Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (The Anthropology of Christianity)

The Anthropology of Christianity

by Pamela E. Klassen

Spirits of Protestantism reveals how liberal Protestants went from being early-twentieth-century medical missionaries seeking to convert others through science and scripture, to becoming vocal critics of missionary arrogance who experimented with non-western healing modes such as Yoga and Reiki. Drawing on archival and ethnographic sources, Pamela E. Klassen shows how and why the very notion of healing within North America has been infused with a Protestant "supernatural liberalism." In the course of coming to their changing vision of healing, liberal Protestants became pioneers three times in the struggle against the cultural and medical pathologizing of homosexuality; in the critique of Christian missionary triumphalism; and in the diffusion of an ever-more ubiquitous anthropology of "body, mind, and spirit." At a time when the political and anthropological significance of Christianity is being hotly debated, Spirits of Protestantism forcefully argues for a reconsideration of the historical legacies and cultural effects of liberal Protestantism, even for the anthropology of religion itself.

Genres: History

348 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2011

About the author

Pamela E. Klassen is Assistant Professor in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Going by the Moon and the Stars: Stories of Two Russian Mennonite Women.

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Klassen provides a close analysis of twentieth century liberal Protestantism through the lens of health and conceptions of body. It is a solid analysis of how prominent individuals in the church conceptualized the body, global health and religion, and the relationship between spirituality and biomedical healing. Klassen uses church newspapers to analyze how these elements came together to form an imagined community nationally and globally. However, it is also a very top-down analysis with little information coming from parishioners or, more importantly, patients! This "view from the pew" could have further elevated this otherwise strong analysis.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The absolutely brilliant theoretical insight here: If you want to understand 20th/21st-c. liberal Protestants, look at their implicit theological anthropology, by way of their healing practices. That gets you straight to worldview, including the surprising supernatural and postcolonial features. I've been trying to explain versions of that to interested friends and skeptics since really becoming Episcopalian. Klassen nails it. This is how you use Foucault today: Don't just quote him (though she does, and unusually adeptly). Follow the lines of inquiry he opens, in directions he'd never have touched.

The research nuggets (mostly archival, with one ethnographic chapter at the end) are interesting too, but I was less compelled by them. Probably it's because, well, I'm a native informant on a lot of this material. I may have been present at some of the services she visited (at least two of her subjects are personal acquaintances). Some of this history, too, I know better than she does. Some of this is relatively petty details (you'd think she could mention Church Missionary Society was an evangelical, not a liberal group); some is more structural (her ignorance of pre-Stonewall queer church history hurts her fourth chapter quite a bit—granted, Recruiting Young Love is the book I'd hand her, and she wouldn't have had access to it while writing.)

In a classroom, what I'd really want to do is excerpt the most relevant chapters so that students could see her interpretive facility at work. You'd want different parts of her argument in a theology class than in a religious studies class, and the full thing almost never, as it's ultimately a quite specialized argument on the best methods for studying liberal Protestantism as such. Because the book is built as a continuous argument and doesn't circle back to define her new terms, that sort of excerpting would be difficult.

So I think this helps define my star rating, for academic books. Five-star means "classic, everyone should read it". Four-star would mean "I'd assign it"; I'm not sure this book quite meets that standard, but I'd still look for ways. So call it 3.5 star, rounded up.