Ministers of the Mind: Protestant Pastoral Counseling in Mid-Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

The February 23, 2009, cover of Time featured a white woman, eyes closed and hands clasped in prayer, alongside the headline How Faith Can Heal/' The articles inside included a piece by Jeffrey Kluger on 'The Biology of Belief; a three-way conversation featuring a chaplain, a radiologist, and a psychiatrist; a photo essay illustrating ritual healing practices in Cuba and Siberia; and a final round-up bearing the headline Research Institutes: The study of religion and medicine is clearly a growth market. While theological seminaries and medical schools preserve separate identities and certifying bodies, this recent issue of Time is one more sign pointing to the myriad ways in which religion and healing have remained intertwined throughout American history1 In the Anglo-American colonies, it was not uncommon for Christian ministers such as Cotton Mather and John Wesley to include medicine in their ministry or even to write medical manuals. From the nineteenth century into the present day, Fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and Holiness people have held massive revivals at which the power of the Holy Spirit gave them the faith to heal illness. (In recent decades, these revivals are often conducted over the television.) In the late nineteenth century, the Mind Cure movement and new religions such as Christian Science interpreted and addressed physical ailments in spiritual terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, Catholic immigrant populations brought to the United States a vibrant repertoire of saintand shrine-based healing practices whose effectiveness often still is proven by a doctor's letter or an x-ray. And in the early part of the twentieth century, hospitals throughout the country were founded and funded by religious denominations. To this day it is common to find in American cities a St. Vincent's, Deaconess, or Mt. Sinai Hospital.2 In his widely read social history of American medicine, Paul Starr gives the impression that by the early twentieth century, biomedicine had grown so