Unfortunately, what we know about faith healing practices is limited to ethnographic evidence from Pentecostal-Charismatic churches. Faith healers are different from traditional healers in their reliance on the world religions of Christianity and Islam to provide both legitimacy for their own practice and the symbolic tools to give meaning to health and illness ( Schoffeleers 1991). Analyses of the rapid growth of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity across southern Africa emphasize the marketing of faith healing as an invaluable product in this context ( Dilger 2007 Becker and Geissler 2007 Gifford 2004). While the expansion of access to biomedical prevention and treatment strategies such as HIV testing and condoms has been central to the global prevention agenda ( Heimer 2007 Schoepf 2001), alternative therapeutic systems such as faith healing and traditional medicine continue to inform how individuals interpret the epidemic, avoid infection, and live with its consequences ( Probst 1999 Peltzer 1999). The generalized AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa intersects with every area of social life and is a widespread concern. The success of faith healing approaches lies in their unique ability to combine individual-pragmatic and communal-ritualized aspects of healing to inform interpretations of the AIDS epidemic and its consequences. We argue that faith healing can be understood as a third therapeutic system that coexists with the well-documented biomedical and traditional systems.
Use of condoms and traditional medicine are, on the other hand, positively associated with worry about AIDS. For individuals, attending a faith healing congregation is associated with lower levels of generalized worry about AIDS, and this association is driven by those who switched churches before AIDS became widespread in rural areas. Using data from Malawi, a religiously diverse African country with high HIV prevalence, we find that faith healing is pervasive across multiple religious traditions. Faith healing in sub-Saharan Africa has primarily been studied qualitatively among Pentecostal-Charismatic groups, and considered as its own phenomenon with little attention to its relationship to other modes of healing.
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