Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity (review)

A few years ago I organized a research project on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). I was drawn to the topic not as a CAM supporter but because I had been intrigued by the hostility that many physicians feel toward it, notably those on medical faculties with rigorous notions about what counts as efficacious therapy. These physicians often seem utterly indifferent to public opinion surveys showing that about 40 percent of Americans use some form of CAM, with the more educated using it the most. Many CAM supporters, for their part, are no less indifferent toward the critics, feeling that they have somehow missed the point and are relying on evidentiary standards that are often seemingly insensitive to patient needs and what actually helps them, however that comes about.

An important subchapter of that debate is the relationship of religion and health. As the authors of this book—a physician and a theologian—note, there is a reasonably solid body of evidence that (quoting the results of a comprehensive literature review) "high levels of religious involvement are moderately associated with better health status" (p. 23). But in a manner analogous to that of medical rigorists in evaluating CAM, they in effect adopt an equivalently tough theological stance in assessing the relationship between religion and health: favorable arguments must be solid theologically as well as scientifically. While they do not reject out of hand a beneficial health effect of religion, their primary aim is a theological critique, and particularly what they see as a corruption of Christian theology, aided and abetted by a no less defective notion of health.

Their indictment is harsh. Religion in the United States, they hold, is shaped by consumerism, the latest stage of capitalism, and exists in a "culture where religiosity is at once ubiquitous, malleable, and radically individualized" (p. 42). The religions of history and tradition have been reduced to the vague, highly subjective language of "faith" and "spirituality," empty of serious content, challenging no one. God, in this perspective, becomes not an end in Himself, but instead an instrumental means to our own individualistic desires, of which health is the most important. But if our understanding of God and religion has been corrupted by our culture, so also has our conception of health, which is "fetishized" and cut off from being set "in a hierarchy of the goods of a society committed to pursuing a substantive account of human flourishing" (p. 43).

More than one reader will be left uneasy with their indictment, both its theological premises and its conception of health. Theologically, it is in that Protestant tradition which understands God as the radically "other," and Christianity not as a religious theory but as a concrete historical manifestation of God's redemptive salvation. It is a tradition that does not readily embody a melding of the natural and the supernatural in our daily lives. Nor does it easily make room for God's direct intervention in our lives, such as a responsiveness to prayers looking to medical relief—though Shuman and Meador, with some ambivalence, concede that possibility. The authors' idea of health is no less radical, and no less unworldly, going well beyond what medicine could accomplish. "We are not," they write, "truly healthy so long as we are not at home with ourselves, at peace with our neighbors, and living with that part of the earth we call our home" (p. 97). Most of us will surely settle for less, and will not always weep about it.

That much said, the moment is ripe for a sharp critique of the too-easy, too-popular attempt to marry religion and health. Yet just as advocates of CAM are not notably intimidated by more sober, skeptical physicians, so the believers in a God (or...