Incarnation, Eucharist and the Christian Body: A Complete Guide·Part G of 9
The Present
This is the largest under-studied object of the whole series, and I mean it literally.
26. Pentecostal bodily practice
This is the largest under-studied object of the whole series, and I mean it literally.
The size
By Pew Research Center estimates for 2010: about 279 million Pentecostals and 305 million Charismatics — totalling around 584 million, that is, about 27% of all Christians.
Pew notes explicitly that the data come chiefly from Christian organisations, not from censuses — so I read them as an order of magnitude, not as a measurement. But even with a generous margin of error, we are speaking of hundreds of millions of people, with the centre of gravity in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
For comparison: this is more people than all practitioners of all techniques described in the thirteen previous documents of this series, cumulatively.
And it is an intensely bodily practice
This is the point. After the retreat of chapter 10 — the Protestant shift toward text and preaching — the body returned to the centre, within the Protestant world, in the early 20th century, with an origin usually placed at Azusa Street in Los Angeles, 1906.
The repertoire:
- Glossolalia — the vocalisation of non-linguistic sequences, held to be a gift
- Laying on of hands, for healing or blessing — bodily contact as a central channel
- Raised arms, loud voice, movement, dance
- “Falling in the Spirit” — collapse with attendants who catch
- Healing queues, with public bodily response
- And collective synchrony: music, clapping, voice, movement, for hours
If you observed this repertoire in a tradition without written texts, you would record it as ecstatic bodily practice with catalepsy, vocal cut-off, and group entrainment — and you would devote a chapter to it.
The fact that the Western serious literature on “body knowledge” treats Feldenkrais extensively and the 584 million minimally is a problem of the literature, not of the object.
The measurements
There are some, and they are few and small. I note this as a deficit.
The neuroimaging study of glossolalia (Newberg et al., Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 2006) used SPECT on five participants, comparing glossolalia with religious singing. The finding: reduction of activity in the frontal lobes, a region associated with control and the sense of self, and changes in emotion-related areas.
The significant point is that this is consistent with the participants’ own reports — that they do not control what they say.
The limits, which are serious: five people, one centre, a preliminary study, SPECT with limited spatial resolution. The authors declare this. It cannot support any strong conclusion, and twenty years later the field does not have the work that would be needed.
Glossolalia as a linguistic object has been better studied: analyses show phonological patterns consistent with the speaker’s native language and the absence of the structures that characterise natural languages. That is, it is not speech of a foreign language, as some versions of the claim propose; it is phonation of another type.
This is not, in itself, a judgment on the practice. It is a judgment on a specific claim about it — and the tradition itself disagrees internally about whether the claim concerns foreign languages or “tongues of angels”.
27. And the deaths: when healing replaces medicine
The hard chapter of Part G, and it does not concern only Pentecostals.
The data
The reference study is Asser and Swan, in Pediatrics (1998). They examined cases of child deaths in the United States, from 1975 to 1995, in families that withdrew or rejected medical care for religious reasons.
172 child deaths.
And the critical finding: 140 of these had conditions for which the expected survival probability with basic medical care was around 90% or higher.
That is: children who died from conditions that are treatable.
Methodological limitation that must be declared: this is a case series collected from reported incidents, not a population study. So the number is a lower bound, not an estimate. The real size is unknown and almost certainly larger.
Who
The cases come from various groups, and the distribution is important so that no one is wronged:
- Groups with doctrinal rejection of medicine, like Christian Science
- Small faith-healing communities, like the Followers of Christ and Faith Tabernacle
- Cases of refusal of blood transfusion by Jehovah’s Witnesses
- And cases from within the broader charismatic and Pentecostal spectrum, where the theology does not reject medicine but local pressure and the preaching of healing produce the same outcome
The last category is the most significant for the chapter, because it shows that no doctrine against medicine is required. It is enough for there to be a community in which seeking a doctor is read as lack of faith.
The shape, which is the same as chapter 23
The tradition provides the exception — and social pressure blocks the exception.
Almost every Christian body, including the large Pentecostal organisations, explicitly teaches that medicine is a gift of God and that prayer does not replace it. The official position is, in the overwhelming majority, correct.
And still children die, because the official position is not what operates in the room.
And there is the legal side, which is perhaps the worst part: the US enacted, from the 1970s, religious exemptions in child abuse and neglect laws that in several states provide a legal shield. That is, the state contributed institutionally to blocking the exception.
The comparison that matters, and is the conclusion of the document
Tibet had srog rlung: a medical category, with a prescription, that says do less.
Judaism had pikuach nefesh: the saving of life as an obligation that overrides the law.
This tradition had, from 530, chapter 36 of the Benedictine Rule: the care of the sick before every other obligation. It had, from the 4th century, hospitals. It had the theology of chapter 4, which gives the body the strongest possible value.
It had all the ingredients, in written form, for fifteen hundred years — and in specific communities of the 20th and 21st centuries the outcome was 172 dead children that we know of.
This is not an argument against the tradition. It is an argument that teaching is not enough, and that the critical question for every system in this series is not what it says, but what mechanism activates the exception when it is needed.
The only mechanism I found that works is the one that makes the exception obligatory rather than permissible.
28. What is structurally unique to this tradition
I gather, before the practical principles.
1. Matter is the object of salvation, not its vehicle. None of the other fourteen systems makes this claim. Most treat the body as vehicle, map, debt, garment, rent, or obstacle.
2. The hope is bodily. Resurrection of the flesh, not immortality of the soul. This is explicitly anti-Platonic, was formulated in a Platonic environment, and survived in the Creed despite the opposite folk belief.
3. The central mystery is the ingestion of a body. Without parallel in the series.
4. The great divisions were made over bodily questions. Chalcedon over how much body the god had; Marburg and Trent over what a piece of bread is. The geographical divisions of the tradition were drawn on questions about matter.
5. It has no technique for the body, it has a calendar for the body. This is, in my view, the most underrated observation of the document. India gave āsana and prāṇāyāma. China gave meridians and qigong. This tradition gave Hours, fasts, feast-day calendars, postures, and a manual with a timetable — that is, regulation of time, not technique of body. And regulation of time is what scales to billions.
6. The one truly explicit protocol of multisensory work that I found written as a manual with supervision. The Exercises, with the additiones.
7. The one tradition that revised itself on whether matter carries — and then re-embodied from the other end, with 584 million people.
8. And the tradition with the greatest distance between the declared value of the body and the treatment of it. This is the most serious judgment of the document, and it is a judgment the system cannot dismiss as external, because it is formulated by its own criteria.