All Sorts of Trickery

In investigating modern faith-healing, I came upon every common method of technical, psychological, semantic, and physical chicanery that one can imagine being used to deceive the public—and some new ones, as well. I was aided in my investigations by some of the finest minds in the conjuring business, and the names of those persons will come up in the discussions that follow. My own expertise is very much centered in the “mentalism” aspects of conjuring. In the early days of my career as a conjuror, I specialized in that field. Because of that specialization, I am able to spot signs of trickery that many “magicians” might miss. Indeed, I ran into several fellow conjurors who told me that they believed at least some of the faith-healers had genuine powers. A few of the former colleagues of the faith-healers themselves, even though they had been exposed to the actual methods used, had been fooled by some other aspects of the act and thus had retained some belief in the powers claimed. We will turn next to the attitude of the “orthodox” churches concerning faith-healing. I will not attempt to define the term “orthodox,” because each reader will have his or her own opinion about that matter.

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The Church View

Is one of you ill? He should send for the elders of the congregation to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer offered in faith will save the sick man, the Lord will raise him from his bed.... (James 5:14)

  Every denomination, sect, and cult of the Christian religion has attempted to explain, condone, deny, embrace, or denounce faith-healing. One evangelist, Glen Cole of Sacramento, California, claimed in his television broadcast of May 24, 1987, that all manner of instantaneous cures occur at his fingertips. He poured forth a quite astonishing view of faith-healing. Briefly, here is a summary of what he used ten times the necessary number of words to say: Sickness started at the moment that Eve tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Because of her disobedience, our species was doomed to die instead of living forever. (I am tempted to invoke a picture of this planet with human beings piled a mile deep over every square inch of surface, and continuing to reproduce in accordance with the scriptural admonition to do so, but I am determined to resist that inclination.) Pastor Cole pointedly ridiculed those who were so silly as to go to their medicine cabinet seeking a cure for illness, instead of running to a preacher. Sickness and dying, he said, can be stopped by anointing, laying on of hands, and faith. Why do some people, following the rules given, still get sick and die? Not to worry, he tells us. It is an exchange of this mundane life for heaven. It is “the ultimate healing, death.” Let Pastor Cole’s colleagues squirm their various ways out of that mess. Perhaps, to them, it makes some sort of sense; to me, it is dangerous and juvenile thinking.

More Orthodox Views

The United Church of Canada, in common with many other major religious groups, looked into the claims of the faith-healers and issued an official report in 1961 that said:Faith-healing is not a legitimate ministry of the Church and should be actively discouraged and resisted wherever it is practiced.

By 1967, that opinion had changed. For whatever reasons, church authorities had now decided that there existed both authentic faith-healing and spurious faith-healing, and “discrimination between [them] is not easy but important.” The spurious variety was attributed to people such as Oral Roberts. The United Church of Canada’s major criticisms of Roberts’s variety of evangelism were:(1) It is based upon an inadequate theology which often assumes sickness to be a divine judgment. (2) It has a naive view of the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” healing. (3) It works—when it does—usually by suggestion and hysteria, and the patient may suffer a relapse that leaves him worse off than he was before. (4) People who are not healed may feel that God has rejected them and suffer morbid guilt feelings and spiritual shipwreck.

I note that the United Church of Canada report did not cite one genuine, proven case of healing, and I may surmise that the church changed its mind because the existence of scriptural references to such wonders was pointed out to it. The Reverend Carroll R. Stegall, Jr., writing in Presbyterian Outlook early in Oral Roberts’s career, reported his conclusions on this subject:So far from glorifying God with this, [the faith-healers] cause His name to be blasphemed by the world by their excesses. So far from curing, they often kill. Far from blessing, their arrival in a city is rather a curse, a misery, a racket, a destruction of faith in simple people.

The Christian Century, an Episcopalian journal, warned the faithful that it is “a profound heresy [to believe that God] is susceptible to such pushing around by man.”