The Pattern Is Established

Following Branham’s successful format, dozens of imitators appeared. They showed up in every local vacant field in much the same way that traveling carnivals did, playing the towns regularly during the “season.” They toured the countryside, erecting their tents, cleaning up and cleaning out each hamlet, then moving on with echoes of “Hallelujah” still ringing faintly from the hills. The advantages of radio, seized upon early by such entrepreneurs as Rex Humbard and Oral Roberts, enlarged their potential audience enormously. It is still used by many evangelists, and can be said to have brought the profession into full bloom. Protected by the First Amendment, anyone capable of speaking in public became eligible to dispense interpretations of holy writ and to claim healing powers. An occasional individual took his or her inspiration from vaudeville, applying psychological techniques and razzmatazz to build an act that the IRS would never trouble, Congress would never question, and the law would find insulated by the Constitution against charges of fraud and deception.

A Similarity to Witchcraft

Faith-healing, especially today, is difficult to differentiate from witchcraft, which in its healing aspects is involved with expelling evil spirits from the body. The modern witch doctor in Africa still applies primitive show biz when he “pulls the thorn” by applying his mouth to a wound or the ailing portion of the body, producing by sleight of hand a thorn, stone, or sliver that is said to be either the actual cause of pain or a material representation of a demon or devil. Anthropologists have spent much time examining these methods, and as we shall see, one of them has compared these primitive methods to those used by today’s more civilized practitioners. There may be a lot of information in these practices that can benefit medical science; much of today’s medical knowledge came from similar sources. In spite of this close resemblance of faith-healing to witchcraft, thousands of doctors and nurses in the United States have revitalized the International Order of St. Luke the Physician, an Episcopal group stressing a spiritual approach to the practice of medicine, thus identifying with if not actually joining the witches. This order experienced dramatic new life as a result of evangelist Oral Roberts’s success in the 1950s. At that time, a Presbyterian minister, John Pitts, commented: Today, interest in extramedical methods of healing men’s minds and bodies is widespread and deep-seated, and the phenomena of Faith-healing can no longer be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders, a snap judgment, and a clever phrase, either by the church or by the medical profession.... There seems to be more than enough evidence to affirm that spiritual healing is a fact.

Witches involved in making folk medicine, an early attempt at pharmaceutical chemistry.  

Lacking any firm evidence of faith-healing, responsible skeptics do not resort to a “snap judgment” or a “clever phrase.” They simply do not accept wishful thinking as enough evidence to prove a highly unlikely claim. It is the believers who get most of their exercise jumping to conclusions.