Health

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Health

Health is a profoundly cultural concept. Prior to the seventeenth century, the Western world understood health in ways that mingled religious and medical perspectives. Religious explanations of disease (e.g., sin or spirit possession) as well as corresponding schemas for therapeutic intervention (e.g., confession or exorcism) have historically influenced Western attitudes toward health. However, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries challenged these religious conceptions of health and disease. Scientific medicine focused solely on the material causes of disease, hoping to understand health without the interference of philosophical or religious ideas. This, of course, was itself a culturally conditioned attempt to understand health. It rested on faith in the rationalistic assumptions of the Enlightenment era, which confidently proclaimed scientific rationality to be the sole avenue toward meaningful knowledge. It should not be surprising that many Americans do not share this unreserved faith in materialistic science to understand all the complexities of human nature. Indeed, most Americans envision their lives as in some way participating in a sacred reality. And for this reason religious attitudes continue to influence many Americans' understanding of both physical and mental health.

The major religious traditions found in the contemporary United States have long histories of addressing matters of health and medicine. From biblical times to the present, rabbis, priests, and ministers have been concerned with issues related to the health of the body as well as the health of the mind and soul. The religious values taught by institutional religion influence the majority of Americans' attitudes toward sickness, sexuality, and lifestyle, including their attitudes toward such issues as birth control, abortion, and euthanasia. The biblical accounts of Jesus performing healing miracles supports ongoing belief in various forms of "faith healing" such as those that form the nucleus of the charismatic movement within Roman Catholicism or numerous Protestant pentecostal denominations. It should also be noted that church-supported hospitals can be found throughout the United States and that virtually every denomination has ordained clergy whose duties include pastoral care activities intended to heal, sustain, and guide individuals throughout the course of their lives.

Two religious denominations indigenous to American religious history warrant special attention for their persistent interest in the connection between spirituality and health. The Church of Christ, Scientist was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879 with the principal task of demonstrating that health is a spiritual rather than a physical reality. Christian Science has profound faith that God has created all that is, and all that God creates is good. From this theological postulate it follows that sickness, pain, or evil are not creations of God and therefore do not exist in any real sense. These negative conditions are instead only the delusional appearance created by an erring, mortal mind. Because disease is considered to be rooted in a false conception, healing only requires that we replace spiritual ignorance with spiritual understanding. A second denomination that emphasizes the relationship between religion and health is the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The church's founder, Ellen Gould White, received numerous visions and revelations in which she learned that healthful living is a moral and religious obligation. Declaring that "it is as truly a sin to violate the laws of our being as it is to break the Ten Commandments," Ellen White made concern with healthful living an essential element of preparing ourselves for the Second Coming of Christ. While interest in faith healing is part of the Seventh-Day Adventist heritage, more characteristic of the denomination is its concern with healthful diet. Strongly discouraging drinking, smoking, and meat-eating, Seventh-Day Adventists also support hospitals throughout the world in their efforts to make health reform an essential element of evangelical piety.

Some of the most interesting attempts to connect spirituality and health over the past few decades have occurred outside of established religious traditions in systems variously referred to as alternative medicine, holistic therapies, or New Age healing. Included among these health systems are chiropractic medicine, homeopathy, positive-thinking regimens, acupuncture, iridology, t'ai chi, yoga, Ayurvedic medicine, massage therapies, crystal healing, and various twelve-step recovery programs. Although their specific philosophies and practices differ, they are all concerned with healing the whole person and awakening our spiritual sensibilities. Taken together, these healing groups constitute an impressive expression of unchurched American spirituality. Most of these alternative healing systems draw a great deal of their vocabulary from Eastern religions and Western metaphysical philosophies. These belief systems envision humans as existing on many levels (or dimensions), including the physical, mental, and spiritual or astral levels. The healing techniques that these groups utilize seek to restore harmony and interconnection between and among these levels of selfhood. Such inner harmony is said to allow persons to become inwardly receptive to the "inflow" of healing energies that emanate from the spiritual or astral plane and restore health to the physical and mental dimensions of our lives.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, those who become interested in these nontraditional conceptions of health are typically white, between ages twenty-five and fifty, and above average in education and income. Moreover, relatively few suffer from acute illness or refuse to consult medical doctors. What they most have in common is their interest in understanding health in ways that place them outside the intellectual boundaries of either scientific or religious orthodoxy—that is, adherents of these groups have found scientific materialism too confining. Scientific rationality has failed to provide them with an outlook on life that might disclose the ultimate meaning or significance of our lives. Biblical religion also strikes them as an inadequate guide to life. Most of those attracted to alternative healing philosophies are self-styled progressive thinkers and find scriptural religion too narrow and dogmatic. Holistic and New Age medical systems, on the other hand, invite people to explore the intimate correspondences and interconnections among the physical, mental, and spiritual levels of human existence.

There have been some theoretical developments within medical science that have made new connections between health and spirituality. Research in psychosomatic medicine has made it clear that it is not possible to make a complete separation between a patient's mind and body. Our personalities, inclusive of our beliefs and general world outlook, have a great deal to do with our overall health. Studies now indicate that religious belief is positively correlated with resistance to heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Continued research in the relationship between spirituality and health may well point the way to a reintegration of science and religion.

Psychotherapists have also given increased attention to the positive effects of religion on mental health. For many decades it was assumed that religion promoted superstition, dependency, and overall psychological weakness. Yet in recent decades studies have shown that religious belief is positively correlated with resistance to depression and suicide, avoidance of anxiety, and positive outcomes in substance abuse programs. Many psychotherapists have gone further and suggested that health should be understood as something more than the absence of disease. Full health, it is argued, should be considered as the capacity to sustain a lifestyle that is spiritual in the broadest sense of the term (i.e., including the abilities for creativity, self-renewal, empathy for others, spontaneity, and the subjective sense of fulfillment). This concern with understanding the nature of full psychological health accounts for the recent popularity of the psychological theories of Carl Jung. Jung proposed that the mind is by no means machinelike or wholly at the mercy of the outer environment. In his view, the mind is purposeful, spontaneously pushing toward wholeness and growth. Many Americans have found in Jung's work a "psychotherapeutic spirituality" that, while not religious in a traditional sense, is overtly spiritual in its emphasis on humanity's capacity for self-transformation. Many other psychological writers, such as Rollo May, Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, M. Scott Peck, and Thomas Moore, have also attracted sizable reading audiences who yearn for new understandings of the "further reaches" of human nature.

It appears that although Western science has attempted to separate considerations of the body from those of the human spirit, most Americans continue to view them as integrally related. The healing ministries of America's churches, alternative medicine, humanistic psychotherapy, and even recent research within scientific medicine are all evidence that American culture continues to support belief in the positive effect of religion on both mental and physical health.