Faith healing is the practice of attempting to cure illness or disability through prayer, ritual, or the intervention of a spiritual practitioner, rather than through conventional medicine. It spans traditions from the informal "laying on of hands" found in many religions to large-scale evangelical healing crusades built around a single charismatic healer, and it is one of the most persistent and widely practised paranormal claims covered by The Vault.
Origins and religious context
Healing through prayer and ritual has roots in most of the world's major religious traditions, and the practice long predates any organised movement built specifically around it. The modern evangelical "healing crusade," in which a travelling minister claims to cure audience members of specific ailments during a live service, developed largely in 20th-century America through revivalists such as Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman, and continued through later televangelists including Benny Hinn.[1] These services typically combine testimony, music, and an emotionally intense atmosphere with public "healings," in which attendees are called forward, told specific details about their conditions, and declared cured.
Notable example: Peter Popoff
Peter Popoff is one of the best-documented cases of exposed faith-healing fraud. During his televised crusades in the 1980s, Popoff would call out audience members by name and describe their illnesses and addresses in specific detail, presenting the information as revealed to him directly by God.[1]
In 1986, magician and sceptic James Randi attended one of Popoff's San Francisco services with a radio scanner and intercepted a signal being transmitted into a hidden earpiece Popoff was wearing. The signal was coming from Popoff's wife, Elizabeth, who was reading the same personal details from prayer cards that audience members had filled in before the service began. Randi played the recording on The Tonight Show, remarking that "God's frequency" turned out to be 39.10 MHz.[1] The exposure was later covered at length in Randi's 1987 book The Faith Healers, which examined the techniques used by Popoff and several other televangelist healers.[1] Popoff's ministry filed for bankruptcy in 1987, though he returned to television faith healing in the late 1990s and continues to broadcast; see Peter Popoff for his fuller history, including a 2023 UK broadcast investigation into his "Miracle Spring Water" product.
Scientific perspective
No controlled study has demonstrated that faith healing produces medical outcomes beyond what can be explained by the placebo effect, natural regression to the mean (the tendency for unusually severe symptoms to improve on their own over time), diagnostic error, or the psychological benefits of ritual, attention, and social support.[2]
The largest controlled test of intercessory prayer specifically, the 2006 Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), followed 1,802 patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery at six US hospitals. It found no difference in recovery between patients who were prayed for and those who were not, and patients who were told with certainty that they were being prayed for actually experienced a slightly higher rate of complications.[3]
Sceptical investigators, including James Randi, have also documented specific techniques used by faith healers to simulate genuine cures on stage, including planted audience members, cold reading of the crowd for likely ailments, and hot reading using information gathered beforehand — as in Popoff's case, transmitted live by radio.[1]
Related concepts
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "The Depraved Peter Popoff."McGill University Office for Science and Society.
- ↑ "Placebo Effects in Modern Medicine: Mechanisms, Clinical Evidence, Limitations, and Future Directions."PubMed Central.
- ↑ "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients."PubMed.