical teachings more strictly than others who would
call themselves Christians. As Pastor Burke noted in one sermon:
Most Christians, and most people in the world, believe that if you live a decent life you are going
to heaven. That belief is universal—that almost everyone is going to heaven. But that’s not true!
We know that you can only get into heaven through faith, and by living as the Bible tells us to live.
Here, Pastor Burke connected biblically sanctioned behaviors with larger reli-
gious meaning, suggesting that only those who behave in ways that signal total
faith will go to heaven.
Church leaders specifically framed the process of following God’s will as tied
to health behavior, suggesting that both the cause and the cure to an ailment are
indicative of one’s relationship with God. Speaking from the pulpit, Pastor Burke
frequently described the choice to use divine healing over modern medicine as
the choice to trust God. As recorded in field notes from one Wednesday evening
sermon, titled “Choosing to Live in Faith”:
Pastor Burke declared that, “Millions profess to believe in Christ but almost none of them rely
on him! The devil’s greatest wish is that we will rely on any plan but God’s.” He looks out at us,
deadly serious, while saying in low tones that “health plans” are “tools of the devil” designed to
prevent us from having faith in God. He adds that one of the things the devil uses to get us to not
rely on God is “safety equipment” because it interferes with God’s plan for us.

The pastor described illness as a form of spiritual warfare, in which one's health
decisions align the believer with either God or Satan. In doing so, members were
encouraged to think of their bodily experience as an important part of their faith,
intimately intertwined with their own spiritual health.
Similar messages emerged in many pamphlets, which are condensed ver-
sions of sermons that summarize church teachings. For example, one 2011 tract
declared that, “A genuine surrender to God is a total commitment to trust Him
for healing, no matter how serious the oppression, without trusting any human
remedy, doctor, medication, or drug.” Another said similarly:
Anyone who lives by faith in God will be putting His Word into practice—a Word that gives
advice and instruction on every detail of life—explaining what to do, and how to meet every
situation. Trusting God each day means … no family doctor.
Yet another reminded believers that, “Obeying the Word just shows evidence of
believing faith in God’s power—to heal, protect, provide, and save.” Again and
again, the institutional message was that divine healing is a key way that members
can physically demonstrate their trust in God above all others.
Interviews and observations revealed that members follow these institutional
messages closely. I found that members not only took the steps of praying for heal-
ing and refusing modern medicine, but also understood their behavior in terms
explicitly defined by the church. In particular, members aligned with institutional
teachings by describing incidents of illness or injury as the result of personal fail-
ings, particularly the failure to follow God’s will. Such alignment was particu-
larly obvious in hypothetical scenarios, in which members used church logic to
describe what was happening. For example, Suzanne, a bubbly grandmother of
ten in her early sixties, summarized her understanding of illness while we rocked
in the armchairs of her cozy living room one hot summer afternoon:
All good things come from above; all bad things come from the devil. And it may be that there’s
something that God wants you to [know] if He allows the devil to give you a pain or attack you in
some way…. We see that as God’s way of saying, um, “Excuse me! You were supposed to turn
left back there!” Or “You were supposed to go straight, not turn left!” A lot of times it’s something
we know we’re doing.
Lewis, a 64-year old widower and local truck driver with two grown sons, said
similarly:
If we don’t get the results from God that we wanna get, it’s because of something wrong in our
hearts. God is enabling us to realize that things in us need to be changed so that we can be right
with Him.
As Suzanne and Lewis suggested, members understand physical pain in spiritual
terms, interpreting ailments as both chastisement and communication from God.
By extension, how they respond is understood as a test of faith—will the member
demonstrate faith in God by praying for healing, or turn away from Him to seek

modern medical help?
Beyond hypotheticals, members recounted specific stories of injury or illness as
opportunities to evaluate their relationship with God. If the relationship was found
wanting, divine healing offered the chance to actively strengthen their faith. Wilson,
a 68-year-old cabinet-maker with 13 children and over 40 grandchildren, described
an incident from his own life that illustrated this point well. He grew thoughtful
as he described an accident while working at his cabinetry business. With his eyes
downcast, and his normally buoyant attitude subdued, Wilson told the story:
I had one serious accident at the shop where a saw blade went right through my hand. Right
through … [shakes his head and pauses, remembering]. I just felt the Lord had got my attention
at a serious level. I mean I could’ve bled to death but one of my sons taped it up, took it over to
another old guy and he taped it up a little more and the Lord healed it.
Wilson held out his hand for me to see the pale, jagged scar across most of his
palm. It had faded in color, but still revealed a dent of puckered skin where the
blade had been. He continued:
It didn’t really hurt a whole lot, but it was a serious injury…. It came to my mind, will I trust
the Lord to save my life? My hand? Or will I get in a car and go to some hospital and say, “Fix it
any way you can?” Not only for myself, but for the family, I knew that my only choice would be
to trust the Lord … God had blessed our family over the years in a lot of ways, and you become
proud of your situation a little bit—So it renewed my interest and effort to live a life that was
pleasing to God. But He got my attention.
Wilson recognized his injury as a moment of spiritual reckoning in which he felt he

was receiving a clear communication from God. Implying that his injury was due to
sinful pride in his family’s success, Wilson’s refusal to ask doctors to “fix it any way
you can,” was an important way that Wilson could embody his renewed faith in God.
Alice, a single food service worker in her late 30s, recalled a moment of hardship
in which she felt that God wanted her attention. Saying that, “It’s only by the mercy
of God that I’m here,” she began by telling me that she had her menstrual period
twice in two weeks, and that the second time, the bleeding became extremely heavy
and painful. Despite feeling weak, Alice got into her car to run errands. She told me:
The last thing I remember was getting back in the car. All of a sudden, I came to, and I was sit-
ting, stopped with my foot on the brake, at a green light a couple of miles away. And there was no
traffic in any direction. And I just started crying out, “God is good! God is good! God is good!”
and the moment I did that, the bleeding stopped. I’ve had my period like normal ever since. I came
to feel that the whole thing was a testimony to me of divine healing, of how I need to trust in the
Lord. And ever since then, I’ve known that divine healing is real; no one can tell me otherwise.
Now I know that I can always be healed; I’ve just gotta keep my eyes on the cross.
Alice described her faith as the result of a specific experience of divine healing.
Though the incident occurred privately, she drew on church teachings to explain
the religious meaning of her ordeal, aligning herself with the church’s interpreta-
tion of divine healing as part of what it means to “trust in the Lord” rather than

the interpretation of those who would “tell [her] otherwise.”
Lori, a mother of seven with another on the way, recounted a time that a
health crisis in her family served as a reminder to trust God. While her young
sons played in the background, she explained that her husband struggled for years
with chest pains and difficulty breathing. Her eyes misting over, Lori told of one
evening when the problem reached a crisis point:
There was a time when I thought I lost [my husband]. He told the kids “bye” and everything.
It was horrible…. He was laying right here on the floor and he could hardly breathe, and it was
that choice in life: What was he gonna do? Was he gonna depend fully on God or go to man for
help? And I knew that he wanted to depend on God. He made that choice no matter what: we’re
gonna depend solely on Him. He passed out and I thought we lost him. I just sat there and prayed
with him, and prayed over him. My parents came and my dad prayed and it was just like, all of
a sudden he was awake, and he talked to us, and God was there; it was really amazing…. You
know, God just wants us to look to Him, and then all the glory goes to Him…. And that’s what
happened that night.
Lori’s account suggests that the family was primed by the church to assign a spe-
cific meaning to her husband’s illness. Saying that the crisis made them face “that
decision in life” [emphasis added] of whether or not to trust in God, Lori under-
scored how members are prepared to interpret suffering in spiritual terms put forth
by church leaders, even when the experience is intensely personal. Lori’s story
further points to how divine healing can be an embodied religious practice for
those who aren’t experiencing the illness directly, requiring specific behaviors like
prayer and a religiously salient interpretation of the outcome.
The question of how to respond to health crises also informs how members
understand death in the community. As Lori’s story suggests, some members are
willing to die rather than seek modern medical care. Even for those who have
never been in mortal danger, the possibility of death looms large. For example,
21-year-old Hailey, a teacher in the church’s elementary school, noted that mem-
bers face a question every time they fall ill: “Are you still gonna stay here and trust
the Lord ‘til the end’? Are you willing to say, ‘This is my life and it’s in the Lord’s
hands?’” [emphasis added]. Members must decide how far they are willing to take
their beliefs, knowing that anything less than total reliance on divine healing is
a lapse in commitment. Despite members’ belief that sin causes illness, however,
refusing medical intervention to the point of death is considered the ultimate
performance of faith. In conversation, members spoke reverently of those who
had “stayed faithful until the end,” and were quick to say that the deceased were
with God in heaven. In this way, even those who die young are redeemed as true
believers, and the grieving family can use the language of their loved one as hav-
ing passed the ultimate test instead of dwelling on past sins.
Members, of course, don’t wish to die, and those battling illness are eager
to demonstrate their faith. Because church teachings frame ailments as the
result of sin, members not only pray for healing, but also actively seek to atone
for their wrongdoing as part of the healing process. These atonement efforts

represent their own form of embodied practice, as members must perform
sincere apologies to friends or family members with the understanding that
the person being asked for forgiveness has a kind of spiritual control over the
sufferer’s body.
Jeremy, a 44-year-old contractor and father of seven, described this process as
it occurred during the birth of his last child about three years ago. After a full day
of labor at home, his wife was becoming tired and increasingly delirious, despite
the prayers being said around her by family members and, as the night wore on,
church leaders who arrived at Jeremy’s request. Jeremy was calm, and his speech
measured, as he explained that:
You know, our belief is that we went through this [difficult childbirth experience] because there
was a spiritual cause somewhere in her life or my life, since we’re married. So during that time …
we made phone calls to people and told them that we’re sorry for whatever. There may be people
out there that we don’t have the greatest relationship with, or something went on where we didn’t
treat them the way we should have, or held a resentment, or had an issue with them, or whatever,
so we apologized to ‘em … Both of us prayed that if there’s anything that we’ve done that’s not
pleasing to God, that He show us.
Soon after the phone calls, Jeremy’s wife delivered a healthy girl in their home, a
result they both attributed to their successful atonement.
Jeremy went on to explain that it can be difficult to be on the receiving end
of these atonement calls, because the recipient is often unaware that he or she has
been wronged. As Jeremy told me:
We all believe similarly. So I think when people get the call they sort of feel bad, because I’m
holding resentment towards this person, [but] they’re probably not holding it towards me; they’re
probably holding it towards somebody else, and down the line. When I get [the call] I’m like,
“Well, there’s nothing on my end. I’m good, but I’m more than willing to accept your apol-
ogy.”… In reality, I need for them to be victorious as much as they need me to be, because we’re
all in this together.
In Jeremy’s telling, such calls may feel unnecessary to the recipient, but are none-
theless important as religious practices that reinforce institutional interpretations
of illness.
In some cases, these apologies have a more abstract tone, such a one testi-
mony written by a member after escaping unharmed when shots were fired outside
the store he was leaving. As recorded in field notes one Wednesday night:
The writer [of the testimony] went on to say that he had been doing a lot of searching for the
“spiritual cause” of being close to a shooting, and “wished to seriously apologize for any wronging
or any sin committed against anyone.”
Such testimonies are important because they make the personal practice of atone-
ment into a public demonstration of faith. By linking physical danger with sin,
these testimonies support the church’s interpretation of the ill and well body.
Sharing these narratives is also a way to share the idea that divine healing has

significance beyond the person being healed. Much as Lori described the health
crisis of her husband as having spiritual significance for the whole family, mem-
bers understand illness in children to be an indication of parents’ spiritual failing.
One anonymous member testified about a time when plans with friends were
disrupted at the last minute, leading to frustration. The member explained how
his child’s injury helped him identify the error of his ways:
I should have immediately gone to God in prayer, asking Him to control my attitudes, words and
emotions, but I let frustration creep in, and let it fester to the point of bitterness and resentment.
Since I wasn’t on Scriptural grounds at this point, Satan seized the opportunity to get in, and our
young child fell and cut her head, causing much bleeding. I knew immediately that I needed to
make things right in my heart with God. After crying a while, the child said she was better, and
the bleeding stopped almost completely, for which we praise God. Apparently, there must have
still been some hidden resentment or bitterness in my heart, because the very next day, I received
a text from my wife saying that this same child was complaining of an earache … I realized that
I still needed God to search my heart even deeper, and to totally give everything over to Him….
Not long after, I received another text telling me that the child was much improved!
The writer described the child’s illness as caused by his sin of frustration, and
framed the child’s healing as the result of his atoning prayers. Even though he
was not the one experiencing pain, this member used divine healing practices in
alignment with the church’s interpretation of health as having spiritual meaning.
Challenging Divine Healing: Competing Institutional Logics and

Religious Identity
The church is not the only institution that shapes the experience of divine
healing as an embodied religious practice. Despite the emphasis on rejecting mod-
ern medicine, members do occasionally receive medical care, either by choice or
as part of court mandated care for children. At such moments, members face
competing institutional messages about the meaning of the ill body, and must
reckon with an interpretation of their behavior as negligent or even abusive.
Members do significant emotional work to determine if and how those interven-
tions can be interpreted as part of religiously meaningful healing practices. I find
that members are able to accept medical care when it is perceived as occurring
under duress, either from a judge’s order to provide treatment for children or
from outsiders intervening to summon emergency care. Members interpret forced
interventions through a lens of religious persecution, contesting medical expla-
nations and treatments as flawed or even dangerous, and framing the experience
as yet another way to embody their faith. As such, while outside institutions may
shape the experience of healing in ways unsanctioned by the church, the language
of interventions as “forced” allows members to view the events as validating the
religious meaning that Full Truth assigns to the ill body and divine healing.
The most common incidents of forced care were medical interventions for
children, which occurred when an outsider brought an untreated childhood ill-
ness to the attention of government authorities, such as Child Protective Services
(CPS) or the Department of Human Services (DHS). State laws vary, but gen-

erally parents may forgo medical care themselves, but may not withhold it from
their children if doing so poses mortal danger to the child. Once authorities inter-
vene, families may undergo home inspections and court hearings to determine
the nature of the child’s illness and the degree to which withholding medical
care endangers the child. At Full Truth, most families ultimately complied with
court orders, but compliance did not indicate acceptance of the government's
perspective.
Over half of the respondents with whom I conducted formal interviews had
some experience, in either their immediate or extended families, with govern-
ment institutions mandating medical care for children. Their detailed knowledge
of these incidents was important because it contributed to perceptions of religious
persecution, and revealed a shared interpretation of how compliance with state
intervention does not necessarily weaken the practice of divine healing. Wilson,
for example, described how the family stayed faithful during a time that his two-
year-old granddaughter, Lyla, was in the court system:
With the situation with Lyla, we had never been in a situation like that before. We went down
there [to court]. The baby had a bad rash, itchy, couldn’t sit still. Went into court. The judge was
ferocious … [My son and daughter-in-law] went in with the understanding that whatever this guy
says, that’s what we got to do…. They did that. The baby spit out the antibiotic. They called the
doctor. The doctor says, “Just forget it.” [Lyla] spit it up two times. “Try one more time.” Spit
up again. Didn’t even hardly swallow it. Spit it right up. “Alright. Forget about that.” Over a
period of time, she got well. Visibly well. They waited four more months, went back down again;
[the judge] could see she was fine. Case is closed. And I really felt that they were blessed for doing
what the Bible says, which is doing what [the court] says you got to do.
Wilson noted that Lyla’s parents were following the biblical injunction to obey
the government,5 an important element of the narrative members use to interpret
the religious validity of accepting medical care. By linking the couple’s obedience
with anecdotes about Lyla’s (admittedly unwitting) resistance to the medicine,
Wilson implied that the child was still divinely healed because even without
swallowing the medicine she “got well over a period of time.”
Alice’s family faced a similar court order when her niece Macy experienced
fluid-filled bumps on her head as a baby. After the court ordered initial treatment,
Alice’s brother, the child’s father, was informed that he would need to seek medi-
cal care promptly in the future. Alice explained what happened next:
5
Full Truth believers trace their belief that the government must be obeyed to Jesus’s ex-
hortation to his followers to “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” meaning that they should
pay taxes because Caesar’s face appeared on the gold currency. The phrase appears in Matthew
22:21, Mark 12:17, and Luke 20:24.
My brother was put on trial the same way [as others], and he was told if Macy ever got sick or
had a problem he had to seek medical attention for her. And that happened. Macy got sick. It was
Thanksgiving; it happened while the child was in my arms, so he took her back to the hospital …
and it was a medical mistake, you know. The tube was supposed to drain the fluid away from her
brain; instead it was retaining it to her brain. So it was miracle that she is still here…. She’s done

fine ever since, thank God.
Again, Alice highlighted the failings of modern medicine, suggesting that Macy
might have never experienced a second negative event if she had not had the
tubes inserted in the first place. In this narrative, Alice and her family followed
the law while remaining committed to divine healing, critiquing the framework
of modern medicine as unnecessary or even harmful.
Less frequent but still noted were stories of adult members who received med-
ical care under duress. Not having made the choice to transgress church boundar-
ies, members could interpret the event as a trial from “worldly” forces, meaning a
form of religious persecution. As Suzanne explained:
My sister Marion, she was giving birth and having difficulties. Her husband’s worldly sisters
called the EMTs, and they took her to the hospital. They gave her a Cesarean and they told her
husband that she wasn’t going to make it. The reason she wasn’t going to make it was because
she got pneumonia after they took her to the hospital!... They asked Marion what she wanted [to
do], and around those tubes [in her nose and mouth] she came to enough and said, “I want to go
home.” And the doctors, told her husband, “Well, she’s probably going to die in a few days, I just
want to prepare you because she’s got serious pneumonia.”… And so she came home, and she
did not die. She actually had another baby.
Suzanne described the experience of her sister as a case of medical care being
forced upon her by outsiders (“worldly sisters” meaning biological sisters who do
not attend Full Truth), and stressed the faults of medical intervention at every
step. In doing so, she removed the responsibility for these interventions from her
sister, while simultaneously contesting medical interventions as helpful or nec-
essary. She further suggested that Marion’s choice to reject medical care when
given the chance was a testament to her continued belief in Full Truth teachings,
and framed her resistance to medical interventions as embodying commitment to
their faith.
When Full Truth members independently chose to receive care, however, the
narrative of religious persecution did not hold. Voluntary care was understood by
both current and former members as a rejection of Full Truth teachings on the body.
When members rejected divine healing it typically signaled that they were leaving
the community. Indeed, former members of Full Truth described the process of leav-
ing as intimately linked with experiences of poor health, and with the feeling that
the church’s interpretation of the ill versus well body increasingly did not reflect
their own beliefs. Importantly, however, while former members specified that they
no longer agreed with Full Truth teachings, the experience of getting medical help
did not lead them to reject religion altogether. Instead, the vast majority of former
members continue to be heavily involved in other Christian churches, suggesting
that embodied practices like divine healing are shaped not by religious faith itself,
but by the institutional meanings with which they are associated.
For example, contrast the way Alice described the voluntary medical care
her sister-in-law received with her earlier story of court-mandated care for Macy.

Alice explained how medical care featured in the declining faith of her brother
(not Macy’s father but another brother) and his wife after their father became
ill and passed away in his 60s, followed just months later by a third brother
in his 30s. She looked resigned, her eyes downcast as she explained what had
happened:
With my brother Kurt and his wife Ellen, they believed their whole lives, but after everything with
my dad and my brother, Kurt just stopped believing. He felt like it wasn’t right. And then when
his wife was having their fourth child she just got really, really scared. And he said, “Well, you
know I don’t believe anymore; we can go to the hospital.” So they did. [The birth was] totally
normal. But she just got scared for some reason. And you can’t have faith if you have fear ….
After they had the baby [Kurt’s wife Ellen] came back a few times, but then she stopped. And he
had already stopped.
While Alice viewed Macy’s court-ordered care as ultimately conducive to reli-

gious belief, she described her sister-in-law’s treatment as based on fear, and there-
fore as a failure to embody their commitment to trust in God.
I interviewed Kurt about a year after speaking with Alice, and he described
the same incident in very different terms. Kurt told me that after hours of push-
ing, his wife was exhausted. Despite the protests of his mother-in-law and the
church’s midwife, Miss Betty,6 he felt that it was “time to get a professional in
here.” Kurt went on:
I asked Miss Betty to leave, and she was saying “No, no, no! You’re making the wrong decision!
You need to just pray about it and everything is going to be okay!” I said, “Yes, yes, yes, it’s time
for you to leave; we’re taking another step.”… So, I called 911. Ellen’s mother got upset, obvi-
ously; she decided she was gonna leave too. It was hard for Ellen … [The ambulance] took her to
St. Anne’s Hospital. And on the exam table, the doctor came in and said, “Here’s the problem!
The water bag wasn’t broken yet. You’re dilated enough.” Poked the water bag and whoosh! And
the next contraction, out came the baby! So it was just something as simple as that. To me, that’s
not stepping in front of God, that’s just common sense.
In Kurt’s telling, he rather than his wife initiated the medical care, based not on
unfounded fear but on exhaustion and the feeling that the birth was not progress-
ing normally. The moment of conflict with Miss Betty revealed that Kurt explic-
itly rejected Full Truth’s teaching that prayer would make “everything okay,” but
he was equally clear that he did not view calling 911 as rejecting God. Instead,
6
The church “midwife” is an older woman and member of Full Truth who has attended
many church members’ births. She is called a midwife out of respect, but has no formal train-
ing. Kurt maintained that she never did any kind of internal exam on his wife, and believes
that she has no medical knowledge, including an understanding of cervical dilation.
he understood their decision to seek medical care as a “common sense” measure

that did not diminish his faith or signal that he was not a Christian. His telling
reflects a moment in which Full Truth’s institutional messages about the meaning
of the ill body lost their salience specifically because he no longer agreed with the

church’s interpretation of what it means to be a believer.
Divergent explanations of the same event came up in other conversations as
well. Kathleen, a single woman and office manager in her early forties, explained
the case of one of her sisters who has since left the church:
Well, [my sister Sarah] is going elsewhere for help [with problems in her life] now, so she would
be considered an unbeliever because she’s not believing that God will do things today for her….
Like, she’s had stuff done at the hospital, and that goes against what I believe. She was praying
about her eyesight for a lot of years, and then she just figured God didn’t want to heal her, so she
went and got something done about that.
For Kathleen, the crux of the transgression was that her sister chose to get care.
Kathleen equated her sister’s eventual choice to go to a hospital with a deliberate
rejection of their faith.
Kathleen’s sister Sarah viewed the choice differently, however. Far from the
somewhat offhand nature with which Kathleen believed Sarah went to a doctor
about her eyesight, Sarah recounted doing so only after a lifetime of suffering
from vision problems. When I spoke with her almost two years after interviewing
Kathleen, Sarah told me that she had memories as young as four years old of not
being able to see the hands on the clock in a room or understand what the teacher
was writing on the blackboard. Sarah described her fear of getting glasses while
she was a member of Full Truth:
My parents were like, “Well, you just have to pray, and ask Jesus to heal your eyes.” So from
the time I was four or five until I was twenty-nine I was like, “What could I be doing wrong my
whole life that I can’t get this prayer answered?” And the thing was, for someone to get glasses
[at Full Truth] was not having faith in God. They were taught that out of fear because they were
afraid that you wouldn’t go to heaven if you didn’t trust in God and you trusted in something man
came up with…. At that point I would have been terrified to [get glasses] because I would have
felt like I was going to be struck down by lightening or something.
Later, however, Sarah began to question church teachings, partially from reading
the Bible closely and finding passages that she believed contradicted Full Truth’s
messages on divine healing. She felt that church leaders took scriptural passages
out of context, and used small snippets of passages to build the argument that they
wanted to make rather than letting the passage guide their teachings. Eventually,
she came to see her eyesight problems differently:
I was born with my eyes the way they are. It’s not a defect, it’s just the way that I was made and
I just need glasses…. My whole entire life changed when I got glasses. I was like, “whoa, I can
actually see!” I just felt so exposed all of a sudden. “People can see me as good as I can see them!
There’s cracks in the sidewalk!” [sic]. I felt like such a little child; it was so crazy.
Sarah defined her eyesight not as a “defect” or the result of ongoing sin, but
merely as a fact of her birth that came without larger spiritual meaning. Learning
how much she had been missing in the world without clear vision, she contin-
ued to explore faith outside of Full Truth, and now attends an evangelical church

with her husband, an outsider whom she met as she was leaving the church. She
described her faith to me today:
I’m a Christian now. All of that [divine healing at Full Truth], I want nothing to do with it.
I believe that that’s wrong. I do have genuine faith now, and it’s so contrastingly different from
what I grew up with. So now my belief is that Jesus died for my sins. I believe that; I accept that.
I have forgiveness for my sins so I know when I die I’m going to heaven. That’s what I believe;
it’s that simple.
In describing her current beliefs, Sarah disconnected her health behavior from
her religious identity, suggesting that she rejected Full Truth by rejecting their
divine healing practices.
As these experiences of medical care reveal, members defined voluntary
and involuntary treatment in very different terms. Members viewed forced care
through a narrative of resistance to persecution. In such instances, mounting even
limited opposition to medical care created a narrative of struggle that reinforced
Full Truth teachings on health without inviting undue legal trouble.
By contrast, former members of Full Truth spoke candidly about the process of
coming to reject divine healing, and the role that seeking modern medicine played
in their defection from the church. Though I have recounted the stories of only
two former members here, all eight of those with whom I spoke echoed similar
sentiments: They typically agreed with current members’ assessments that their
choice to get care was a sign that they no longer agreed with church teachings,
but they strongly disagreed that their break with Full Truth meant that they were
no longer Christians. Instead, most described the process of leaving Full Truth
as a journey toward a closer, more loving relationship with God. The embodied
practice of divine healing was so linked to the institution of Full Truth that former
members felt they could no longer be a part of the community while using modern
medicine, even though they did feel that they could be good Christians.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, though past studies of divine healing rarely use the vocabulary of
embodiment, I find that those who use divine healing do so to express their faith in
ways similar to those who embody their religion through dress or diet. Using three
years of observations, interviews, and writings from Full Truth Calvary Church,
I have shown that members refuse modern medicine in favor of divine healing as
a way to physically embody their trust in God. While they perform such practices
privately, the meaning that members ascribe to divine healing is shaped by insti-
tutions, including Full Truth and medical and judicial bodies. When members do
receive modern medical care, they must negotiate these competing institutional
meanings around health to determine how they will frame their experience for
themselves and others. Describing their medical care as either forced or voluntary
has larger meaning for members’ religious identity going forward, such that those

who no longer participate in divine healing practices are not “true believers” as
church members understand the term, though they may continue to see themselves
as good Christians. Thus, church membership remains inextricably linked to insti-
tutional meanings of the ill or well body, and rejecting one is synonymous with
rejecting the other.
My work contributes to understandings of embodiment and religion by
extending the valuable research of Meredith McGuire (1988, 1993, 2008) to
incorporate a broader consideration of institutions in embodied practices. I find,
as Davidman’s (2015) work would suggest, that the process of rejecting a key
embodied practice is part of rejecting the group’s religious beliefs more broadly,
making the practice inseparable from its institutional meaning. Ultimately, I sug-
gest that divine healing is part of what it means to perform and negotiate religious
identity, or as Avishai (2008:422) so well observes, to say, “This is who we are and
this is what we do.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my advisor, Melissa Wilde, for her tremendous guidance
throughout this project. Special thanks also to Annette Lareau for her thought-
ful feedback, as well as to Rachel Ellis, Nora Gross, Peter Harvey, and Patricia
Tevington for their helpful comments and support.
FUNDING
The Constant A. Jacquet Award from the Religious Research Association,

the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Student Research Award, and
the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate and Professional Student Association’s
Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation.
REFERENCES
Avishai, Orit. 2008. “‘Doing Religion’ in a Secular World Women in Conservative Religions
and the Question of Agency.” Gender & Society 22: 409–33.
Badaracco, Claire. 2007. Prescribing Faith: Medicine, Media, and Religion in American Culture.
Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Linda L. Barnes, Susan S. Sered. 2005. “Introduction.” In Religion and Healing in America, ed-
ited by Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bartkowski, John P. 2005. “Faithfully Embodied: Religious Identity and the Body.” DisClosure:
A Journal of Social Theory 14: 4.
Bartkowski, John P., and Jen’nan Ghazal Read. 2003. “Veiled Submission: Gender, Power,
and Identity among Evangelical and Muslim Women in the United States.” Qualitative
Sociology 26: 71–92.

Bell, Ronny A., Cynthia Suerken, Sara A. Quandt, Joseph G. Grzywacz, Wei Lang, and
Thomas A. Arcury. 2005. “Prayer for Health among U.S. Adults: The 2002 National
Health Interview Survey.” Complementary Health Practice Review 10: 175–88.
Allan M. Brandt, and Paul Rozin, eds. 2013. Morality and Health. New York: Routledge.
Brown, Candy Gunther. 2011. Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing. London: Oxford
University Press.
Buckser, Andrew. 1999. “Keeping Kosher: Eating and Social Identity among the Jews of
Denmark.” Ethnology 38: 191–209.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge.
Cartledge, Mark J. 2013. “Pentecostal Healing as an Expression of Godly Love: An Empirical
Study.” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 16: 501–22.
Peter Conrad. 1994. “Wellness as Virtue: Morality and the Pursuit of Health.” Culture,
Medicine and Psychiatry 18: 385–401.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1988. “Elements of Charismatic Persuasion and Healing.” Medical
Anthropology Quarterly (New Series) 2: 121–42.
Csordas, Thomas J., ed. 1994. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture
and Self, vol. 2. London: Cambridge University Press.
Davidman, Lynn. 1991. Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2015. Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews. New York: Oxford University
Press.
DesAutels, Peggy, Margaret Pabst Battin, and Larry May. 1999. Praying for a Cure: When
Medical and Religious Practices Conflict. Rowman & Littlefield.
Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1st American ed. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Glik, Deborah C. 1988. “Symbolic, Ritual and Social Dynamics of Spiritual Healing.” Social
Science and Medicine 27: 1197–206.
R. Marie Griffith. 1997. God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission.
University of California Press.
Hartman, Tova, and Naomi Marmon. 2004. “Lived Regulations, Systemic Attributions:
Menstrual Separation and Ritual Immersion in the Experience of Orthodox Jewish
Women.” Gender & Society 18: 389–408.
Konieczny, Mary Ellen. 2013. The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American
Catholics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lamont, Michèle, and Virág Molnár. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.”
Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–95.
Carol Ann MacGregor. 2008. “Religious Socialization and Children’s Prayer as Cultural Object:
Boundary Work in Children’s 19th Century Sunday School Books.” Poetics 36: 435–49.
Manca, Terra. 2013. “Medicine and Spiritual Healing within a Region of Canada: Preliminary
Findings Concerning Christian Scientists’ Healthcare Practices.” Journal of Religion and
Health 52: 789–803.
McGaw, Douglas B. 1980. “Meaning and Belonging in a Charismatic Congregation: An

Investigation into Sources of Neo-Pentecostal Success.” Review of Religious Research
21: 284–301.
McGuire, Meredith B. 1988. Ritual Healing in Suburban America. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.

———. 1993. “Health and Spirituality as Contemporary Concerns.” The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 527: 144–54.
———. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Arthur E. Nudelman. 1986. “Use of a Medical Facility by Christian Scientists.” Southern
Medical Journal 79: 437–40.
Orsi, Robert A. 2013. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the
Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Poloma, Margaret M. 1991. “A Comparison of Christian Science and Mainline Christian
Healing Ideologies and Practices.” Review of Religious Research 32: 337–50.
Poloma, Margaret M., and John C. Green. 2010. The Assemblies of God: Godly Love and the
Revitalization of American Pentecostalism. New York: NYU Press.
Rajtar, Małgorzata. 2013. “Bioethics and Religious Bodies: Refusal of Blood Transfusions in
Germany.” Social Science & Medicine 98: 271–77.
Rao, Aliya Hamid. 2015. “Gender and Cultivating the Moral Self in Islam: Muslim Converts
in an American Mosque.” Sociology of Religion 76: 413–35.
Regnerus, Mark. 2007. Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Abigail C. Saguy and Kjerstin Gruys. 2010. “Morality and Health: News Media Constructions
of Overweight and Eating Disorders.” Social Problems 57: 231–50.
Singelenberg, Richard. 1990. “The Blood Transfusion Taboo of Jehovah’s Witnesses: Origin,
Development and Function of a Controversial Doctrine.” Social Science & Medicine 31:
515–23.
Singleton, Andrew. 2001. ““Your Faith Has Made You Well”: The Role of Storytelling in the
Experience of Miraculous Healing.” Review of Religious Research 43: 121–38.
Stolz, Jörg. 2011. ““All Things Are Possible”: Towards a Sociological Explanation of Pentecostal
Miracles and Healings.” Sociology of Religion 72: 456–82.
Swan, Rita. 1983. “Faith Healing, Christian Science, and the Medical Care of Children.” New
England Journal of Medicine 309: 1639–41.
Tavory, Iddo. 2010. “Of Yarmulkes and Categories: Delegating Boundaries and the
Phenomenology of Interactional Expectation.” Theory and Society 39: 49–68.
Watts, Fraser. 2011. Spiritual Healing: Scientific and Religious Perspectives. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Winchester, Daniel. 2008. “Embodying the Faith: Religious Practice and the Making of a
Muslim Moral Habitus.” Social Forces 86: 1753–1780.

Divine Healing

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Divine Healing

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review 2018, 79:1 35–57

“In the Lord’s Hands’: Divine Healing

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

*Direct correspondence to Lindsay W. Glassman, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

teachings typically leave the church, framing their decision to do so as part of an

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

The following research is based on observations conducted between March

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Among church members, I conducted formal interviews with seven women

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

To contextualize my findings, I offer a brief outline of the church’s history and

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

neighborhood, remaining close to other church families but by no means separate

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Embracing Divine Healing: Embodied Practice and Institutional Meaning

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Wilson recognized his injury as a moment of spiritual reckoning in which he felt he

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Challenging Divine Healing: Competing Institutional Logics and

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

While Alice viewed Macy’s court-ordered care as ultimately conducive to reli-

he understood their decision to seek medical care as a “common sense” measure

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

The Constant A. Jacquet Award from the Religious Research Association,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

McGaw, Douglas B. 1980. “Meaning and Belonging in a Charismatic Congregation: An

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socrel/article/79/1/35/4563782 by University College London user on 07 December 2021

You might also like