Pentecostal Healing Prayer in an Age of Evidence-Based Medicine

Introduction

Pentecostal forms of Christianity that emphasize healing, and that are growing rapidly in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, spread through their characteristic divine healing practices. Indeed, miracles have figured prominently in Christian missions from the early church to the modern era (Ma and Ma, 2010: 52; MacMullen, 1984: 29; McGee, 2010: 220). According to one estimate, as many as 80% to 90% of first-generation Chinese Christians today convert to Christianity because either they or members of their families believe themselves to have been divinely healed (Oblau, 2011: 313). A major, 10-country survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that large majorities of denominational Pentecostals and higher-than-average percentages of Charismatics reported personal divine healing experiences (The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2006). This article focuses on pentecostal Christians – denominational Pentecostals, Charismatics, and other Christians who believe that gifts of the Holy Spirit such as healing are for today – but its insights apply equally to any Christians who pray for healing and offer testimonies that healings result from prayer.

Anyone who has scanned very many pentecostal newsletters or websites will have seen an abundance of testimonials of miraculous cures. People claim to have been healed of countless medical problems – ranging from headaches to metastasized cancers and occasional claims of resurrection from the dead. But is there any medical support for such healing claims? If so, very little has been published (Keener, 2011: 1–2). Assuming for a moment that people really do experience healing through prayer, why is not more documentation publicized? For one thing, doctors are not in the business of documenting miracles. For another thing, individuals seeking prayer are understandably more concerned with receiving healing than with documenting their recoveries. Prayer ministry leaders may be too busy praying for sick people – who are never in short supply – to follow up with those who have already received prayer or to contact medical providers asking for documentation. Even if prayer ministries did have time to conduct follow-up, very few would have any idea how to go about collecting useful documentation.

Testimonies of divine healing occupy a privileged place in the identity of pentecostal Christians and in pentecostal efforts to engage in evangelistic and missionary outreach. Yet, pentecostals express an intriguing ambivalence toward empirical investigation of healing testimonies. This article begins with a brief historical sketch of empirical studies of divine healing claims. The article asks: should healing testimonies be medically evaluated? Answering this question affirmatively, the article contextualizes pentecostal healing practices within the framework of modern evidence-based medicine. The article asks why empirical investigation of pentecostal healing prayer is controversial, considers which empirical methods are best suited to evaluating claims of healing through prayer, and summarizes what empirical research reveals. The article examines consequences of pentecostal neglect of empirical investigation: confirming popular impressions that misinformed or fraudulent claims are normative and reducing the impact of missionary overtures.

Historical Vantage on Medical Investigation of Healing Claims

Although some people perceive pentecostal prayer and modern medicine as competitors, tension between religious and medical perspectives has not always seemed inevitable. Since the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church has customarily solicited medical investigation before publicizing claims of miraculous healing. Reformation-era Protestants, by contrast, dismissed Catholic healing claims as superstitious, despite the presentation of medical evidence. In 1883, the Catholic Church established a Medical Bureau – which includes non-Catholic doctors – to scrutinize claims of healing at the Shrine of Lourdes (Duffin, 2009: 7–8). By the late 19th century, certain Protestants had renewed their interest in divine healing, though showing less interest in medical validation than Catholics exhibited.

Early 20th-century Pentecostals, concerned that medicine might conflict with faith, sometimes avoided medical treatment and sometimes used modern forms of evidence, such as x-rays and photographs, to argue that prayer is superior to medicine. Pentecostals have sometimes conflated rejection of medicine with ‘faith’ and acceptance of medicine with ‘unbelief’ – rather than follow a line of logic that one may reject medicine and still lack faith, or accept medicine without wavering in faith (Alexander, 2006: 102; Opp, 2005: 177–195).

Skeptics have sometimes used medical standards to try to invalidate claims of healing through prayer. In the 19th century, a skeptical British physicist, John Tyndall, challenged Christians to compare outcomes of patients who did and did not receive prayer in what became known as the ‘Prayer Gauge Controversy’ of 1872. Christians refused the challenge because they feared that prayer was being subjected to a test it could not pass. Christians’ avoidance of a contest did not, however, induce skeptics to back down. To the contrary, 2 months after Tyndall’s challenge went unmet, another skeptical scientist, Francis Galton, published a retrospective study that he claimed revealed the worthlessness of prayer for health (Mullin, 2003). For the next century, skeptics periodically published similar findings. In 1953, the British Medical Association, in collaboration with the Church of England, conducted a retrospective examination of claims of divine healing through prayer – and concluded that it found no medical evidence of miraculous healing (British Medical Association, 1956; Brown, 2012: 99–100). By the late 20th century, as scientific studies began reporting empirical benefits from prayer, scientific naturalists stopped calling for further investigations and began to oppose them. In the face of positive research findings, scientific naturalists worried that scientific research might appear to lend credibility to supernatural claims and erode the cultural authority of modern science.

By the 1960s, a handful of pentecostal leaders associated with the Charismatic renewal movement began to take the initiative in soliciting medical validation of healing testimonies. Charismatics sought to shed early Pentecostals’ reputation for fanaticism because it had proved an obstacle to making evangelistic inroads to mainstream culture. Among the most significant impediments to Pentecostal engagement with culture was the anti-medical stance that many adopted. Charismatics accordingly worked hard to demonstrate the complementarity of prayer and medicine and to invite medical investigation of claims of healing through prayer (Yong, 2010: 51).

Most influentially, the American healing evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–1976) insisted on medical corroboration of every healing claim she publicized. Kuhlman, the daughter of Baptist and Methodist parents, gave medical doctors special seating at her services and interviewed them during her weekly telecast: I Believe in Miracles. Kuhlman kept her distance from Pentecostal practices that she viewed as fanatical – such as laying hands on the sick in quick succession in lengthy ‘healing lines’ while rejecting modern medicine. Kuhlman saw no difficulty in conceding that God works through doctors and medicine to heal, but she also sought to prove by means of medical evidence that God has the ‘power to heal instantly without the material tools of scientific medicine.’ Kuhlman seems to have gotten the idea of using medical documentation as an apologetic device after being investigated by a skeptical reporter for Redbook magazine, Emily Gardner Neal, who published an article titled: Can Faith in God Heal the Sick? (1950). After examining medical and x-ray records and workmen’s compensation reports, Neal – and Redbook’s editorial team – concluded that people were really healed during Kuhlman’s miracle services. Neal was sufficiently convinced that she converted to Christianity and became a lay Episcopal healing minister (Brown, 2008).

With Neal’s assistance as a ghostwriter, Kuhlman published a book trilogy, I Believe in Miracles (1962), God Can Do It Again (1969), and Nothing is Impossible with God (1974) that includes before-and-after medical documentation for 60 healing narratives. Cases include metastasized cancer, disappearance of goiters, reappearance of decayed bones, restoration of eyesight, and recoveries from drug and alcohol addiction, paralysis, multiple sclerosis, emphysema, diabetes, stroke, epilepsy, and curvature of the spine. Kuhlman carefully selected published cases – from a much larger pool of submitted testimonies – based on criteria borrowed from the Lourdes Medical Bureau: First, the disease or injury had been medically diagnosed as resulting from an organic or structural problem, involving more than the unexplained failure of a body part to function. Second, the healing had to have occurred rapidly, involving changes that could not easily be explained as psychosomatic. Third, the patient’s primary physician had to verify the healing. Fourth, the healing had to have occurred long enough in the past that it could not readily be diagnosed as remission. Many readers walked away from Kuhlman’s publications persuaded. A 1970 Time magazine article concluded that ‘miraculous cures seem to occur’ and termed Kuhlman a ‘veritable one-woman shrine of Lourdes’ (Brown, 2008).

In emulation of Kuhlman, the prominent Palestinian Canadian American televangelist Benny Hinn published a volume of 10 healing narratives, Lord, I Need a Miracle (1993), for which a physician, Donald Colbert, MD, wrote a foreword. Colbert attested to having personally reviewed the medical files for each case, including the healing of two metastatic cancers, blindness, and deafness. Mahesh Chavda, an Indian born in Kenya who migrated to the United States, includes before-and-after photographs of a woman testifying to recovery of eyesight and a death certificate for a 6-year-old boy who seems to have died from cerebral malaria and then been resurrected in the book Only Love Can Make a Miracle (1990). The German Reinhard Bonnke, who has spent most of his evangelistic career in Africa, includes a death certificate for a man apparently killed in an automobile accident as well as interviews with the examining physician and mortician in the 2003 film Raised from the Dead (Brown, 2012: 110–111).

In recent years, European and North American pentecostals have largely backed away from their earlier interest in medical documentation – even as the technological means for medical corroboration have advanced. Embracing a postmodern cultural identity that esteems ‘science’ and spiritual experience, pentecostals may seek to ‘prove’ healing by pointing to the ‘evidence’ of sensory experience, such as feelings of heat, sensations akin to electricity, or diminished pain, or visionary experiences. Unconvinced that medical evidence can prove anything to the satisfaction of skeptical audiences, pentecostals instead wield narrative, individual experience, and physical sensation as evangelistic tools. Postmodern pentecostals generally welcome medical treatment, yet may consider medical documentation of religious healing to be superfluous and even dangerous to faith (Brown, 2012: 102).

Obstacles to Empirical Investigation of Divine Healing Claims

Medical validation of divine healing testimonies is in short supply. Few people seeking medical care, let alone their doctors, are concerned with keeping comprehensive records in anticipation of one day experiencing a religious healing for which they must provide documentation. Medical progress notes are typically brief and oriented toward tracking specific markers of disease or health in order to provide effective treatment. What seems most relevant at the time of treatment may differ substantially from what later investigators might consider important in determining causation. Many of the most dramatic healing testimonies are from areas of the two-thirds world where medical treatment, and hence documentation, are scarce, and where environmental conditions make it challenging to conduct rigorously controlled clinical trials. Even in industrialized regions, many individuals seek prayer for healing before waiting for a medical diagnosis. If people experience relief after prayer, they may feel no need to return to their doctors just to prove it – indeed they may forget they were ever sick and simply move on with their busy routines. Those healed after prayer may also worry that returning to their doctors could cause them to lose their healings by showing their faith to be faulty (Brown, 2012: 100).

Even when before-and-after medical documentation is collected, it cannot prove – though in certain cases it may disprove – that prayer heals anyone, let alone that ‘God answered prayer.’ Medical records cannot even show that a condition has been permanently cured; relapses are common, particularly with conditions such as cancers. By the same token, the absence or incompleteness of medical evidence does not constitute evidence of the absence of healing. Medical files inevitably exclude more information than they include. Medical records are often sketchy and ambiguous in meaning, since doctors typically jot down scant information in haste. Such apparently objective records as x-rays, laboratory reports, and doctors’ notes are not self-interpreting – thus the term medical ‘opinion,’ and calls for ‘second opinions’ (Brown, 2012: 153–154).

What the most complete medical records can show is that a medical expert previously diagnosed a patient with a disease or disability; no medical interventions – or none that were expected to be curative – were administered by that provider; an expert can no longer detect clinical evidence of the diagnosed problem; such a recovery is statistically rare, given the diagnosis, prognosis, and any treatment; and there is no obvious medical explanation for how the healing occurred, given the current state of medical knowledge. On rare occasions, doctors may be quoted as saying a recovery is ‘miraculous,’ but they are either simply stating that they cannot account for a recovery or, if they are genuinely invoking supernatural agency, they are no longer speaking in their capacity as medical professionals (Brown, 2012: 153–154).

Although blatantly anti-medical stances have become much less common among Christians in recent years, many Christians continue to feel ambivalent about modern medicine. Christians want the benefits of medical technology, but they also worry that relying on medicine too much, or seeking medical proof that God heals, hinders faith in God. There is residual unease with biomedicine’s materialistic assumptions, interventionist approach, and apparent hubris. Within this general tendency, denominational Pentecostals tend to be more mistrustful of modern medicine than Charismatics. When outside researchers or the media come asking for medical verification, ministry leaders and people reporting healing may get their dander up – concerned that medical evidence will be used to disprove rather than confirm miracles (Brown, 2012: 118).

Most of my investigations of healing testimonies have failed to yield medical documentation. In following up with leads, a typical pattern ensued: several weeks or months after a pentecostal healing conference, the participant claimed to have experienced healing at the conference and to have maintained the healing; before-and-after medical records confirming the healing exist; and the individual would be willing – even eager – to share these records with me. But after repeated phone, e-mail, and postal mail follow-up, no records were produced. Sometimes follow-up elicited apologies that a host of inexplicable life crises had intervened – but still no records, until I eventually lost touch with the contact (Brown, 2012: 143).

Pentecostal Resistance to Empirical Investigation

High-profile pentecostal ministries that disseminate the largest volume of healing testimonies are often the least interested in conducting their own follow-up with medical providers. Ministries that are busy praying for a steady stream of sick people, and who receive a constant torrent of testimonials, would lack time and expertise to investigate a fraction of cases even if doing so were a priority. Ministries also tend to resist allowing outsiders to investigate.

Tracking down medical records does not appear to be even a moderately high priority for most pentecostals. Bethel Church in Redding, California, pastored by Bill and Beni Johnson, is, as of 2014, one of the most influential pentecostal healing ministries with a global reach. The church belonged to the Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination until branching off in 2006 to start its own international network of pentecostal churches. Bethel publicizes countless healing testimonies: regularly posting them on the Internet and selling printed copies through the church bookstore. Notably, Bethel employs a full-time staff person, Amy, to collect and publicize all the testimonies. ¹ Yet, Amy admitted in an interview that she has done very little to seek medical corroboration of healing claims. She is ‘trying to get more,’ but found it ‘nearly impossible’ to track down before-and-after medical records because the ministry receives such an overwhelming volume of testimonies. Amy’s top priority is to get the word out about as many encouraging testimonies as possible rather than to scrutinize claims for their validity. Amy apparently lacks medical or research training to identify which testimonies to single out for special follow-up as exhibiting the greatest potential for yielding revealing medical documentation (Amy, 2006; Brown, 2012: 121).

It appears, moreover, that it is more than lack of time and expertise that works against medical validation of Bethel’s healing testimonies. Bethel’s pastor Bill Johnson admitted in a 2008 interview with scholar of pentecostalism Margaret Poloma that he has refused to cooperate with outside efforts to investigate the church’s healing claims:

We’ve had people ask to be able to interview certain people. We allow it in a certain measure. Strangely, a lot of people don’t understand, I won’t give names of people healed, and I won’t give names of doctors. And the reason is because the media is so cruel. Individuals could handle it well, but once the news gets out it’ll become almost public property, and it causes doctors to withdraw because they come under such scrutiny. . . . We work really hard to [protect confidentiality]. I’d rather the word not get out, I’m not interested in promoting what God’s doing in Redding, I’m interested in promoting what God’s doing in the earth, and if we’re a case study for that then that’s fine. (Johnson, 2008)

Johnson worries that public scrutiny from the ‘cruel’ media will pressure medical doctors to back away from endorsing pentecostal testimonies. He prefers that the ‘word not get out’ rather than risk allowing medical investigations to be used to discredit rather than substantiate healing claims. In my own investigation efforts, I asked Bethel for de-identified medical records (that is, all names, dates, numbers except years, and addresses are removed, in accordance with the health-care privacy regulations of the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, of 1996) – a practice that protects the anonymity of those reporting healing and that of their doctors – but Bethel did not respond to even this request (Brown, 2012: 122).

The timing of Johnson’s October 2008 interview was poor. Only a few months earlier, Johnson had to clean up after the media pounced on the unsubstantiated healing claims and scandalous revelations of the Lakeland Outpouring. When Stephen Strader, pastor of an Assemblies of God Church in Lakeland, Florida, invited Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley for a visit, revivalistic services attracted some 10,000 attendees nightly. Healing testimonies filled the televised services, and Bentley issued regular on-the-air challenges to the media to come investigate. When reporters from major news outlets, included NBC New, ABS News/Nightline, and the Associated Press, took Bentley up on the offer, Lakeland leadership mailed out a thin binder of 16 undocumented testimonials with sketchy contact information (Brown, 2012: 122–123).

The Associated Press published an article noting that they had been assured that cases in the media binder had been

vetted by [Bentley’s] ministry, with all but three of their stories ‘medically verified.’ / Yet two phone numbers given out by the ministry were wrong, six people did not return telephone messages and only two of the remainder, when reached by The Associated Press, said they had medical records as proof of their miracle cure. However, one woman would not make her physician available to confirm the findings, and the other’s doctor did not return calls despite the patient’s authorization. (Reed, 2008)

A similar report soon followed from Nightline: ‘not a single claim of Bentley’s healing powers could be independently verified’ (Kofman et al., 2008). When I conducted my own investigation of cases in the media binder, I discovered that the reporters had done due diligence and accurately reported the facts. The binder gave incorrect contact information for several individuals reporting healing; some of the people I was able to contact admitted to relapses; and not one person produced a single medical record to corroborate their healings. The reporters did not demonstrate ‘cruelty,’ as Johnson characterized them as doing, but simply reported on the evidence that was and was not provided them by a ministry that had demanded to be investigated. Shortly after reporters exposed the lack of medical evidence to back Lakeland’s healing testimonies, the revivals fizzled, news broke that Bentley was leaving his wife to marry his children’s nanny, and Bentley took a leave from public ministry at the urging of other pentecostal leaders including Bill Johnson (Brown, 2012: 122–123).

Not only Bentley, but also his host during the Lakeland Outpouring, Stephen Strader, adopted the paradoxical position of asserting the possession of medical validation for healing testimonies and yet failing to make medical evidence available to reporters or outside researchers. After news outlets reported on their frustrations following up with contacts in the media binder, I emailed Strader asking for de-identified medical records (that would not compromise the confidentiality of those reporting healings or their physicians), and he responded by e-mail:

Our church has taken a stand that we will provide NO information. The lawsuits and the strife to the families is JUST NOT WORTH IT. . . . You just can’t imagine the hardships that the media puts on all of us. . . . It’s just overwhelming. (Strader 2008a)

I could find no evidence of lawsuits, or threats of lawsuits, or discern how providing de-identified medical records would cause strife or any other problems for involved families (Brown, 2012: 123).

Soon after I communicated with Strader, he published a collection of undocumented healing testimonials: The Lakeland Outpouring: The Inside Story! (2008b). The 158-page book includes a 4-page chapter on medical verification. The chapter asserts: ‘we do have a number of healings with good, verifiable reports’ that have been reviewed by a ‘currently licensed and board certified physician’ – the identity, and qualifications of whom, are not revealed. The chapter lists just three cases – of the hundreds of testimonies advertised – that Strader’s anonymous doctor accepted as ‘verifiable healings’: scoliosis, a liver lesion, and kidney failure. Only for the last case did Strader quote from a medical note – indicating improvement from 5% to 75%−80% renal function with the comment: ‘This God of yours healed you.’ The Lakeland Outpouring includes a full-color insert with 37 photographs of Lakeland services, but not one photograph of the alleged medical documentation – even for the case of scoliosis described as verified on the basis of before-and-after photographs of the woman’s back showing first ‘severe curvature’ and then the ‘spine very straight’ (Brown, 2012: 124; Strader, 2008b: 65–68).

Examples of pentecostal resistance to medical investigation predate Lakeland. One major offshoot of Johnson’s Bethel Church is the International Association of Healing Rooms (IAHR), founded by Cal Pierce, a former Bethel board member, in Spokane, Washington, in 1999. Like Bethel, the IAHR collects and posts healing testimonies both on location and on the Internet. In 2005, I asked Harvey, the IAHR staff person whose job it was to publicize testimonies, about his thoughts on medical documentation. Harvey was frankly skeptical that there is any value in medically validating healing testimonies. He reasoned that those who already have faith do not need medical records to be convinced that God heals, whereas skeptics who demand medical evidence will not be convinced regardless of the quantity or quality of evidence produced, because they will always be able to find some reason to discount the evidence. Attempting to convince people who are unwilling to be convinced seemed to Harvey a ‘waste of time,’ or worse an opening for the ‘enemy’ to challenge an intellectual basis for faith that depends on x-rays and similar visual evidence (Brown, 2012: 126; Harvey, 2005).

A key problem for Harvey is that scientific evidence encourages dependence on the sense of sight (associated with the ‘world’) rather than the sense of hearing (associated with faith), because the Bible teaches that ‘faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God’ – and the Word seems inherently aural, even when one uses the sense of sight to read the Bible. Whereas looking for medical evidence breeds doubt, listening to testimonies and the Word’s promises of healing ‘washes away disbelief.’ Harvey assumed a hierarchy of the senses in which hearing surpasses seeing, and feeling sensory input rather than seeing is believing. Healing presumably follows faith, rather than faith following evidence of healing

Given Harvey’s disdain for medical validation, it is not surprising that the IAHR left unanswered my repeated requests for de-identified medical records. During a 2011 interview, IAHR director Cal Pierce did agree to provide documentation, but as of 2014, no medical records have yet been provided. Follow-up with IAHR affiliate, the Healing Rooms of the Santa Maria Valley, California, yielded several videotapes of healing testimonies, but a direct refusal to provide medical documentation. Santa Maria did give me the phone number of a 61-year-old retired police officer, Ralph, who claimed to have been healed of metastasized stomach cancer 6 years before. Ralph readily narrated his healing story, but spoke dismissively of medical documentation:

I don’t want or need a MRI – I live on faith. I’ve had six years of perfect health. . . . I don’t need to test God. They have the law and the prophets. Every lab test would be seen as misdiagnosis to skeptics. . . . I don’t need to plead to the doctors ‘It’s a miracle.’ People want to document it, but the skeptics won’t stop till they find something to disprove it. . . . Any effort to prove miracles will fail. They’ll just dismiss it. (Ralph, 2008)

From the perspective of Ralph, as well as pentecostal ministry leaders, there is no point in trying to collect medical documentation, because it will not convince anyone of anything. This leads to the question of how non-pentecostals envision medical evidence (Brown, 2012: 126–127).

The Cultural Priesthood of Biomedicine

In cultures in which the biomedical profession is respected – if not always liked – it seems obvious to many that doctors are best qualified to arbitrate assertions of illness and healing by providing medical documentation. The term medical documentation can refer simply to the system of record-keeping used by healthcare professionals. Often, however, what people mean in reference to healing prayer is ‘biomedical proof’ that someone was ‘really’ diseased and is ‘really’ cured – and that modern medicine cannot account for the recovery. The phrase ‘evidence-based medicine’ has become a watchword in the health-care professions since the 1990s. Clinicians seek, largely through population-level studies, to prescribe only those treatments that have the strongest evidence of therapeutic efficacy and safety (Sackett, 1996).

Reporters for the secular media typically demand medical evidence of claims of healing through prayer. An online primer on reporting on religion addressed to journalists writing about religious healing claims advises: ‘Seek verification. If someone says their cancer was healed by a preacher, ask for medical confirmation from before and after the alleged healing’ (Connolly, 2006). When medical documentation is provided, reporters often adopt a strikingly unskeptical tone. Fox News (2006) did a story on Christian cardiologist, Dr. Chauncy Crandall, chief of the Cardiovascular Transplant Program at the Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic in Florida, titled ‘Raised from the Dead’ that attracted over a million website hits. Crandall had declared a man dead after 40 minutes of failing to resuscitate him following a heart attack – and then declared that the same man had been miraculously brought back to life. Having ‘called the code’ and on his way out of the emergency room ward, Crandall had avowedly heard God tell him to pray for the man and try the defibrillator one more time – after which his heart began to beat. Fox reported Crandall’s – and his patient’s – accounts in a matter-of-fact style, in part because a respected medical professional vouched for the dramatic claim (Brown, 2012: 117).

Reasons for Investigating Claims of Healing Through Prayer

Prayer is the single most common form of complementary and alternative medicine. Reasons are not hard to find. When people feel sick, are in pain, or have received a discouraging medical prognosis, people pray for help or accept prayers from religious neighbors. Even people who are not otherwise religious reason that prayer might help, and it probably will not hurt. In the two-thirds world, 80% of the population lacks basic medical care. Secularization theory predicted that the rise of science would bring the fall of religious healing. This has not occurred, because even with the best medical care, people suffer life-long, debilitating conditions and die from disease. Public opinion polls reveal that a large majority of Americans – including medical doctors – believe that miraculous healing sometimes occurs. Yet scientific research has returned mixed results. Some studies conclude that prayer improves health, while other studies suggest that prayer may have no effect – or even lead to worsening health. Many scientific studies have been conducted with insufficient awareness of religious concepts of what prayer is and why, how, where, when, and by whom it should be conducted. Consequently, such studies are of little value in determining whether the types of prayer most often practiced benefit health (Brown, 2012).

Certain scientists and Christians agree that science has no business investigating religious healing claims. Scientific naturalists argue that what the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould termed the ‘nonoverlapping magisteria’ of science and religion must be kept separate (Gould, 1997). My position is that the differences between science and religion can be respected while asking empirical questions about prayer and health. In my view, empirical questions, even about religious practices, are valid topics for empirical study. It is an empirical question whether prayer for healing produces empirical effects that are therapeutically beneficial or harmful. The magisterial boundary to be maintained is the interpretation of what empirical findings mean for matters of religion. The fact is that people do pray for their health, whether or not their physicians approve. If prayer practices can affect health – for better or for worse, for natural or for supernatural reasons – then doctors, patients, and policymakers should all want to know. What scientific studies of religious practices cannot prove is the existence – or non-existence – of the divine or suprahuman or whether such an entity answers prayer.

Christians express concern that scientists will not give prayer a fair test, and that in any case, reliance on science for evidence of healing conflicts with faith. In rejecting medical standards of evidence, Christians focus on two potential audiences: confirmed skeptics and confirmed believers. The prior assumptions of members of the first group make it unlikely that any quantity or quality of evidence will convince them. Given the premise that there is no supernatural, prayer for healing appears incompatible with medical science, and testing for empirical effects of prayer seems pointless. By contrast, members of the second group presume, without requiring scientific evidence, that God heals through prayer. Believers in healing prayer prize testimonies as encouragements to faith, but may disdain the quest for medical proof as unnecessary or worse as presumptuously ‘testing’ God. There is, however, a third group that may be considerably larger than the other two and yet receives little if any attention from Christians who resist the project of testing prayer: the undecided, who base their evaluations on the paradigm of evidence-based medicine. This group includes doctors, patients, Christians, and non-Christians, who are open to the possibility that prayer affects health – if claims are tested by the same rigorous standards that are applied to other health treatments. Many people want to know whether there is scientific evidence that prayer makes a difference and will use prayer if they are convinced by the medical evidence that healing testimonies are valid – but will dismiss healing claims that are unsupported by empirical evidence.

Medical records are valuable as one among several methods of examining healing claims. Comparison of medical records from before and after prayer can offer a scientifically informed perspective on whether someone claiming healing showed improved health. Failure to consider medical documentation has sometimes resulted in the dissemination of patently false claims. Scattered records collected from pentecostals between the 1960s and 2013 suggest that certain individuals claiming healing did exhibit medically unexpected recoveries. Yet the relative scarcity of medical documentation and inherent gaps in the information that medical records can convey also indicate the importance of finding supplementary windows onto healing claims – such as clinical studies, survey research, and long-term ethnographic follow-up (Brown, 2012).

In the absence of medical evidence, it is very difficult to reach any conclusion about the reliability of healing testimonials. It is impossible to provide a medical evaluation of whether people reporting healing were ever diagnosed with a medical problem, whether treatments or the course of time were expected to resolve it, or whether medical professionals observed any improvement. Until more emphasis is placed on medical documentation of healing claims, it will be relatively easy for the unscrupulous or the naïve to claim healing when it is obvious from the medical record that no objective improvement took place. Without some way of sifting out which claims are more or less credible, just a few instances of fraud or misperception are enough to convince the skeptically minded that most or all healing testimonies are equally spurious.

Banned for Want of Evidence

Pentecostal resistance to medical scrutiny may result in legal prohibitions on claiming that God can heal through prayer. A test case arose in February 2012, when the British Advertising Standards Authority banned a Healing on the Streets (HOTS) ministry in Bath, UK, from advertising that God can heal. The nondenominational group had handed out fliers stating that: ‘We’re Christians from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus. We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness.’ Critics charged that the fliers ‘provided false hope.’ The BSA review panel was persuaded by the complaint because they had

not seen evidence [emphasis added] that people had been healed through the prayer of HOTS volunteers, and concluded that the ad could encourage false hope in those suffering. . . . We told HOTS not to make claims which stated or implied that, by receiving prayer from their volunteers, people could be healed of medical conditions . . . the ad was misleading.

Upon appeal, the BSA retreated slightly by allowing HOTS to make undocumented claims on its website (but not in its printed materials) – only because the BSA lacks jurisdiction to regulate Internet content (HOTS Bath, 2012). Unless Christians or other researchers provide medical evidence of the efficacy of prayer, it seems possible, and indeed, likely that there will be further challenges and prohibitions not just in the UK, but elsewhere.

Susceptibility to Deception

Another danger of relying on testimony at the expense of documentation can be illustrated by a globally disseminated healing testimony: that of the Brazilian pentecostal ministry leader Davi Silva who claimed to have been healed of Down’s syndrome through his mother’s repeated prayers. Silva asserted that medical documentation in the form of before-and-after chromosomal tests once existed but had not been preserved, and pentecostals did not press him for records because they were awed by his dramatic testimony. In 2010, 11 years after his testimony began to circulate, Silva admitted to lying about his healing claim. Unlike Kuhlman, who required medical documentation before endorsing healing testimonies, such has not been the customary practice in pentecostal ministries in the first decade of the 21st century. Silva’s ministry associates defended themselves by insisting that they had not covered up his lies, they just never investigated his claims (Brown, 2012: 144–145).

Many people can readily think of instances of high-profile ministry leaders like Silva making fraudulent claims, and therefore conclude that most if not all healing testimonies are similarly false. Psychologists refer to this kind of inference as the ‘availability heuristic’ (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). This means that people tend to infer the probability of an imagined scenario on the basis of how vividly they can recall examples of such scenarios. In actuality, such judgments are often unfounded. Systematic research on divine healing claims suggests that Silva’s dishonesty is the exception rather than the norm. Yet the tendency to accept at face value such dramatic claims as his without medical documentation opens the door for easy deception and exposés by critics – while placing implicit pressure on other pentecostals to exaggerate their own experiences in order to appear comparably ‘spiritual.’

Frank is a lay pentecostal salesman with an attention-loving personality who, in the course of my research, gave several indications of wanting to be viewed as a spiritual leader. He boasted that biblical ‘manna’ regularly appeared in his open Bible, and walked around with a golden, glitter-like substance shining on his face that he, and his peers, interpreted as supernatural ‘glory dust.’ While traveling on a pentecostal ministry trip to Brazil, Frank testified that his eyesight was healed. He averred that, due to a shrapnel wound garnered during military service, he had been unable to read through his left eye for 24 years. After prayer, he could read very well. At my request, Frank produced an optometrist’s report that indicated: ‘On 02’ left eye uncorrected visual acuity was ‘20/200’; in 2007, it was ‘NOW 20/40.’ Follow-up with Frank’s optometrist revealed that the record had been ‘altered.’ The phrases ‘On 02’ and ‘Now 20/40’ had been added by someone outside the optometrist’s office. The unaltered record shows visual acuity of 20/200 in 2007 − after Frank’s supposed healing (Brown, 2012: 146–149). In the course of my research, I have found very few cases of acknowledged or apparent fraud like Silva’s and Frank’s, but medical records are one way of distinguishing among claims that are more or less credible. If Christians or other researchers do not do due diligence to investigate healing claims, there are skeptical media outlets that will publicize cases of fraud as the norm.

Medical Evidence in Service of Non-Christian Religious Healing

Despite low rates of religious observance in many industrialized countries, there is widespread interest in practices that people envision as both ‘scientific’ and ‘spiritual.’ Many Europeans and North Americans are looking for something more than modern medicine to help them. Most people who say they are ‘spiritual but not religious’ or who have stopped going to church believe in God or a higher power and may be open to receiving prayer. People go where they expect to find help, and when churches or medical doctors do not offer hope of healing, people go elsewhere. If pentecostals will not engage popular demand for medically corroborated, yet more-than-medical healing, there are other religious healers who will.

Promoters of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) who claim to heal by unblocking universal life-force energy, variously named qi, ki, prana, Innate Intelligence, or vital force, have already surpassed pentecostals for winning entrance into the biomedical mainstream. The American Hospital Association reported in 2007 that 15% of US hospitals, a total of 800, offered Reiki (Barnes et al., 2008: 10). In 2010, 42% of US hospitals provided CAM services (Ananth, 2011: 9). The medical mainstreaming of CAM has occurred even though much of CAM is closely tied to religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Western metaphysics (Brown, 2013).

CAM advocates succeeded in importing religion into mainstream medicine by adopting scientific vocabularies and publishing a large volume of relatively poor-quality studies in scientific journals. For instance, the Center for Reiki Research Including Reiki in Hospitals [emphasis in original] has the mission of integrating Reiki into hospitals through medical validation. The center’s website lists publications supporting CAM and concludes that the ‘strongest evidence that Reiki has a demonstrable biological effect’ comes from two studies that showed benefits for a combined total of seven rats (in one study, an experimental group of four rats was compared with three control groups of four rats each; in the second study, the same three rats were first given Reiki and then ‘sham’ Reiki) (Center for Reiki Research, 2014). Although there is more scientific evidence of health benefits for Christian prayer than for most forms of CAM, pentecostals are losing culture wars in the West in part because they are less aggressive than CAM boosters in advertising medically validated health benefits (Brown, 2013).

Which Empirical Methods Should be Used?

Rather than select a single method, there is an advantage to combining multiple methods, each tailored to answer particular questions about prayer and health, since this multifaceted approach offers complementary angles to produce a composite picture. For instance, medical records can help determine whether people claiming healing exhibited any observable improvement for which there is no obvious medical or natural explanation. Survey responses reveal how suffering people perceive the benefits of prayer. Clinical trials can show whether prayer practices result in measurable changes in health markers. And multi-year follow-up shows whether changes are temporary or enduring (Brown, 2012). For the purposes of this article, it is sufficient to focus on collecting medical records and conducting clinical trials.

Comparison of Before-and-After Medical Records

Despite the widespread ambivalence I have encountered regarding the proof value of medical documentation, I have tracked down cases of pentecostals reporting healing in the 2000s who have produced copies of their before-and-after medical records. Such records typically provide limited information when read alone but do provide a check on whether people claiming healing exhibited improvements for which there is no obvious explanation. For example, in the course of my research, I met Daisy, who had worn hearing aids for 30 years. She had a progressively worsening, hereditary inner-ear problem. In 1999, hearing tests at an audiologist’s office showed moderate hearing loss; by 2004, tests showed that Daisy’s hearing loss was moderately severe to severe. In 2008, Daisy received prayer and ‘felt my fingers on fire and the warmth of the Holy Spirit inside of me,’ after which she could avowedly hear without hearing aids. Daisy had her hearing retested 2 weeks later – at the same audiologist’s office, using the same testing equipment – showing normal thresholds in lower frequencies with moderate loss in higher frequencies. A 2010 screening still showed normal hearing in speech frequencies. Medical records do not prove that ‘God’ healed Daisy through prayer, but do confirm Daisy’s claim of improved hearing (Brown, 2012: 141–143).

A signed physician’s statement from 2005 − written on behalf of a US college student named Joy to explain any absences from class due to migraine headaches – describes Joy as having ‘vertical heterophoria.’ This is a visual impairment in which a muscle or nerve weakness causes one eye to turn up or down so that the eyes take pictures from slightly different angles, in Joy’s case causing double vision and migraines. This lifelong condition can be largely corrected by prism glasses – and Joy has an optometrist’s prescription for such lenses dated 2006. The same optometrist wrote a note dated 2009 stating that she ‘no longer requires corrective lenses for driving.’ The medical records do not explain the improvement, but they do confirm its notation by medical professionals. Joy’s explanation is that during a worship service, she heard God say she did not ‘have to live’ in the dark any more, and felt her skull being pulled upward, after which she removed her glasses and was able to read without double vision. Interviewed 6 months later and again 2 years later in 2011, Joy had not experienced a single migraine or other symptom and continued to see well with both eyes together, despite having discarded her glasses and stopping her antimigraine diet (Brown, 2012: 129–132).

Pentecostal healing evangelist Heidi Baker testifies that she has been miraculously healed of dyslexia, pneumonia, multiple sclerosis, and methicillin resistant stapholococcus aureus, or MRSA. Baker says that in 2005, she was hospitalized in Malaysia and South Africa for 32 days on the strongest antibiotics available for MRSA; doctors said ‘write your tombstone.’ Baker instead checked herself out of the hospital to see a ‘specialist’ in Toronto, by which she meant Jesus. Baker claims she was healed while preaching. A conference DVD shows that Baker appears to have gained strength by the end of her 2-hour-long sermon. Medical records confirm that Baker followed up 2 days later at a California hospital that specializes in the treatment of MRSA. Medical professionals who examined her were convinced that she had had MRSA but that she no longer required hospitalization. Laboratory tests showed no evidence of remaining staphylococcus bacteria (Brown, 2012: 242–244). In each of these instances, medical records are not self-interpreting, but they do provide information that supplements the perspective offered by healing testimonies.

Clinical Investigations of Divine Healing Practices

Medical researchers have focused on conducting double-blinded, controlled trials of distant intercessory prayer. Researchers typically give intercessors the first name and condition of someone they have never met and instruct them to pray for recovery. There is a fundamental limitation to this approach to studying prayer. In real life, people do not pray in the double-blinded way that many scientists want them to for their studies, because many prayer traditions for healing have a strong social component. When people actually pray for healing, they usually get up close to someone they know, touch the person and empathize with their sufferings – what I call proximal intercessory prayer (PIP).

I worked with medical researchers to conduct a clinical study of PIP for vision and hearing impairments in rural Mozambique. We used an audiometer and vision charts to prospectively evaluate 24 consecutive Mozambican subjects reporting severe auditory or visual impairments. We tested every single ‘deaf’ and ‘blind’ person brought to healing evangelist Heidi Baker before and after she prayed for them and reported all of our results – whether or not the people claimed to improve, and whether or not we observed any change. Even with a relatively small sample size, we found large enough effects in individual subjects and consistent enough effects across study populations that the results were statistically significant (for hearing, p < .003; for vision p < .02). Two subjects had hearing thresholds reduced by over 50 dBHL (decibels of hearing level) on a scale from 0 to 100. One subject, Jordan, was presented as deaf and mute since birth and made no responses to sounds at 100 dBHL; after PIP, he responded to 60 dBHL tones, imitating sounds in a hoarse, raspy voice. Three subjects improved from reading 20/400 (6/120), the top of an eye chart, or worse to 20/80 (6/24) or better. Before PIP, Maryam could not count fingers from one foot (30 cm) away; after 1 minute of PIP, she was reading the 20/125 (6/38) line on a vision chart. We did a replication study in Brazil, where we also found significant effects. We compared the magnitude of effects from PIP with studies of the effects of hypnosis and suggestion on hearing and vision. We found greater average and greater maximum improvements even though similar potential confounds – such as the oft-discussed placebo effect – may be involved (Brown, 2012: 194–233). Although this study was not without its limitations, the results are sufficiently intriguing to suggest the value of further investigations.

Global Medical Research Institute (GMRI)

There are some indications of current cultural interest in empirically evaluating claims of healing through prayer. In 2011, the Global Medical Research Institute (GMRI), under the leadership of American and British medical doctors, was incorporated as a non-profit 501(c)(3) research organization that ‘seeks to apply the rigorous methods of evidence-based medicine to study Christian Spiritual Healing.’ The institute hosts a website, launched in 2012, through which individuals or ministries can submit healing testimonies supported by before-and-after medical records for evaluation by a panel of medical specialists. In addition, the institute seeks to support the publishing of clinical research on prayer ‘in peer-reviewed journals, and to communicate the empirical findings to physicians, medical students, and other health care providers.’ Specifically, GMRI aims to investigate:

What happens when people pray for healing? Are there measurable health effects? If so, are the effects positive, negative, or neutral? Can some or all of these effects be attributed to a placebo effect? If so, what exactly are the limits of placebo effects, and how effective is prayer relative to known placebos? (GMRI, 2013)

According to the institute website,

the overall goal of GMRI is to promote an empirically grounded understanding of the physiological, emotional, and sociological effects of Christian Spiritual Healing (CSH) practices. To this end, GMRI seeks to apply the same standards of empirical research to the investigation of CSH practices as are commonly applied to the study of other conventional and alternative medical and cultural practices. (GMRI, 2013)

In order for initiatives like GMRI to succeed in illuminating any medical benefits – or harms – of prayer, collection of before-and-after medical records and development of clinical studies are essential.

Conclusion

This article has sought to provide insight into the relationship between prayer for healing and evidence-based evidence, and has argued that researchers should use empirical methods to test for effects of prayer on health. In particular, comparison of before-and-after medical records and clinical trials provide means of testing how well healing testimonies match with objective data. Ironically, given pentecostals’ emphasis on missionary outreach, pentecostals’ dismissive stance toward medical validation has hindered their ability to speak the language of scientifically-oriented cultures – disregarding what the theologian Lamin Sanneh (2013) calls the ‘translatability’ that has contributed to Christianity’s missionary success. As a result, non-Christian religious healers have been more successful than pentecostals in gaining access to secular health-care settings. Moreover, when pentecostals do not sort out which healing testimonies are more credible than others, outside researchers are sure to point to evidence of fraud or naïveté, with the result that skepticism toward all similar-sounding healing claims increases. Investigating whether prayer benefits, harms, or has no effect on health, or whether certain forms of prayer are more efficacious than others, can offer valuable information for health-care providers and patients. Since it is an empirical fact that people do pray for healing, it only seems prudent to find out what if anything happens when people pray.