Faith healers, shamans, have, by invoking gods or spirits, for thousands of years been mankind’s defence against sickness, a fact often forgotten in the era of modern western medicine.
Now faith healing appears to be on the rise again.
It’s faith healing with a difference. The modern shaman uses the techniques of modern technology – to reach millions through syndicated TV programmes; hundreds of thousands through large stadium events where the healers, like rock stars, prance about, sing and, climactically, invite the chosen sick to roll up in their wheelchairs or limp up on their crutches to be “touched”, and cured.
Benny Hinn, perhaps the world’s best known faith healer, will be appearing this summer at London’s main conference centre, the Excel, on 27 and 28 July, to perform before thousands of Britons – and will proclaim, on past form, to have healed hundreds.
Statistics on the rise of the global phenomenon are hard to come by, but Hinn’s income is estimated to have doubled to US$200m in the last two years, quadrupled since 1997.
And there is such fertile ground: a poll of 1,000 US adults by USA Today suggests that 79 percent of the population believes prayer could help them to better health.
But faith healing is not just about rich gurus healing the masses. In a growing number of churches and healing centres across the States, small groups of lay healers and priests are getting together in churches and healing centres to pray for and heal neighbours, friends and local people.
But regular doctors shouldn’t have to hang up their stethoscopes just yet.
Several organisations have campaigned against faith healing, arguing that the hopes healers instil prevent people from seeking proper medical treatment. The Dallas-based Trinity Foundation – which is Christian, but which feels stadium faith healing besmirches Christianity’s name – says the big faith healers make fortunes from donations collected at meetings. Benny Hinn lives in $5,000-a-night hotel suites; his tax-free “parsonage” is a multimillion dollar mansion in an exclusive estate overlooking the Pacific. Meanwhile the people they “heal” actually get worse because they then reject proper treatment. Trinity says the mass healings - kinetic performances that involve invocations of God and symbolic laying of hands on the sick onstage - don't actually work.
Investigations into Hinn’s case history have revealed the story of one ten-year-old Indian boy with two brain tumours attending Hinn's rally. Despite the healing pronounced a success and a pledge by his impoverished parents to give thousands of dollars to Hinn’s ministry, the child died seven weeks later.
For all the numerous calls to show evidence for the success of his miracles, dispensed at his Prayer Meetings around the world, Hinn has failed to so convincingly, say researchers – even when presenting evidence on his own terms.
At one typical stadium prayer meeting, in Oregon, where the usual three score miracles were proclaimed, Hinn's habitually secretive ministry, when asked to provide verifiable evidence for these miracles, first stalled for months, then eventually provided only five names. When these cases were checked out, one woman “cured” of lung cancer had died nine months later, an old woman’s broken vertebrae hadn’t healed after all, a man with a logging injury deteriorated because he refused medication and a needed operation, a woman claimed to have been healed of deafness had never been deaf (according to her husband), and a woman complaining of "breathlessness" had stopped going to the doctor on instructions of her mother.
British readers would surely like to know all this before they book their rendez-vous with God in Docklands this summer.
