Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

uneasy alliances 289

The argument is new, but, in the span of a few short years, it has begun
to eclipse the others. With more than a decade of research now to draw on,^4
the claim that religion is good medicine has been prominently trumpeted in
the popular press—most recently (November 2003) in a cover story ofNews-
week, but before then in high-profile journals ranging from theNew York Times
toThe Atlantic MonthlytoPsychology TodaytoReaders’ Digest. There also exist
a growing number of popular paperback digestions of the arguments:The Faith
Factor, by Dale Matthews;Timeless Healing, by Herbert Benson;The Healing
Power of Faith, by Harold Koenig;God, Faith, and Health, by Jeff Levin.^5
On the academic front, the last several years have seen the establishment
of a series of university-based research centers on the topic: the George Wash-
ington Center Institute for Spirituality and Health; the Mind-Body Medicine
Institute at Harvard University; the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the
University of Minnesota; the Interfaith Health Program at Emory University;
the Center for the Study of Religion/Spirituality and Health at Duke Medical
School. Medical education is also being affected. Today, more than seventy of
the United States’ 125 medical schools—from Harvard to Stanford—have in-
tegrated discussion of the religion-health connection into their curricula; still
others offer continuing education courses on that theme.^6
Energizing many if not all of these various activities is a vision of a new
kind of relationship emerging between medicine and religion. No longer, we
are told, do we need to confine pastors and doctors to their own distinct spheres
of expertise. Nor do we need any longer to see them as motivated by values
that are, at bottom, antagonistic to each other. The discovery of religion’s ther-
apeutic powers exposes the lie behind tired old Cartesian oppositions between
spirit and body that previously had helped fuel such feelings of antagonism.
In so doing, it opens the door to a new era of cooperation between clerics and
medics, an alliance without historical precedent.

The Anatomy of the Argument

That all duly noted, it is still not at all obvious what all this adds up to. What

does it mean to insist that religion is good medicine? What kind of alliance

between medicine and religion is this going to be? What kinds of assumptions

does it make about both what medicine is and what religion is, and how we

should conceptualize their proper relations? Before any kind of answer can be

hazarded to these questions, it is necessary to better understand the anatomy

of the argument itself: the empirical basis is for the claims, the assumptions

within which they function and how they relate to other medical and theological

traditions. When we do look more carefully, we quickly discover something

important: that we actually have here to do with, not one, but four discrete

claims, each with historical roots in a discrete culture of research in the bio-