Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

Healing Words: Narratives of Spiritual Healing and Kathryn Kuhlman’s Uses of Print Culture, 1947–76

Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–76) was an obscure itinerant evangelist with a questionable past until one fateful day in 1947 when the forty-year-old redhead stood before a small audience in Franklin, Pennsylvania. A woman interrupted Kuhlman’s sermon to announce that a tumor had disappeared from her body the previous evening while Kuhlman had been preaching and that her doctor had just confirmed the healing. Kuhlman had not prayed for the woman and had not been preaching on the subject of spiritual healing. Soon, other people began to report spontaneous healing during Kuhlman’s services, especially when she preached on the Holy Spirit. From such humble beginnings, Kuhlman became an internationally prominent healing evangelist who, by the mid-1960s, was holding regular services for overflow crowds of thousands in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities across the United States and Canada. The daughter of Baptist and Methodist parents, Kuhlman captivated ecumenical audiences who sometimes traveled thousands of miles to attend her services. Kathryn Kuhlman became a household name throughout much of churchgoing America. Pope Paul VI invited her for a visit, and the municipal governments of Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, 271 > Healing Words Narratives of Spiritual Healing and Kathryn Kuhlman’s Uses of Print Culture, 1947–76    and St. Louis bestowed on her civic awards. The meteoric rise in Kuhlman ’s profile resulted from the publicity that print, radio, and television gave to the dramatic stories of those who reported healing during her miracle services. Hearing about the alleged healings, the crowds came, and Kuhlman developed more formalized strategies to maintain decorum in her services and to manage the publicity that they generated.1 Following a lineage of controversial female healing evangelists in the Holiness and Pentecostal traditions, such as Maria Woodworth-Etter (1844–1924) and Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), Kuhlman used her winsome style to usher new expectation of spiritual healing and other charisma, or gifts of the Holy Spirit, into Protestant and Roman Catholic churches previously resistant to presumed Pentecostal fanaticism . Kuhlman’s success in crossing once rigid boundaries between religious communities suggests a major cultural shift—which Kuhlman’s career reflects and to which it also contributed—from the traditional Protestant-Catholic divide toward a new polarity between those who subscribed to supernatural and naturalistic worldviews.2 Kuhlman rose to prominence in an era when more and more Americans, including economically mobile intellectual sophisticates, were beginning to question the functionally naturalistic assumptions that had dominated much of medical as well as evangelical and liberal Protestant discourse during the first half of the twentieth century. The charismatic movement that Kuhlman represented blossomed even while non-Christian healing alternatives such as New Age crystal, yoga, and psychic healing also flourished .3 Kuhlman’s teaching on spiritual healing, popularized through modern communication media, exemplified and encouraged widespread disillusionment with a naturalistic worldview that denied either the existence or relevance of an unseen higher power to everyday life.4 At the turn of the twenty-first century, in part because of Kuhlman’s legacy, public opinion polls suggest that 70 to 80 percent of Americans believe that God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer.5 Narratives of spiritual healing published by Kuhlman offer a rich approach to debates over the supernatural because of their implications for fields of discourse rarely treated together, including religion and science, the history of medicine, gender studies, the history of the body, theology, narrative theory, and print culture. Kuhlman deployed healing narratives as a direct challenge to the controlling assumption of scientific naturalism : that permanent natural laws account for every phenomenon. In 272    response to issues raised by Kuhlman and others, strange new alliances formed, with scientific naturalists and functionally naturalistic evangelical and liberal Protestants positioned across a philosophical chasm from neo-Pentecostal Protestants, Catholics, and New Age practitioners who expected supernatural healing of hurting physical bodies.6 In this essay, I analyze Kuhlman’s trilogy, I Believe in Miracles (1962), God Can Do It Again (1969), and Nothing Is Impossible with God (1974), as strategically crafted apologetics for spiritual healing.7 By presenting empirical evidence acceptable within a naturalistic paradigm and reinterpreting that evidence through the lens of personal testimony, Kuhlman questioned the adequacy of dominant scientific and religious constructions of the human body and of the meanings of health, illness, and healing. Kuhlman defied her critics either to present an interpretation of the evidence at least as plausible as hers...