The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 6: Faith Healing

In more dramatic religion-based therapeutic interventions—such as "faith healing"—the common (nonspecific) factors I discussed earlier are especially prominent, magnified further by the awe of a crowd, intense emotions, and a strong attachment to a charismatic leader. Faith healing, much like hypnosis, can appear particularly effective for problems with a substantial psychosomatic component: symptoms that fluctuate with stress, attention, expectation, and social reinforcement (for example, dissociative phenomena, psychogenic seizures, and other functional presentations in which meaning and arousal shape the experience of illness). In such settings, a sudden "cure" can let a person feel validated and publicly endorsed by the community—their distress reframed as something meaningful, even sacred or chosen, rather than as ordinary misfortune—which can temporarily lift self-esteem and social standing. This is not to say the symptoms were imaginary: functional symptoms are genuinely experienced, and often genuinely disabling. What a dramatic healing changes is not the reality of the suffering but the meaning, the attention, and the social frame around it. Unfortunately, these dynamics are easily exploited by charlatans, and one does not have to look far to find examples.

Most people with severe medical problems who pursue faith healing will not experience remission, because many illnesses are not primarily functional or psychosomatic and are not particularly amenable to community support, suggestion, or adrenaline-soaked collective emotion. Yet devout people may then conclude that they did not have sufficient faith, or that they were not worthy of divine intervention. Or they may conclude that it is God's will for them to continue suffering, while others, for reasons no one can explain, receive a miracle.

It is worth separating two quite different things, because much of the confusion about faith healing comes from blurring them. When a symptom is genuinely functional, a dramatic "cure" can bring real improvement—the symptom truly settles, because it was always shaped by expectation, attention, and emotional context. But most of the healings invoked as miracles involve serious organic disease, and there, what looks like a cure is almost always something else.

Similarly, miracle stories in religious texts—blindness cured, paralysis reversed, even the dead raised—are awe-inspiring if taken literally. But they should be read against the background rate of suffering in the ancient world. In pre-modern settings, roughly a quarter of newborns died within the first year of life, and close to half did not survive childhood. Maternal death in childbirth was also far more common. In such a world—saturated with infection, malnutrition, injury, and loss—miraculous healing would have had to be common and broadly distributed to register as a genuine explanation of reality. Instead, what we mainly have are vivid stories about rare exceptions (or legendary claims) in a sea of ordinary, relentless suffering, with the miracle-giver doing nothing for the massive public health problems while singling out some lucky individual.

Miracle stories are a little bit like discussing lottery winners: if miracles truly occur, they are extremely rare, and the narrative focus on the "winner" distracts from the millions who hoped, prayed, suffered, and received nothing. And some of these millions had problems that could have been solved through simple interventions, nothing magical required. As with lotteries, one is not well-advised to build one's medical, psychological, or moral planning around the hope of an exception.

There are also some predictable cognitive and statistical illusions at work here. One is selection bias: the "miracle stories" are the ones that get put on stage, recorded, and retold, while the far more numerous failures quietly disappear. Another is regression to the mean: many symptoms fluctuate naturally, and people are most likely to seek dramatic interventions when they are at their worst—so improvement afterward can look like a miracle even when it is simply the usual swing back toward baseline. Base-rate neglect adds to the distortion: a vivid testimony feels more compelling than the boring, brutal fact that most people do not improve. And then motivated reasoning does the rest: once someone has publicly declared faith, donated money, and staked identity and relationships on the story, it becomes emotionally costly to admit that nothing supernatural happened. The narrative hardens, not because the evidence is strong, but because the social and psychological incentives are.

The same selectivity appears in religious appeals to nature. For example, there are many Biblical references to birds, with the insinuation that they live joyfully and are fed through divine providence. This is an attractive image, but it reflects a limited understanding of biology. Wild creatures face high mortality from starvation, disease, and predation. Birdsong has natural functions—communication, territory, mating—not simply the expression of joy or a benevolent performance for human listeners. Similarly, "lilies of the field" (another symbol of divine providence) have a difficult existence shaped by competition, pathogens, drought, and chance: the blooming lilies that catch our eye do not reveal the many that did not survive. In other words: nature is beautiful, but it is not reliably gentle—and any spirituality that wants to use nature as moral reassurance has to be honest about what nature actually does. The same selective gaze that romanticizes birds and flowers can romanticize miracle claims as well: it fixes on the striking exception and looks away from the background rate of suffering.

References

Asser, S. M., & Swan, R. (1998). Child fatalities from religion-motivated medical neglect. Pediatrics, 101(4), 625–629. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.101.4.625

A review of 172 child deaths in the United States between 1975 and 1995 in families that relied on faith healing instead of medical care. In 140 of the cases, survival rates with standard medical treatment would have exceeded 90%, and a further 18 had expected survival above 50%. The study documents the lethal consequences of substituting religious ritual for effective treatment, particularly for children, who have no voice in the decision.

 

Barnett, A. G., van der Pols, J. C., & Dobson, A. J. (2005). Regression to the mean: What it is and how to deal with it. International Journal of Epidemiology, 34(1), 215–220. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyh299

A widely cited methodological review of regression to the mean—the statistical tendency for unusually high or low measurements to be followed by ones closer to the average. Because people typically seek dramatic interventions when their symptoms are at their worst, any subsequent improvement can be misread as a treatment effect (or a miracle) when it is simply the expected return toward baseline.

 

Espay, A. J., Aybek, S., Carson, A., Edwards, M. J., Goldstein, L. H., Hallett, M., LaFaver, K., LaFrance, W. C., Jr., Lang, A. E., Nicholson, T., Nielsen, G., Reuber, M., Voon, V., Stone, J., & Morgante, F. (2018). Current concepts in diagnosis and treatment of functional neurological disorders. JAMA Neurology, 75(9), 1132–1141. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamaneurol.2018.1264

A consensus review of functional neurological disorders (FND)—genuine and often disabling conditions such as functional movement disorders and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. It documents the field's shift away from the term "psychogenic" and away from requiring a psychological stressor for diagnosis, emphasizing that the symptoms are real and shaped by attention, expectation, and prediction rather than feigned. Relevant to why suggestion-rich settings can genuinely influence such symptoms.

 

Kaptchuk, T. J., & Miller, F. G. (2015). Placebo effects in medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 373(1), 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1504023

A concise overview presenting placebo responses as genuine biopsychosocial effects of expectation, conditioning, and context on the experience of symptoms—rather than mere imagination or spontaneous fluctuation. Useful for understanding how expectation and suggestion can produce real symptomatic change in conditions sensitive to those factors.

 

Volk, A. A., & Atkinson, J. A. (2013). Infant and child death in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(3), 182–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.11.007

A synthesis of infant and child mortality across 20 hunter–gatherer and 43 historical pre-industrial populations, estimating that approximately 27% of infants died within the first year of life and approximately 47.5% of children died before reaching puberty. Provides the demographic background against which ancient miracle claims must be read.

 

Next Chapter