Joseph Lewis vs. the Faith Healers

 

My previous essay was about Joseph Lewis the freethinker. I learned some important things from his published speeches, even though his anti-religious fervor sometimes got tiresome.

In the above image, Lewis is the white-haired man at the right at the dedication of a Thomas Paine statue in 1956.

Where Joseph Lewis was at his white-hot finest was when he criticized faith-healers. One of these was Jack Coe, who called together people with TB to be healed. Not only did Coe fail to heal them, but he violated quarantine by assembling so many consumptives together. Coe was earning $800,000 a year, which was a fortune back then. Lewis challenged Coe to heal a child of polio in a hospital where it could be observed; and if Coe healed the child, Lewis would donate $60,000 to medical research. (Needless to say, this didn’t happen.)

My favorite part was when Lewis lashed out against Oral Roberts, who remains to this day the darling of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I currently live. He, too, was a faith healer. Lewis accused Roberts of malpractice because he took advantage of people when they were at their most vulnerable. It was worse than the Catholic church selling indulgences in previous centuries. He challenged Roberts: how can you prove that you represent God? And where does the money go? Roberts also had the same problem as Coe: gathering four hundred people with TB together in order to (pretend to) heal them is a health menace. The boy that Roberts supposedly cured of epilepsy—how do we know he was really cured? In fact, how do we know he was ever sick? Maybe he was just a “shill”, a fake, planted in the audience. Once again Lewis challenged the faith healer to do his work under hospital conditions, a challenge that as far as I can tell went unanswered.

I have a special reason to dislike Oral Roberts. It gets personal. My wife’s grandmother sent Roberts much of her money, and the entire family continues poor as a result. My wife is perhaps the richest of them, as a part-time librarian and wife of a middle-class professor at a small university.

However interesting it was, I got tired of Lewis’s attacks on faith healers. It sounded as if he was trying to convince Oral Roberts that he was wrong. This was, of course, impossible. It is not a matter of reason. As Gad Saad explains in his book The Consuming Instinct, faith healers are meeting the emotional needs that have been placed in our brains by evolution. Sometimes I think that Lewis’s insistence on the primacy of reason is as un-evolutionary as the faith healers’ rejection of evolution. Religion is not something that is either true or false; it evolved.