Religion, Health and Healing: Findings from a Southern City

Abstract

During the last decade the traditional Christian practice of faith healing has reemerged in a number of mainline denominations. Most of the recent social science investigation of faith healing has been qualitative in nature. The present study explored faith healing practices in the context of a larger survey research project on education and health care. A sample of 586 adult respondents in the Richmond, VA SMSA were asked about their use of prayer in dealing with physical illness. The single most striking finding was that 14 percent of the respondents reported having experienced a healing which they attributed to prayer or regarded as a divine healing. Reported instances of faith healing probably would have been higher had the item wording encouraged reporting of multiple incidents and of non-physical healings. Multivariate analysis suggests that faith healing is not concentrated among deprived populations but rather is widely diffused through a broad range of churches and segments of the general population.

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