Healing and Authority

In Christianity and New-Age Spirituality

Photo by lee zheng yuan on Unsplash

It’s an old story: generations collide. For my generation and our parents, one of the collisions was cultural 1990s/early 200s Evangelicalism and the Progressivism of cancellation that we replaced it with. What both movements shared was shame as a main persuasive tactic. Generational movements don’t occur in a vacuum, which is to say that history breathes into the clashes and the shifts that occur with aging and seasons of life.

My own parents and their peers had their own frictions, of course, even the ones who were ultimately dissatisfied with hippy “peace and love,” and the resulting “Jesus People USA” movement is documented in the better-than-I-expected 2023 film, Jesus Revolution, which was based on “Psychedelic Christ,” a 1971 article in Time. The religious and cultural phenomenon ultimately became my father’s charismatic escape from Catholicism (and, from what I understand, a substance or two), and of the Calvary Chapels that spread across the country, it was one in Denver that they were attending when my brother Shane was born. It was a different movement but a similar bringing together of hippies, Christians, and military folk that a young woman I was involved with in my early twenties came out of and that was all so familiar and triggering: easier to see in her than it was in me.

I don’t know much about the makers of this recent movie, and I have resisted my urge to do the background research as to what their motives might have been, but part of what makes the movie successful in my view was how serious the story takes the characters who are at the center of its drama. It would be all too easy for Hollywood types to make religious people look like complete idiots, to not make any real attempt at understanding their world as they experienced it, but these writers resisted that path, and it is to their credit that they did so.

One of the subtle way the filmmakers allowed for their audience to make up their own minds was the careful tightrope that was walked around miracles. Part of the power and the authority of Jesus Movement USA, from what I understand and from what the film betrays, was its literalism around our capacity to be healed by God of our physical ailments. It’s interesting to note here, by the way, that some of the New Age circles I sometimes frequent seem to carry this same optimism; they just attribute healing to ourselves and to the universe rather than to God. Just slight, semantic differences dancing around essentially the same claim? Maybe. Or maybe not.

Regardless, the filmmakers don’t take a clear side on the possibility of healing and miracles, and it’s evident in the way we get scenes of Lonnie Fresbee in particular interjecting into church-like services large portions of time devoted to “spirit-led” healing without seeing the after-effects of healed (or unhealed!) people. The movie has plot and interpersonal conflicts, but it’s mostly not a fight about science or spirituality, and thank God it’s not, because that would be less interesting than what unfolds.

I don’t know that Jesus Revolution is a “Christian movie,” but if it is, it’s a decidedly-better one than almost any I have ever seen. The ultimate comparison point for me will always, for better and worse, be a 2006 story called Facing the Giants. As I recall, it was a story about a football coach with a bad team who comes to Jesus or something and then the team starts winning. I don’t know how old, exactly, that I was when I watched it, but I was old enough to recognize that the story it told was infuriatingly cheap and false, and that if the real life most of us live was anything at all like Facing the Giants, it would be a lot easier than it is. There were times earlier and later in my life than the viewing of that particular film when I have surely fallen for all kinds of bullshit, but my visceral response to Facing the Giants was complete repulsion as I watched it the first (and only) time. I could not believe that resources had even been put into making the thing.

Perhaps it’s just as interesting and instructive to notice that so many of us want healing (and a reprieve from our confusion, while we're at it) and for people who crave that cinematic exploration I would recommend a television show, The Leftovers, though it muddles as much as it illuminates. There is something about pain and limitation that we always seem on quest to “fix.” Count me among that trend, every day of the week, and of course to read the Gospels in the Christian New Testament is to find people with a diversity of problems they’re hoping an encounter with Jesus will free them from. To read the stories is to create the same kind of believers and skeptics—many of us are both—that might come out of a breath-work session or a psychedelic ceremony with a shaman.

“What is the difference,” I once posed to an “energy” therapist, “between speaking in tongues and a shaman’s chanting?”

(He nodded to my not-“yes or no” question.)

I might have asked the same question about Natives dancing around a fire or Pentecostals lifting their hands to the heavens in song. Why the hell are we are, and what in the world is going on in all this chaos and guessing? We can spend a lifetime trying to “figure it out,” or we can try our damndest to protest that which we didn’t initially choose, or we can awkwardly begin to sway with the branches and call with the birds.

“Their love seems more sincere than a slogan,” reads the piece in Time, “deeper than the fast-fading sentiments of the flower children; what startles the outsider is the extraordinary sense of joy that they are able to communicate. Of course, as in any fresh religious movement, zealotry is never far away.”

As I watched Fresbee’s style as depicted on the screen, I thought, again, of my father. I had grown up worshipping with the Methodists on Sunday morning (out of proximal convenience) and with Pentecostals on Sunday evening (whose style better suited my father’s preferences), and what I liked about the Methodists was that there was some predictability to it. Viewed at its extreme from the vantage point of the movie and from stereotypical general battles, perhaps this is the conservative instinct. Give me order! All you have to do is look at the bulletin and you know what’s going to happen. Stand up, sing, sit down, pray, listen, process forward for the bread and juice. And for god’s sake, get me out of here on time.

Except for when my dad was filling in behind the pulpit. And I guess this weirdly makes him the “liberal” on this particular point. I once challenged him as to why he felt the need to narrate every part of the service, and his response—not too different from what Fresbee’s might have been, even as he began to lose some of Chuck Smith’s confidence and support—was that you had to allow some space for the “Spirit” to “move.”

Well, as Fresbee’s wife points out to him when the two start to bicker is that one potential problem that pops up when one person is allowed to dictate all the whims of a religious service (or a yoga session or a college course or a political speech) is that—never mind “the spirit”—that person in front so easily becomes the main object of adoration. Leadership constructs identity, even if it’s easily shatter-able, as we see in headlines over and over again.

We often defer our own judgement to the authority of someone who acts like such a leader, who posits and appears to live an answer, any answer, to life’s complexity. We so badly want it—something!—to be true, to be worth trusting and staking a life on. This is, presumably, how a person shifts from hippy to charismatic to conservative parent, all in the same lifetime.

I do not mean to suggest that none of our movements or turns are, or can be, sincere or purposeful—I hope there is something in this life that can anchor us in the midst of all our grasping—but, rather, I am merely pointing out that our desire for such direction in the first place, combined with a person who possesses just enough charisma and audacity, creates the very atmosphere that is ripe for power struggle and abuse.