I’ve been fascinated and bewildered as I’ve been thinking about revivalism lately. Check out this collection of photos of an Oral Roberts healing service and try making sense of what’s going on. The whole phenomenon of the big tent revival seems 
to me to hold some profound keys to the nature of American identity. Charles Finney’s famous quote on the difference between the second Great Awakening and the ones before it reflects a change that was taking place in all aspects of life:
Revivals were formerly regarded as miracles. And it has been so by some even in our day. And others have ideas on the subject so loose and unsatisfactory, that if they would only think, they would see their absurdity. For a long time it was supposed by the Church that a revival was a miracle, an interposition of Divine power, with which they had nothing to do, and which they had no more agency in producing than they had in producing thunder, or a storm of hail, or an earthquake. It is only within a few years that ministers generally have supposed revivals were to be promoted, by the use of means designed and adapted specially to that object.
I think this could be applied pretty much accross the board to post-revolutionary American society.
Also interesting to me is the obvious question of what to make of the healings (assuming for the time being that not all of them are fakes). Are they miracles or placebo effect? Is that a relevant question? On this reference the tremendous Radio Lab episode on the placebo effect.
And then there is the personality of the evangelist herself. There is a certain purity to be seen in the sheer narcissism of Kathry Kuhlman floating around on stage in her white robe. There is a Whitmanian spirit at work in Oral Roberts grabbing hold of the face of a man in a wheelchair and telling him “be well!” But then maybe Whitman would tell him you are already well just as you are.
