Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (review)

By most calculations, there are presently more than two billion Christians in the world, and more than a quarter of them are Pentecostals or Charismatics living in the Southern Hemisphere. As Harvey Cox says in the Foreword to this volume, this means that “the epicenter of Christianity is no longer in Europe (or its North American extension) but in the ‘two-thirds’ world, the global South, which we recently referred to as ‘the third world’” (xvii). Despite these staggering numbers and the shift in Christianity’s geographical and cultural center of gravity, religious studies scholars have until very recently ignored or in some cases disparaged the worldwide Pentecostal and Charismatic movement.

In the last few years, scholars have at long last begun to take global Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity seriously. Unfortunately, three factors have made scholarly understanding and appreciation of this global phenomenon an uphill battle. First, few, if any, scholars have the range of knowledge and skills needed to survey the diverse cultural and political locations in which Pentecostal and Charismatic forms of Christianity are flourishing around the world. To be sure, there are now several volumes that promise to introduce readers to global Pentecostalism, but these volumes are, more often than not, gatherings of statistical data rounded off with some tentative sociological observations. They rarely give readers a sense for what holds the varied Pentecostal and Charismatic expressions of Christianity together. Indeed, few, if any introductory volumes manage to provide a constructive thesis about global Pentecostalism.

Second, growth in scholarly understanding has suffered from widespread, if popular, stereotyping and caricaturing of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. For example, scholars must work through and assess claims that global Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is little more than a syncretistic form of religion, a veritable crazy quilt of religious beliefs and practices woven together from hither and yon. Similarly, Western European and North American scholars have to hold at bay pervasive popular media images of corrupt, money-grubbing Pentecostal and Charismatic preachers when they are attempting to assess and understand the diverse forms of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity around the world.

Third, as Candy Gunther Brown observes in the editor’s introduction to this volume, many religious studies scholars in Western Europe and North America who set out to understand global Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity will have to wrestle deeply with the fact that their “worldviews have been shaped by the disenchanting implications of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, Cartesian mind-body dualism, and Enlightenment and Darwinian science” (10). In other words, religious scholars operating from within a naturalistic framework must determine how best to approach and then assess the strange new supernatural world—a world that includes a robust belief in demons and demon possession—that they are now encountering with increasing frequency in global Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.

Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing is a volume of singular importance in large part because it candidly acknowledges and convincingly addresses each of the three factors that have inhibited scholarly understanding and appreciation of global Pentecostalism to date. For example, unlike most introductory volumes, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing goes well beyond gathering and reporting the statistical and basic historical data relative to Pentecostalism in various world areas. Indeed, what is offered here is a compelling, constructive thesis about the heart and soul of the global Pentecostal and Charismatic movement–a thesis that helps readers to understand and appreciate why this movement is appealing to millions of people around the globe.

The constructive thesis for which Gunther Brown and her colleagues make a compelling case is, on the surface, easy to name. The practice and experience of divine healing or cura divina is the heart and soul of the global Pentecostal and Charismatic movement. It is what makes the movement appealing to persons from highly diverse cultural, political, social and economic backgrounds. To support this thesis, Gunther Brown provides some important statistical data from a recent (2006) Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey, namely, Spirit...