The Lord for the body: Pain, suffering and the practice of divine healing in late-nineteenth-century American Protestantism

This study explores how participants in the divine healing or faith cure movement that flourished among Protestant evangelicals in the late nineteenth century worked to transform the ways in which Christians comprehended and coped with physical pain and illness. Drawing upon autobiographies, theological treatises and tracts defending faith healing, and numerous articles and testimonials gleaned from evangelical periodicals, I argue that advocates of faith cure endeavored to break free from a deep-seated devotional ethic that linked bodily suffering with spiritual holiness and valorized patient resignation as the proper Christian response to affliction.; Focusing upon the primacy of spiritual practice to the enterprise of divine healing, I show that participants in this movement employed a distinctive interpretation of the role of human action, as well as specific rituals and devotional disciplines, as means for modifying the meaning and experience of pain in the Christian life. According to these Protestants, overcoming illness and its effects upon the flesh required an ability to translate belief into behavior. To be healed, they contended, was to believe that God had banished sickness from the body, despite any sensory evidence to the contrary, and to act accordingly. The practice of healing, therefore, involved training the senses to ignore lingering pain or symptoms of sickness and disciplining the body to "act faith" by getting out of bed and serving God through active engagement with others. For the ailing women and men who espoused this perspective, participating in practices such as meditation, prayer, laying on of hands and anointing helped foster the requisite mental habits, corporal behaviors and spiritual dispositions that faith in divine healing demanded.; Paradoxically, however, proponents of divine healing also insisted that "acting faith" involved receptivity to the invigorating influx of the Holy Spirit, rather than exertion of the human will. Elucidating the complicated ways in which men and women within the faith cure movement described the relationship between divine power and personal passivity in the process of "acting faith" enables me to illumine the connections between Protestant practices of healing and broader cultural discourses about gender and the body. In this period, conversations concerning the relationship between will, mind and body, as well as between divine providence and human agency, were inextricably bound up with debates about the nature of true womanhood, virile masculinity, healthy-mindedness, muscular Christianity and the advancement of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Within this context, the practice, and practices of healing, operated as tools for spiritual formation of the self, and as tactics for negotiating the various gender norms, medical discourses, and theological idioms that shaped the experience of bodily affliction.; Divine healing was thus a movement that sought both personal transformation and broader cultural reform. In addition to enabling believers to conquer illness and counteract its effects upon their own flesh, the doctrines and rites of divine healing supplied strategies for navigating, and sometimes resisting or modifying, the complicated religious, cultural, historical, economic, and social circumstances that influenced the ways in which pain and suffering, illness and healing were understood and performed.