Meet the Faculty

Candy Gunther Brown

• Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• Adjunct Associate Professor, American Studies Program
• Affiliate Faculty, Liberal Arts and Management Program

Education

• Ph.D. at Harvard University, 2000

Contact Information

Background

• Trustees’ Teaching Award, Indiana University, $2,500 (2010)
• Flame of Love Project, Templeton Foundation, $150,000 (plus $25,000 productivity bonuses) (2009-11)
• New Frontiers Exploration Traveling Fellowship, Lilly Endowment, $50,000 (2009-2010)
• Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Indiana University, $14,500 (2007-2008)
• Summer Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University, $8,000 (2008)
• New Frontiers Exploration Traveling Fellowship, Lilly Endowment, $2,500 (2006)
• Spiritual Healing Conference Grants, Deaconess Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Voices Project, Saint Louis University, $11,500 (2006)
• Faculty Development Grants, Mellon Foundation, $6,500 (2002, 2003)
• Dissertation Completion Fellowships, Louisville Institute, Packard Foundation, $20,000 (1995)
• Research Grant, Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, $1,500 (1999)
• Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Research Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, $1,000 (1998)
• John Clive Teaching Prize, Harvard University, $300 (1998)
• Research Grants, Harvard University, $2,000 (1995, 1998)
• Sidney E. Mead Article Prize, American Society of Church History, $250 (1995)
• Fulbright, Lilly, Mazur, Sarah Bradley Gamble Graduate Study Fellowships (1992, 1993, 1994, 1995)
• Coolidge and Greenman Debating Prizes, $2,750 (1990, 1991, 1992)
• Detur Prize, John Harvard Scholar, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa Junior 12 (1990, 1991, 1992)
• Charles Warren Center Thesis Research Fellowship, Harvard University, $2,000 (1991)

I am an historian and ethnographer of religion and culture. My particular focus is the United States, understood within the broader frameworks of the Americas and global cultural flows (for instance among Brazil-Mozambique-United States-Canada). My scholarship contributes to several overlapping fields in religious studies: religion in the Americas, spiritual healing practices, evangelicalism, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianities, globalization, lived religion, religion and science, medical ethics and healthcare management, first amendment constitutional interpretation, history of the book and print culture, comparative religions, theory and method, and gender, women's, and ethnic studies. My first book, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), assesses how evangelicals interacted with the burgeoning print market of the mid-nineteenth century. The early twenty-first-century success of the Left Behind series, which sold over 50 million books, points to an enormous readership of evangelical Christian literature that has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream publishing world. But this is not a recent phenomenon; the evangelical publishing community has been growing for more than two hundred years. The Word in the World explores the roots of this far-flung conglomeration of writers, publishers, and readers, from the founding of the Methodist Book Concern in 1789 to the 1880 publication of the runaway best-seller Ben-Hur. I show how this distinct print community used the Word of the Bible and printed words of their own to pursue a paradoxical mission: purity from and a transformative presence in the secular world. Although scholars usually claim that religious publishing fell prey to the secularizing engines of commodification, I argue that evangelicals knew what they were doing by adopting a range of strategies, including the use of popular narratives and beautiful packaging. An informal canon of texts emerged in the nineteenth century, consisting of sermons, histories, memoirs, novels, gift books, Sunday school libraries, periodicals, and hymnals. Looking beyond the uses of texts in religious conversion, I examine how textual practices have transmitted cultural values both within evangelical communities and across a larger American cultural milieu. An epilogue considers twenty-first-century ties between religion and the media.

Writing my first book alerted me to the significance of “sanctification,” the pursuit of holiness or freedom from sin and its consequences, as an organizing yet inadequately examined theme in American evangelicalism. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a growing number of Americans became alienated from Calvinist theologians and “heroic” medical practitioners. These seekers began to reason that if it was possible to escape the spiritual consequences of sin, it should similarly be possible to escape the physical consequences that led to bodily sickness. The resultant divine healing movement grew out of the transnational Holiness and Higher Christian Life movements within evangelicalism (while borrowing from Nature Cure and New Thought movements that extended beyond the cultural boundaries of evangelicalism), then caught fire with the global expansion of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century. The Charismatic movement of the 1960s-1970s ushered divine healing into mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Thus, divine healing shifted from the edges of orthodox practice into the center of the American and global ritual imaginations.

Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is a global phenomenon that comprises a quarter of the world’s two billion Christians and is growing rapidly. Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, edited (Oxford University Press, 2011), reveals that the primary appeal of pentecostalism worldwide is as a religion of healing. Contrary to popular stereotypes of flamboyant, fraudulent, anti-medical “faith-healing” televangelists who preach a materialistic, “health-and-wealth” gospel, handle serpents, or sensationally “exorcize” demons, this book offers a more nuanced portrait. The collected essays illumine local variations, hybridities, and tensions in practices on six continents, and depict the extent of human suffering and powerlessness experienced by people everywhere and the attractiveness to many of a global religious movement that promises material relief by invoking spiritual resources. This is the first book of its kind. Achieving the twin goals of thick description and comparative analysis of global practices is best achieved by bringing area experts into conversation. This volume’s distinguished, international team of contributors includes sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, theologians, and religious studies scholars from North America, Europe, and Africa. Read together, these essays set the agenda for a new program of scholarly inquiry into some of the largest forces of change at work in the world today—globalization, pentecostalism, and healing—each of which is extremely powerful in itself and which together are reshaping our world in vastly significant ways.

When sickness strikes, people around the world pray for healing. Many of the faithful claim that prayer has cured them of blindness, deafness, and metastasized cancers, and some believe they have been resurrected from the dead. Can, and should, science test such claims? A number of scientists say no, concerned that empirical studies of prayer will be misused to advance religious agendas. And some religious practitioners agree with this restraint, worrying that scientific testing could undermine faith. Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Harvard University Press, forthcoming spring 2012) argues that science cannot prove prayer's healing power, but what scientists can and should do is study prayer's measurable effects on health. If prayer produces benefits, even indirectly (and findings suggest that it does), then more careful attention to prayer practices could improve global health, particularly in places without access to conventional medicine. Drawing on data from Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians, the book reverses a number of stereotypes about believers in faith-healing. Among them is the idea that poorer, less educated people are more likely to believe in the healing power of prayer and therefore less likely to see doctors. Rather, people across socioeconomic backgrounds use prayer alongside conventional medicine rather than as a substitute. Dissecting medical records from before and after prayer, surveys of prayer recipients, prospective clinical trials, and multiyear follow-up observations and interviews, this book shows that the widespread perception of prayer's healing power has demonstrable social effects, and that in some cases those effects produce improvements in health that can be scientifically verified.

American interest in divine healing peaked twice in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, in parallel (and intersecting in surprising ways) with twin peaks in interest in various "natural," "holistic" therapies (such as yoga, meditation, martial arts, acupuncture, energy medicine, anti-cancer alternatives, homeopathy, and chiropractic) that are similarly envisioned as offering something more than biomedicine. How and why this came about is the subject of The Healing Gods of Christian America: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the Mainstream (unpublished book manuscript). Although using scientific language to market complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, as natural medicine, many CAM providers make religious and spiritual assumptions that holistic healing works by mobilizing subtle connections among body, mind, and spirit. Many of these assumptions can be traced to religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism (Daoism) that developed in Asia, or to metaphysical spiritual traditions that grew up in Europe and North America. Up until the late twentieth century, most conventional medical doctors rejected CAM as quackery or medical cultism and most Christian clergy denounced CAM as heresy or idolatry. A central question explored by this book is: what causes particular health-related practices to move from the fringes to the center of American culture? Or, how are alternatives once classified as medically and religiously illegitimate redefined as acceptable means of achieving physical and spiritual wellness? My answer is that holistic healthcare entered the American mainstream as CAM-promoters strategically marketed products to consumers poised to accept seemingly effective, scientifically validated, non-religious, yet spiritually wholesome therapies. Simply put, alternatives become acceptable as they are re-categorized as non-religious (though generically spiritual) healthcare, fitness, or scientific techniques—congruent with popular understandings of quantum physics and neuroscience—rather than as religious rituals. The recent integration of CAM into the mainstream healthcare market and, even more surprisingly, into the conservative Christian subculture is an extraordinary development with unsuspected implications for health, religion, and democracy. At stake are the principles of informed consent in healthcare and the non-establishment and free exercise of religion in American civic life.

Grounded in archival and ethnographic research, Miracle Cures? Divine Healing and Deliverance in America (work-in-progress) traces a cultural history of healing practices within the United States from the 1860s, when a clearly defined divine healing movement first emerged, to the present. Although scholars predicted that advances in scientific medicine would weaken religious responses to illness, I explain how and why there is instead growing interest in miraculous healing, even where biomedical science is the most sophisticated, convenient, and affordable. As multi-directional globalizing processes bring into contact conflicting assumptions about the nature of reality, and as Christians in the global South increasingly influence North American Christianity, America is shifting from a Protestant-Catholic to a spiritual-material divide: pentecostal Protestants and Catholics and alternative healers line up on one side of a cultural chasm, while scientific naturalists and functionally naturalistic Protestants and Catholics form an unlikely alliance. At stake are the meanings of health, illness, healing, pain, aging, and death, and competing medical and religious claims to knowledge, authority, and power.

Research Interests

• Religion in the Americas
• Spiritual healing practices
• Evangelicalism
• Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianities
• Globalization
• Lived religion
• Religion and science
• Medical ethics and healthcare management
• First amendment constitutional interpretation
• History of the book and print culture
• Comparative religions
• Theory and method
• Gender, women's, and ethnic studies

Courses Recently Taught

• Religion and American Culture
• Evangelical America
• Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity in the Americas
• Introduction to Christianity
• Sickness and Health
• Religion, Illness, and Healing
• Religion, Health, and Healthcare Management
• Women and Religion in America

Publication Highlights

Books

Testing Prayer: Science and Healing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming spring 2012).

Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, editor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed)

“Study of the therapeutic effects of proximal intercessory prayer (STEPP) on auditory and visual impairments in rural Mozambique,” by Candy Gunther Brown, PhD; Stephen C. Mory, MD; Rebecca Williams, MB BChir, DTM&H; Michael J. McClymond, PhD, Southern Medical Journal 103.9 (September 2010): 864-869.

“Chiropractic and Christianity: The Power of Pain to Adjust Cultural Alignments.” Church History 79:1 (March 2010): 1-38.

“Touch and American Religions.” Religion Compass 3.4 (2009): 770-783.

“From Tent Meetings and Store-front Healing Rooms to Walmarts and the Internet: Healing Spaces in the United States, the Americas, and the World, 1906-2006.” Church History (Sept. 2006): 631-647.

“Publicizing Domestic Piety: The Cultural Work of Religious Texts in the Woman’s Building Library.” Libraries and Culture 41.1 (winter 2006): 35-54.  

 “Prophetic Daughter: Mary Fletcher’s Narrative and Women’s Religious and Social Experiences in Eighteenth-Century British Methodism.” Eighteenth-Century Women 3 (2003): 77-98.

“‘Faith Working through Love’: The Wesleyan Revivals and Social Transformation—Considerations for the Contemporary Filipino Church.” Phronesis (Jan. 1997): 5-20.

“The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Rachel Stearns, 1834-1837: Reinterpreting Women’s Religious and Social Experiences in the Methodist Revivals of Nineteenth-Century America.” Church History (Dec. 1996): 577-595. (Article awarded the Sidney E. Mead Prize, American Society of Church History)

Book Chapters (Peer-Reviewed)

“Practice.” In “Part IV Global Reach (1898-present),” in Religion in American History, ed. Amanda Porterfield and John Corrigan, 302-322. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010.

 “Healing Words: Narratives of Spiritual Healing and Kathryn Kuhlman’s Uses of Print Culture, 1947-1976.” In Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America, ed. Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, 271-297. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.
 
 “Religious Periodicals and Their Textual Communities.” In A History of the Book in America, vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, ed. Scott Casper, Jeff Groves, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, 270-278. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press & AAS, 2007. (Volume awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize in Bibliography)  

"Singing Pilgrims: Hymn Narratives of a Pilgrim Community’s Progress from This World to That Which is to Come, 1830-90.” In Sing Them Over Again to Me: Hymns and Hymnbooks in America, ed. Mark A. Noll and Edith L. Blumhofer, 194-213. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.

 “Sanctified Singing: The Role of Hymnody in Shaping Wesleyan Evangelism, 1735-1915.” In Considering the Great Commission: Evangelism and Mission in the Wesleyan Spirit, ed. Stephen Gunter and Elaine Robinson, 211-220. Nashville: Abingdon, 2005.

"Domestic Nurture Versus Clerical Crisis: The Gender Dimension in Horace Bushnell’s and Elizabeth Prentiss’s Critiques of Revivalism.” In New Perspectives on North American Revivalism, ed. Michael McClymond, 67-83. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

31 additional articles and reviews.