Science, Religion, and the Human Experience

uneasy alliances 299

of scientific data but in authority that draws on the force of certain ethical and
existential commitments. Is the claim that religion is good for one’s health
compatible with an ongoing commitment to those ethical and existential com-
mitments? If not—if the new perspective on the health benefits of religion is
as likely as not to eclipse older perspectives on proper relations between med-
icine and religion—then what has been gained and what lost?
Many of the advocates for the health benefits of religion suggest that the
new scientific findings simply add further weight to the ethical and existential
concerns that have been the more traditional focus of dialogue between med-
icine and religion. The authors of the recent (2002)Handbook of Religion and
Health(a review of more than 1,600 studies on the religion-health connection)
explicitly identify the moral timeliness of all this work by noting that

Patients are caught...wishing to have their diseases diagnosed and

treated competently with the latest technology, yet having social, psy-

chological, and spiritual needs that are being ignored because of an

increasingly streamlined health care system that overemphasizes the

physical over the spiritual....Scientific medicine has been magnifi-

cently successful but is challenged to figure out how the ancient and

venerable tradition of “doctor as healer” fits in and how to connect

practically at the bedside with the way most human beings deal psy-

chologically with life-threatening disease, which is broadly spiritual/

religious.^37

These authors believe that these new data from scientific medicine can be
used to overcome the current ethical and existential limitations of clinical prac-
tice. Is the claim credible? I am skeptical. I am skeptical, not because I resist
inherently the project of investigating the health benefits of religion, but simply
because in the end that project is all still about more research and more therapy.
Those people who have seen in religion a source of values and practices capable
of responding to the spiritual inadequacies of modern medicine have consis-
tently done so first by pointing out that Western medicine falls short existen-
tially and ethically because it judges all things according to a utilitarian calculus
of health; one that has little if any room for other issues that matter to sick
people. In fact, Anatole Broyard did not want his doctor to tell him he should
pray because it might help his cancer, or that he should consider going to
church for his health (even assuming—as in fact was not the case—that he
was a religious man). What he wanted was for his doctor to stop trying to fix
him and instead to spend a little time beholding him as he was—listening to
what was in his soul, listening to his efforts to make meaning of his experience.
Historically, as we know, the pastoral act of listening and finding sense in
suffering has been seen as the job of the clergy. In the proposed new alliance
between medicine and religion whose contours we are just glimpsing, however,
it is not clear that the clergy will still have any unique domain of expertise.