294 mind
specific faith tradition in order to enjoy the healing fruits of faith. This quasi-
secularization of the healing power of faith would be completed some twenty
years later, in the early 1970s, when the editor ofThe New Republic,Norman
Cousins, wrote inThe New England Journal of Medicineabout his remarkable
experiment in self-healing from a potentially fatal illness. His method involved
deliberate cultivation of positive attitude, and his description of his experimen-
tal treatment—written for a medical audience—represented “faith” as a potent
mental state with specific health-enhancing biochemistry.^21
The combined legacies of Peale and Cousins have in our own time created
conditions in which it seems natural to think of faith—religious or otherwise—
as a key that unlocks the body’s “natural” pharmacology cabinet. Today, there
is a growing tendency to conceptualize the specific healing effects of belief—
any kind of belief—through reference to what is known about the physiological
changes associated with aparticularkind of belief: not in God but in medicine
and its treatments. This is the kind of belief that results in perceived and
measurable changes in bodily functioning known as the “placebo effect.”
For a long time, the placebo effect was defined as the subjective (but not
truly curative) response that gullible patients have to inactive “sugar pills.” In
this understanding, evoking the placebo effect was tolerated (just barely) as a
form of very occasional benevolent deception that doctors might practice on
patients who couldn’t be otherwise helped or didn’t really have anything wrong
with them.^22 Since the late 1970s, however, the placebo effect has been slowly
rehabilitated as a true physiological phenomenon. The new ruling wisdom is
that those infamous sugar pills—or, rather, the patient’s faith in those pills—
triggers changes in biochemistry that in turn lead to true healing processes.
New brain imaging studies are being published that show, for example, star-
tling similarities between the brain changes seen in patients given morphine
and those seen in patients who received plain saline solution but believed they
had been given morphine.^23
The collective effect of the placebo-effect work has been to turn the healing
power of belief—including and perhaps especially religious belief—into an
entity that has nothing to do with God’s compassion or Providence, and every-
thing to do with certain intriguing realities of human psychology and physi-
ology. There is an innate capacity for our bodies to try to bring into being, to
the best of their ability, the optimistic scenarios in which we fervently believe.
And nothing has contributed more to facilitating this innate capacity, some
people have gone on to say, than belief in God’s capacity to heal us. Indeed,
it is not unlikely that we specifically evolved with the “wiring” (the term
was originally used by Herbert Benson) to believe in some kind of beneficent
divine power that can heal us, because such wiring kept our ancestors healthy
in a time before there were many, if any, truly effective medical treatments
available.^24