In the Lord’s Hands Divine Healing and Embodiment in a Fundamentalist Christian Church

At Full Truth Calvary Church, members reject modern medicine, avoid prescription glasses, and even refuse to wear seatbelts, choosing instead to pray for healing and protection from God. Using three years of ethnographic data from Full Truth, I show that church members’ rejection of modern medicine...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSociology of religion Vol. 79; no. 1; pp. 35 - 57
Main Author Glassman, Lindsay W.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Washington Oxford University Press 01.04.2018
Subjects
Christianity
Diet
Embodiment
Ethnography
God
Healing
Health behavior
Health care
Health services
Meaning
Medicine
Morality
Oppression
Protection
Religious fundamentalism
Religious identity
Religious persecution
Seat belts
Spirituality
Truth
United States > US
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Summary:At Full Truth Calvary Church, members reject modern medicine, avoid prescription glasses, and even refuse to wear seatbelts, choosing instead to pray for healing and protection from God. Using three years of ethnographic data from Full Truth, I show that church members’ rejection of modern medicine is an embodied, or physically enacted, religious practice shaped by church teachings that assign meaning to the ill or well body. Moreover, I find that when members do receive medical care, they must negotiate competing institutional logics to frame the incident in religious terms, either as persecution or as a rejection of Full Truth teachings. These findings extend past research on embodiment to show that healing practices allow believers to express their faith in ways similar to those who perform religious identity through dress or diet. They further reveal that embodied practices remain inseparable from institutional meanings, such that rejecting one is rejecting both.
ISSN:1069-4404
1759-8818
DOI:10.1093/socrel/srx046