Health and Spirituality as Contemporary Concerns

Abstract

One theme of particular importance in contemporary U.S. religion and quasi-religion is health and healing. Groups as diverse as Pentecostal Christians and New Age groups, women's spirituality groups and New Thought churches are promoting non-medical approaches to health and healing. Indeed, to many contemporary Americans, health and healing appear to be salient metaphors for salvation and holiness. Religious and quasi-religious attention to health is adamantly holistic in the belief that spiritual, emotional, social, and physical aspects of well-being are fundamentally interconnected. To understand the significance of this widespread focus on health and healing, we need to look beyond the religious groups themselves and appreciate some twentieth-century structural and cultural changes in the meanings of the body, the self, and the nature of well-being.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

1. Quoted in Meredith B. McGuire , Ritual Healing in Suburban America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), pp. 39, 97, 136. Descriptions of contemporary religious healing groups used in this article are documented in this book.

idem , “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology, 1:6-41 (1987).

3. James V. Spickard , “Experiencing Religious Rituals: A Schutzian Analysis of Navajo Ceremonies,” Sociological Analysis, 52(2):191-204 (1991).

Paul Starr , The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

5. Deborah Gordon , “Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine,” in Biomedicine Examined, ed. M. Lock and D. R. Gordon (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 19-56.

See also Peter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider , Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1980).

7. Unfortunately, since the 1960s, the mass media have misapplied the term “cult” to a wide range of unfamiliar religious movements—most of which are actually sects, as characterized previously—giving the concept a pejorative connotation of deviance. The socio-logical concept of cult is neutral, describing a loose association of persons with an eclectic, individual religiosity. Historically, most religion probably has been cultlike, since the consolidation of effective authority and control of doctrine and ritual, characteristic of official religions, is relatively recent, unevenly achieved in all parts of society, and waning in most contemporary societies.

8. Emile Durkheim , “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” trans. S. Lukes, Political Studies, 17:26 (1969).

9. Frances Westley , “The Cult of Man: Durkheim's Predictions and New Religious Movements,” Sociological Analysis, 39(2):135-145 (1978).

10.

10. Anthony Giddens , Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

11.

11. Cf. Hans P. Dreitzel , “The Socialization of Nature: Western Attitudes towards Body and Emotions,” in Indigenous Psychologies: The Anthropology of the Self, ed. P. Heelas and A. Lock (New York: Academic, 1981), pp. 205-223.