300 mind
What seems instead more likely is that the same utilitarian therapeutic criteria
will be used to judge the value of practices for the soul (such as listening to
confession) and practices for the body. To hold their own in this new alliance,
clergy may feel compelled to learn the language of t-cell counts and brain
biochemistry—and, indeed, at least some of them are beginning to do this.
I entitled this essay “Uneasy Alliances.” The remarks I have made above
should make clear why clergy or other kinds of religious practitioners might
have grounds to feel uneasy about the call for a new kind of alliance between
medicine and religion. I also think, however, that there is reason for medical
science to feel uneasy about it. Its authority and values may triumph, but it
runs the risk that both it and society as a whole will look back in time and
judge that victory a pyrrhic one.
The reason is that there is surely something wrongheaded about supposing
that the ethical and existential limitations of modern medicine can be met by
it simply becoming an even more expansive version of what it has always been;
by extending its “therapeutic ethos”^38 into areas that had not previously been
conceived as “medical.” There is really no reason to suppose that the human
institution of medical science will become more “spiritual” if we ask it to assess
the value of spiritual and religious human experiences using methodologies
that were developed for quite different ends. There is every reason instead to
suppose that those human experiences will simply become “medicalized”;
translated into terms that—ironically enough—are likely in the end to feel
every bit as alienating to patients as the high-tech and impersonal medical
practices that previously left no room for the needs of the soul. Evenifthere
is merit to the claim that certain kinds of religious practices can enhance one’s
health, the needs of what we call the soul will never be identical with the needs
of the body.
The hard ethical and existential conversation about modern medicine and
how it can best act to serve human flourishing and human values remains
unfinished. It would be tragic if, in our pursuit of yet another health-enhancing
elixir, it were to be prematurely cut off. To continue to pursue that conversation
well, however, our society needs to insist on its right to continue to test the
robustness of other perspectives on the most fruitful relations between medi-
cine and religion. Above all, we do not want to foreclose for ourselves, even
implicitly, the almost certain possibility that there are values in life worth pro-
tecting beyond the utilitarian, and perspectives worth defending that cannot
be translated into the language of the laboratory and statistics.
notes
- Norman Autton,Pastoral Care in Hospitals(London: Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge, 1968). Raymond Carey,Hospital Chaplains: Who Needs Them?
(St. Louis: Colorado Health & Hospital Association, 1972).