Isn’t it weird that faith healers aren’t curing COVID-19? Isn’t it weirder that their flock isn’t calling them on it?

From Oral Roberts’ sweaty tent revivals in the 1950s to Benny Hinn’s slick five-hour productions today, faith healers have been busy. Kenneth Copeland, Pat Robertson, Peter Popoff, and other big names are faith healers or started that way. A healing revival has lots of practiced emotional manipulation, but there is clear biblical support for healings of this sort. Jesus did public healings, and we see a first-century promise to the sick in James 5:14–16:

Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

If faith healing worked, and healing revivals were the place to see them, what would that look like? How could we tell that it was for real? Here’s a list of some of the things we should expect to see (contrasted with what we actually see).

Use of money

Donations given by sick people to the ministry that provided real faith healing would either be refused or used for conventional good works (food, clothes, and housing for the needy, for example). Instead, God would provide money, equipment, or whatever was necessary to run the ministry. After all, God “will repay each person according to what they have done” (Romans 2:6), and Jesus said, “Give, and it will be given to you” (Luke 6:38).

What we see instead: the big faith-healing ministries take in roughly $100 million per year, and sick people in the audience, who probably have better things like medical expenses to spend their money on, are encouraged to give money repeatedly. Desperate people giving money they shouldn’t part with to rich people who make big claims with paltry evidence? Though it may be done for the best of reasons, that certainly looks from the outside like a scam, a modern-day version of the patent medicine salesman.

Relationship to evidence

If faith healing worked, the focus would be on evidence and science. Scientists and doctors would be given easy access to evidence supporting claims of miraculous healings and would be encouraged to evaluate the claims and publish the results. They’d be encouraged to examine people before and after healings by prayer.

You would see statistics showing the efficacy of faith healing, just like with a conventional medical treatment. The ministry would show that it could reliably access the supernatural by winning a public, transparent test like the James Randi Education Foundation’s Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. (The JREF Challenge retired in 2015 after fifty years with no winners.) If faith healing worked, you’d see people going there first instead of conventional medicine.

What we see instead: instead of evidence and science, we see anecdotes, emotion, and faith. The focus is on quantity rather than quality, and if you debunk the claims of one anecdote, they point you to others. No one won the JREF million-dollar prize, and no big-name psychic or faith healer ever tried. The 2006 STEP experiment, often known as the Templeton Study because of the foundation that funded it, showed no value in third-party healing prayer.

Relationship to faith

It may be faith healing, but it’s claimed to actually work. Faith may be the key to unlock the miracle, but the results should be testable. It should work as reliably as a car or light switch works—otherwise, “faith healing works” is a meaningless claim. If a sick person stays sick despite treatment, the medicine (the faith healing procedure) would be faulty.

What we see instead: We see sick people who don’t recover blamed for their lack of faith, adding guilt to their burden and making faith healing unfalsifiable. We see sick people told that using conventional medicine admits a lack of faith. We see people pushed because of the limitations of conventional medicine to a desperate, “Well, I can’t take it with me” attitude toward their life savings, preyed upon by faith healers eager to provide snake oil in return for all they can take.

I remember one televangelist who used the line, “The bigger the need, the bigger the seed”—that is, the bigger your problem (and a life-threatening disease is a pretty big problem), the more money you must send to God to the televangelist. It’s hard to imagine more reprehensible advice to give to a vulnerable person.

Lourdes, France became a destination for the sick shortly after a claimed visitation by Mary in 1858. Today it receives six million visitors per year, though the Catholic Church recognizes a total of just 67 miraculous cures. How many more people are killed or injured just traveling to Lourdes than are imagined to be healed?

Kinds of cures

A real faith healer would be able to cure anything, including healings that anyone could see, such as limbs restored, burns healed, and chromosomal diseases like Huntington’s or Down syndrome cured.

What we see instead: we see only claims for invisible “cures” like cancer or some other internal illness that we can’t check on the spot. We must take the results on faith.

Military uses

The battlefield would be the perfect place for faith healing. Imagine a wizard who could conjure injured soldiers back to health or even raise them from the dead. Such a military would be invincible.

What we see instead: chaplains in the military can be helpful with matters of conscience (“Is it wrong to kill people?”) or as a therapist in an extremely stressful environment. But they have no medical mojo to offer medics and doctors.

Public healings

Real faith healings wouldn’t need to be elaborate public events. Real faith healers would take their show on the road. They wouldn’t be in churches but rather in hospitals or on street corners. The goal wouldn’t be showmanship but simply healing people. There would be no interest in a big audience, and a private hospital room would be as good a venue as a stadium.

What we see instead: we see a performance. We see emotional manipulation. We see tricks like those performed by a stage magician—think of Peter Popoff’s use of wireless messages to magically “know” someone’s name or ailment. We see frauds like putting someone who normally needs only a cane into a wheelchair. The patient is then wheeled onstage so the faith healer can do his thing and then marvel when the patient gets up and walks.

With the public spectacle, we have the solitary person put on the spot and all the emotional issues that brings: the placebo effect that can simulate a cure, adrenaline that masks pain, peer pressure to encourage you to play the role you’re expected to play, and so on.

Negative results? Just blame them on demons.

Intermediaries

Faith healing wouldn’t need a special personality or great training. There would be no need for intermediaries like Benny Hinn. Jesus himself makes clear that it’s as simple as, “Ask and you will receive” (John 16:24).

What we see instead: faith healers are apparently anointed by God. They may or may not have great learning, but they have the gift. Communicating with God is so tenuous that only a very few can do it. Nevertheless, even their performance isn’t very reliable, so don’t expect a guarantee.

Here again, the presence of an intermediary with his hand out makes faith healing look like just another scam.

Conclusion

Televangelists always conclude their infomercials with two requests: to pray for them and to send lots of money. But why ask for money? If prayer works and God responds to it, then the prayer is far more potent than my twenty dollars. Televangelists asking for money means that they know what I know: that money has value but prayer is just a placebo. Prayer does nothing whether I’m at home praying for their ministry or they’re on television praying for my health.

Am I too hard on faith healing? Televangelists handwave about the comfort provided by a god that’s not there or a heaven that doesn’t exist, but this may provide hope for the hopeless.

I’m in no position to criticize what someone in a tough position must do to get through life, but we’re not talking about a sugar pill. We’re talking about taking poor people’s money in return for witchcraft or encouraging them to shun conventional medicine. In the West in the twenty-first century, when we know something about disease, neither is acceptable.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/22/16.)

Image credit: Jay Trinidad

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Christian apologist Greg Koukl recently wrote an article with a provocative title: “This One Thing Could Destroy Christianity Completely…” (4/1/2020). Who doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking about?

I’ll get to the argument in a moment. First let’s recall another argument that has an interesting similarity, C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.” In brief, Lewis takes the gospel story and demands to know what could explain Jesus’s claims of divinity. Jesus could be a liar (he’s wrong and he knows it), or he could be a lunatic (he’s wrong but doesn’t know it). Lewis rejects those two and so, by process of elimination, Jesus must be right, so he’s the Lord! (I respond here and here.)

Someone hearing Lewis’s argument for the first time who’s even just a bit skeptical will probably think of a fourth possibility, that Jesus in the gospels is legend. This very reasonable, natural option screams out as the best explanation, and yet apologists will carefully run through the standard three options, concluding with Lord with what I can only imagine are crossed arms and a smile, and ignoring the elephantine Legend in the room. Do they never think of it? Do they know this option but hope their audience is too unsophisticated to raise it? We’ll be left with a similar puzzle at the end of Koukl’s example.

Let’s return to Koukl’s article. This Achilles’ heel of Christianity is spelled out in the verse from Paul that says that if Jesus was not raised, “we [Christians] are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

So if we overturn the idea of the Resurrection as a real historical event, Christianity falls. Koukl says,

If Jesus rose from the dead, then everything critical to Christianity is true. If Jesus stayed dead, everything uniquely important about Christianity is false. It’s all or nothing.

Let’s accept that challenge and attack the Resurrection. Helpfully, Koukl gives three “facts” that argue for the Resurrection as a historical event. Let’s see how factual they actually are.

0. What evidence would prove a resurrection?

Koukl wants to establish the ground rules first. To prove a resurrection, he says, you’d need to show that (1) someone was dead and then (2) later alive. With that, you could claim a resurrection.

But read the gospels carefully, and you don’t find that! Matthew and Mark make clear that no men witnessed the death, so they don’t satisfy the first requirement. It’s true that women disciples saw Jesus dead, but conservative scholars like Koukl emphasize that women at that time were unreliable witnesses. (They do this to defend their argument that women finding the empty tomb was surprising and therefore historically accurate. I respond to that here.)

Apologists can clumsily salvage their argument by pointing out that Luke and John don’t have this problem. With these gospels, the male disciples stay to witness the death. But by pointing this out, they’ve created a new problem, that the Bible is contradictory and therefore unreliable.

The three facts that establish the Resurrection as historical

Here are the three claimed facts: Jesus was dead and buried, the tomb was empty, and the disciples were transformed. To emphasize how unremarkable these claims are, Koukl says:

Each piece of evidence is about something completely earthly. Nothing supernatural, only natural—a corpse, an empty tomb, and apparent personal encounters of some sort changing doubters into believers.

That’s true, these are all natural claims. But he will try to use three natural claims to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead, an incredible supernatural event. Something doesn’t seem right about that.

The general worldview-changing document

Let’s take a step back and abstract Koukl’s argument. The gospel account is compelling enough that he thinks nonbelievers should use it to conclude that the supernatural exists. But that’s a lot to expect of mere words on paper, that it would force on the reader a complete worldview change.

To show that he’s being fair and not privileging the gospel story, I want Koukl to give another example of words on paper that would convince open-minded people to change their worldview. Call it Story X. If Koukl thinks that the gospel story should convince us, he must first show us that Story X is so compelling that it convinces him. That’s right—Koukl needs to show us that it’s possible for an all-natural set of words on paper to convince a thoughtful person by first being sufficiently convinced himself to radically change his own worldview away from Christianity.

This challenge is impossible for him to meet because he begins with the assumption that the gospels are unique. He won’t grant that any other document has the worldview-changing power of the gospels, but with this he reveals his bias: you should believe his document (and only his document) just because. Sorry, that’s not an honest discussion.

With that his entire project fails, but let’s continue and examine the three supposed facts.

1. Jesus was dead and buried

As I noted above, half the gospels don’t meet the resurrection-witness requirement Koukl himself defined: first seeing Jesus dead and then seeing him alive. According to Matthew, at Jesus’s arrest, “all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56b).

But Koukl ignores this. To argue the first part of the miracle, that Jesus was dead, he steps through the torture, crucifixion, and burial. He wraps up:

So, based on the record, is it reasonable to conclude Jesus survived that ordeal?

Based on what record? The record that says that Jesus didn’t survive that ordeal??

Yes, based on the record of the gospels, Jesus died. And based on the record of “Goldilocks,” the little girl ran away when woken by the three bears. That doesn’t mean it actually happened.

There’s another problem. In his description of the burial, Koukl mentioned the application of spices by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and the wrapping of the body with strips of linen. This comes from John. But both points conflict with claims that the famous fourteenth-century Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus in that (1) the image on that shroud doesn’t show the enormous quantity of spices, and (2) the Shroud is a single large rectangle rather than strips (which was the Jewish custom  according to John 19:40b). This argument contradicts Koukl’s belief that the Shroud is authentic (podcast @22:00).

Conclude with a response to the final two arguments, the tomb was empty and the disciples were transformed: Part 2.

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Image from darkday, CC license
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