i finished reading God’s Daughters. Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission in an airport or an airplane somewhere. it helpfully elaborates on something that strikes me, since i’m living in the U.S., as a peculiarity of the religious formations that i came across thusfar. a peculiarity that seems to have grown wild in california and santa cruz.
healing.
the book is grounded in an ethnographic study of Aglow, a nation-wide (and international) network of Christian charismatic women. positioning this specific mode of religiosity, within existing religious and cultural coordinates the author identifies three main threads of which the movement is made.
1/ the Pentacostal revival since the 1900s, with its prophetic message and experiental, ecstatic style of workship. in the following decades, a strand of Pentacostal evangelists focussed less on preaching the gospel and calling people to salvation than on bringing down the power of the Holy Spirit to enact miraculous healings -culminating in the American “healing revival” of the late 1940s and 1950s.
2/ the Recovery Movement and Therapeutic Culture. This is traced back to the 1930s when Alcoholics Anonymous was found, and since then methods of “twelve-step”, “self-help” and “recovery” were elaborated, transposed to various realms, and became part of popular culture.
3/ an emphasis on women’s “eerie restlesness” and the need to find cures for it. such discourses were very much part of late Victorian America, and when the crisis of female “restlessness” was reformulated in the post-war era, it provided one of the impulse of second wave feminism (cfr. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique). while conservative evangelical women would come to conclusions very different from the feminists ones, the point has been repeatedly made that there is some shared ground in perceiving a problem with the social roles and situations women find themselves caught in.
it’s the heavy mixing of the therapeutic with religion (less perhaps in the third thread, although there’s a lot of therapeutization going on in the field of “women’s restlessness”). religion marked by a cultural shift from salvation to self-realization. connected to the so-called “small group” movement with people seeking authentic, intense experiences that they fail to find elsewhere. the sacred becoming personal, and serviceable in meeting individual needs. a tendency that fails to acknowledge hiearchies of human suffering, and that is drenched in selfism and narcism in its exaggeration of personal pain. and its particular attraction to women.
living in Santa Cruz means living with the omni-presence of therapeutic discourse. it’s simply part of the air one breathes over here. it comes with a vague sense of spirituality here, although it is not so difficult to see its (Protestant) evangelical and charismatic influences and roots.
the difference with “indigenous” Protestantism and evangelicalism in Europe is sharp. remember the fierce rejection of vacinations and other kinds of modern medical treatments in the Dutch Bible-belt: as much as healing might be taken as the working of God’s hand, so is getting sick and dying, and one should not mess with that. there is no salvational quality to healing. and perhaps more importantly, there is a resistance to the psychologization of religious experience (among believers). among my visits, conversations and encounters in the field of Dutch Protestantism, there’s only one instance where religion and psychology met, in the person of an orthodox reformed believer who was also doing a phd in psychology. she discussed with much interest psychological studies and takes on religion, where the religious is connected to emotional needs. but it remained fingerspielerei for her, in which she engaged for pleasure, but that did not interfere with or taint her sense of belief.
the healing discourse repulses me both ways around. the individualist and voluntarist take on physical, mental and social (and societal) health. the way it domesticates and impoverishes the sacred, pushing that what fills us with awe, God, to revolving around me-me-me. the worst of two worlds.
