Bodies and their Care in a Secular Age

In September 1956 two physicians at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Tilden Everson and Warren Cole, received support from the American Cancer Society to study an undisputed but rarely discussed phenomenon: spontaneous regression of cancer. Published in the Annals of Surgery, their report provided what remains the standard definition of spontaneous remission: “the partial or complete disappearance of a malignant tumor in the absence of all treatment, or in the presence of therapy which is considered inadequate” (Everson and Cole, 1956: 366). A cogent definition notwithstanding, physicians have never been able to explain how such regressions occur. Though practitioners have documented examples dating from well before the twentieth century to our present moment, Everson and Cole failed (just as their predecessors did in 1918) to establish a definitive biological cause. Nevertheless, case reports continue to appear in the literature in hopes that one day the mystery will be solved, and that hypotheses such as patient hormonal changes or autoimmune responses to infectious fevers will change from educated guesses to gospel truth. ¹

Patients who experience spontaneous remission, by contrast, often have an explanation at the ready—one that need not wait for empirical verification by medical authorities. An internet search for “miraculous cancer cure” turns up hundreds of thousands of results: “Cancer Cured by a Miracle of Jesus Christ,” one headline proclaims (2016). “Schoolboy Battling Cancer Receives ‘Miracle Cure’ After Visiting Holy Site,” avers another (Campos, 2015). These survivors, who tell their stories not in medical journals but in popular news outlets, including the UK Mirror or hobby websites like Born Again Christian Info, attribute their changed physical state to prayer or divine intervention. They often relate an accompanying spiritual transformation: they have been “saved” in more ways than one. The deferral of certainty seen in medical reports—passive voice stylings such as “the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon is unclear”—is exactly reversed in these spiritual reports (Lim, Park and Lee, 2014: 1225). The healed know with an assurance that transcends mere intellectual assent that they have experienced a miracle wrought by God. The spontaneous remission of cancer offers, on the one hand, a tantalizing challenge to biomedical researchers and, on the other, a life-altering event, with precedent in nearly every religious tradition, that seems to confirm divine intervention in human affairs.

In the history of grand narratives, the one pitting scientific ways of knowing against religious epistemes proves particularly recalcitrant. Referred to in academic circles as the “secularization thesis,” this narrative describes science’s triumph over what it deems religious superstition. ² In light of this thesis the biomedical and spiritual explanations rehearsed above seem to confirm their epistemological incompatibility—especially from the perspective of the practitioners in question, whether of the doctoral or divine variety. The biomedical explanation requires empirically verifiable and repeatable evidence recorded under controlled conditions and without the researcher’s biased intervention. The spiritual interpretation is predicated on an emotional, embodied, and indispensably personal assurance that the ineffable has been present and its healing work performed. To the biomedical practitioner, the miraculous explanation for spontaneous remission is nonsense, a superstitious remnant of a prescientific age. To the patient guided by faith, the biomedical explanation is largely irrelevant, since divine action requires no experimental proof.

This special issue denies the rigid distinction between the medical and religious regimes, demonstrating that at the level of practice and from the perspective of history their ostensible incommensurability does not make them mutually exclusive. Although researchers who search in vain for the “underlying mechanism” of spontaneous cancer regression and their patients who know they experienced a miracle cure may seem to occupy opposing sides of an irreducible impasse, in fact they both evince a deep, abiding commitment to the truths communicated via bodies. The same disease-free body that proves the miracle cure also drives forward scientific inquiry about how the cure occurred. This mutual interdependence is acknowledged in the language of both medicine and religion: the healed often use the term “miracle” to describe a cure in which medicine played an integral but not an all-sufficient role. Patients attribute the discovery of a groundbreaking treatment, the healing abilities of medical professionals, and other biomedical interventions to divine will enacted through earthly means. Meanwhile, doctors describe their work as a calling or vocation, and may even consider themselves the instruments of a benevolent providence, while spiritual leaders attend to sick and suffering souls. It is the interpenetration of the religious and the medical on which these essays focus, positing that bodies in community—where the intersection of illness, healing, and faith is directly experienced—offer an understudied site for examining how medicine and religion interact in our secular age. ³

The essays collected in this special issue belong to a new generation within secularism studies, one that places bodies and communities at the center of discussions about secular modernity. ⁴ Scholars across disciplines have begun to demonstrate (contrary to what the secularization thesis would have us believe) that in both the past and the present, religion and medicine have often been allies or at least uneasy collaborators rather than sworn enemies. Studies such as Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen’s (1997) Caring and Curing and Roy Porter’s (2005) Flesh in the Age of Reason brought to light the long history of religious practitioners and communities weighing in on medical issues. Using anthropological methods in her Spirits of Protestantism, Pamela E. Klassen (2011) revealed that notions of North American healing are built on a foundation of Protestant “supernatural liberalism.” Literary scholarship such as Justine Murison’s (2013) The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Kelly Wisecup and Toni Wall Jaudon’s (2015) recent special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents on obeah (a set of medico-religious practices deployed by enslaved Africans in the West Indies) underscore how narratives and their circulation construct worldviews in which spiritual and scientific ideas work together. ⁵ Building on this multi-disciplinary foundation, the essays collected here seek to answer how bodies (and attendant medical theories) accrue meaning within religious communities, both as abstract concepts and as material objects, as well as how religious ideas undergird modern medical practices. In examining how contexts of care precipitate intricate, highly specific configurations of the relationship between medicine and religion, our contributors articulate how bodies in distress provide the fulcrum for advancing secular modernity.

When Charles Taylor (2007) published his seminal A Secular Age, one of its primary concerns was determining how secularism shaped the conditions for belief and unbelief alike—a phenomenon he saw as constituting modernity. Since then there has been ample response to his analysis, including various readings and misreadings of his thesis. ⁶ But little has been said specifically about how medicine, illness, care of bodies, definitions of wellness, and so on pertain to his larger claim. Leading the way has been Justine S. Murison (2015) in her recent essay “Obeah and its Others: Buffered selves in the era of tropical medicine.” Murison acknowledges Taylor’s claim that Western secularity constructs a recognizable notion of self. But, she argues, this self is constituted not by “the absence of enchantment in the secular, modern world so much as its relocation, not to the mind, but to invisible diseases” (Murison, 2015: 146). Murison’s work underscores that when we account for medical knowledge in secular contexts (such as the colonial encounter with obeah), our understanding of that secularity changes. She challenges us to ask, not “what is religion?” which is Taylor’s way of unpacking what happens when religion and medicine meet, but “how do bodies signify when they do and what is secularism as a result?” ⁷ Our contributors acknowledge the centrality of bodies as a subject of study, asking how we might see the sick and suffering body differently through the lens of a religious experience of illness and healing. ⁸ Religious people and communities construct knowledge around bodies in ways that are meaningful for them—ways that often synthesize scientific knowledge with spiritual experience, rather than holding them separate—and these experiences are central to an accurate understanding of North American secularity.

In other words, these essays challenge us to consider how lived, material, and indeed biological conditions influence what Talal Asad has called “the mechanics of reality maintenance”: the discursive process of defining—and constantly redefining—what is humanly apprehensible and under what terms (1993: 49). ⁹ To insist on the centrality of biology to secularism studies may seem like secularization by another name. However, interrogating Western secular processes of “reality maintenance” entails accounting for how the body signifies within that discursive system. The essays collected here are premised on secularism theory’s acknowledgement that “science,” “medicine,” “faith,” and “religion,” rather than fixed and universal aspects of all human experience, are constantly-changing discursive categories that intersect to define reality in particular ways and to produce interdependent structures of meaning. But they push this insight further by underscoring how embodiment, biological existence, and communal identity play crucial roles in shaping these discursive categories. Secular modernity, our contributors show, does not transcend bodies but instead grows out of moments in which therapeutic care is offered and the suffering body receives ministering.

Bringing bodies to the forefront of conversations about secularism still means recognizing and moving beyond the limitations imposed by the secularization thesis. When narratives of biomedical secularization fail, it is often precisely because they remove bodies and communities from discussion, treating all medical subjects as having the same departicularized body (most often the white, male, middle-class, North American college student immediately available as a subject for biomedical research) and belonging only to the delocalized community of “test subjects” or “ICU patients.” But bodies have race, gender, and ethnic identifications, spiritual or religious commitments, family responsibilities, claims to national belonging, refugee or immigrant status, and countless other intersecting markers of biological and communal identity. As biomedical epistemologies have redrawn the boundaries of rationalized human experience, medical science has not reached all bodies and communities at the same time. Nor has it affected them uniformly when it arrived. This special issue considers moments in which the care of bodies became a locus for forming secular modernity. Jennifer Seman’s essay, for instance, explores a moment when the biomedical practices of white European settlers in nineteenth-century California met and clashed with the faith-based healing practices of indigenous Catholic mystics including Teresa Urrea. Rather than simply replacing these traditional practices, as narratives of secularization would suggest, Seman shows how a nascent white biomedical establishment defined itself in opposition to native bodies and non-Protestant traditions. In this case, bodies were accorded different types of care based on their racial and religious characteristics—a disparity that persists in our current care environment.

The essays collected here share a common interest in the intersection of religion and medicine without adhering to narrow disciplinary allegiances, drawing their approaches from their subjects of study rather than imposing ill-fitting theoretical or ideological premises upon them. So, for instance, in her contribution to this volume, Cathy Gutierrez addresses the post-Darwinian scientific rhetoric of eugenics, which sought to guide the future of the human race by controlling reproduction in ways that would produce “ideal” genetic outcomes. Spiritualist progressives of the mid- to late nineteenth centuries, Gutierrez writes, saw the medical management of human reproduction as a way to liberate women from domestic duties and thereby further feminist ends. Gutierrez does not tell a simple tale of medical triumph (the “triumph” of eugenic science would not be a matter for celebration) or religious decline (Spiritualism persists today in altered forms). Rather, in this essay, the seemingly modernizing advance of Darwinist evolution has restored to it the theological import of its ideas—an import long obscured by the consumable simplicity of the secularization thesis. Unsatisfied with the conventional wisdom promulgated by their various disciplines, the literary critics, historians, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars responsible for these pages returned to the archive and let the people they study speak for themselves on the subject of medicine and religion.

With this methodological approach these essays are able to begin to overcome one of the key problematics within secular criticism: how the secularization thesis continues to undergird the disciplinary regimes of the academy. ¹⁰ As many important voices have argued, it is only with the benefit of hindsight that scholars have been able to grasp “how shaped our conceptual frameworks are, down to their most elemental premises, by secularization” (Coviello and Hickman, 2014: 646). As Vincent Pecora (2006) points out, the forms of criticism valued by twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship—codified most famously by Edward Said—base their claims to objectivity on an implicit or explicit characterization of all religious adherence as irrational, primitive, and dogmatic. In this way modern scholarship is “forged in opposition to religion and, in that way, irremediably marked by it” (Seth, 2009: 305). ¹¹ As the institution that enshrines these critical principles, the modern research university is one of the primary producers of secularized discourse (Kaufmann, 2007: 607). However, the supposedly secularized university enfolds centuries of assumptions and attendant practices rooted in Western sectarian history. This special issue models how we might fold our metacritical awareness of the limitations of the disciplinary academy into our analyses of specific histories, practices, and contexts of care. It is possible, in other words, to use our close readings, historical interpretations, and ethnographic accounts of specific moments of American secularity to also question the secularized assumptions that linger in our thought.

It helps, of course, to not be a single scholar fighting the norms and practices of her discipline and to instead belong to a larger group of like-minded researchers whose paths may not cross at national conventions and who do not belong to the same departments or even the same colleges but who find themselves speaking the same language or thinking in similar ways. If in the recent past such multidisciplinary alliances have succeeded in “the killing-off of a once-commonsensical master narrative,” then today scholars must band together to engage in “a different, broader kind of imagining” (Coviello and Hickman, 2014: 647). The essays collected in this special issue showcase the interpretative practices and tools that can help us rethink secularism through bodies. Peter Skrivanic’s ethnographic interviews with North American Zen Shiatsu practitioners, for instance, reveal the importance of tactile and affective knowledge to this cross-cultural religio-medical phenomenon. In contrast, Megan Goodwin uses the literary tool of close reading to analyze memoirs by satanic abuse survivors in order to unearth the Catholic iconography that undergirded a widespread psychological diagnosis. Each method is suited, naturally, to each researcher’s given disciplinary training. But they also prove to be the right tools for the job. How Zen Shiatsu practitioners talk about their practice is a key discursive act in that context, whereas the circulation of satanic abuse survivors’ memoirs was crucial to the rise of a psychological diagnosis thoroughly imbued with Catholic ideology. By working cross-disciplinarily and diachronically, the essays collected here assemble a clearer picture of the role of religious and medical discourse and practice in the construction of North America’s secular situation. Together these essays both describe and interrogate the social, historical, and intellectual conditions that make it difficult to think of the religious and the medical as connected by anything other than mutual suspicion and conflict. This special issue, in other words, does not offer a ringside seat to yet another fight between religion and medicine, but instead examines not only the rules of the fight but how the idea of a “fight” has helped to construct the contours of the public and private spheres.

The scholars whose essays are collected here trace the contours of the changing relationship between North American religion and medicine across time and space—from the colonial period to the present and from New England to the US–Mexico borderlands. In the process, they collectively construct a cultural history of North American secularity in which medicine does not succeed or supersede religion, nor does religion fall victim to a secularized rationality. With luck and diligence, these ideas may eventually make their way into the public sphere, which is still dominated by culture war “debates” represented at either pole by the dogmatic hyper-rationalism of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins (1986, 2006) and Sam Harris (2004, 2006) and the reactionary conservatism of New Calvinists including John Piper (1986) and Al Mohler (2008). For these public intellectuals, science and religion are still locked in narratives of progress or decline and consistently positioned as antagonists and villains. ¹² And yet, as our contributors show, the relationship between religion and medicine in North American culture has always been far too complex to be contained by such debates. Instead, the essays collected here balance, perhaps precariously, on the ever-moving boundary between religious and medical models of knowledge production. Contemporary scholars and practitioners on both sides of this false epistemological divide, we believe, can benefit from a more thorough understanding of the connected histories of medicine and religion. Where flesh meets faith, secularism’s human faces emerge.