Texans Offer to Turn Flock Into ‘Healers’

Flamboyant faith healers have plied the evangelical preaching circuit for decades, but Charles and Frances Hunter, a folksy husband-wife team from Texas--the latest sensation in the field--have a new wrinkle: They teach thousands of “ordinary” Christian believers to purportedly do everything from casting out devils to curing cancer, goiters and infertility.

Everyone can heal the sick, they say.

To back up their claim, the “Happy Hunters” turned loose 700 of their trained followers at the Long Beach Convention Center on Friday night.

The healers, who had been “baptized with the Holy Ghost and fire,” worked in teams of three, laying their hands on the sick and commanding them to be made well “in Jesus’ name.”

Some testified to feeling better or having no more pain. A few said they had experienced “a miracle.” But they left in the same wheelchairs and with the same limps or deformities with which they had arrived nearly four hours earlier.

And some analysts suspect that gimmicks and psychological pressure are behind the reputed cures rather than genuine miracles.

“They’re giving suggestions to very suggestible people,” said Don Henvick, an amateur magician and a member of the Bay Area Skeptics society who attended a Hunter meeting in Oakland earlier this year. “This is the ‘miracle.’ ”

But Charles Hunter, 68, and Frances Hunter, 72, made miracles seem commonplace as they joked, cajoled, exhorted--and pitched for $1,000 contributions--during the one-night show, their 73rd “healing explosion” since July of 1985. Hunter meetings have drawn crowds of up to 55,000 in their worldwide ministry.

The 2,900 at Long Beach “danced in the spirit” to upbeat live gospel music, spoke in “tongues” on command from Charles Hunter and fell backward onto the floor in domino fashion as the Hunters moved down long rows of people, touching them one by one on the forehead to “slay them in the power of the Holy Spirit.” Most of those in the audience seemed familiar with these expressions of charismatic, or Pentecostal, Christian experience.

After the preliminaries, Frances Hunter, who wore a long, pleated blue gown, said Jesus, according to the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Mark, promised that his followers would do “even greater miracles” than he did.

Sick Aunt From Arizona

Veverly Holiwell of Cerritos brought her sick aunt from Mesa, Ariz., hoping she would be healed of colon cancer. Amelia Camacho of Pico Rivera walked up and down without her walker--something she could do anyway, she said, but tonight there was almost no pain, “praise God.”

And there was James Naves, a self-described “street person looking for something to do.” He had wandered in to “stay warm, listen to the music . . . (and) see all kinds of people play their little games.”

In the opinion of one investigator of “healing explosions,” those who come are “sincere people participating in . . . a religious psychodrama, a participatory divine theater that supplies its audience with strong emotional rewards for the willing suspension of critical analysis.”

David Alexander of Long Beach, a writer and publisher who debunks claims of the supernatural, added that he and other investigators had tried to follow up on the Hunters’ assertions that they had restored missing limbs, “regenerated spines” and “raised the dead.” The people supposedly involved could not be located, Alexander said in an interview.

“The Hunters can make any kind of grandiose claims they want because they come and go on their traveling medicine show,” he said.

Indeed, much of the Hunters’ storytelling of healings is based on vague references, is often said to have happened overseas in remote places and is frequently secondhand information even to the Hunters.

Keep No Statistics

The Hunters keep no statistics on reported healings, nor are they alarmed that everybody is not healed. They say about four out of five seeking cures are healed.

“My testimony as I share it will see thousands of people healed,” Frances Hunter said during an interview. “It will be a connecting point for their faith. So you can call it psychosomatic if you want. You can call it ideas we plant in their minds; but as long as it works, what difference does it make?”

One of the few comprehensive studies of faith healings was conducted in the early 1970s by Dr. Mansell Pattison, now retired head of psychiatry for the Medical College of Georgia. Pattison followed up on about 100 “charismatic healings” in the Pacific Northwest, concluding that the great majority had no lasting healing effect. But the recipients of the claimed healings nevertheless retained positive feelings about the event and said it had deepened their faith, Pattison found.

Dr. Paul Goodley, a specialist in pain diagnosis and orthopedic medicine who has attended Hunter rallies, is particularly put off by what he calls “the carnival atmosphere . . . flippancy . . . and mass hysteria that drives off the thoughtful.”

At the Hunters’ request, Goodley examined several people at the time they came on stage for healing at a Hunter rally at the Walnut Faith Center in Pomona on Sept. 18.

“When people come up, they . . . want to conform, and they’re fair prey, fair game,” he said in an interview later.

Goodley said he had placed his hands on the backs of people undergoing the apparent “leg-lengthening” therapy done by Charles Hunter. “They were just shifting their pelvises,” although the movement may have been made unconsciously, Goodley concluded.

One Exception

But the Big Bear Lake physician, who is a Christian believer, pointed to one exception: Carolyn Phillips, 27, of Fontana, who complained of numbness and acute pain in her back before her apparent healing at the Hunters’ Pomona rally. When Goodley gave her a cursory exam on stage, he said, Phillips’ left hip was lower than her right one.

After the healing session, Goodley said, her hips had become level, a diagnosis he confirmed during a more extensive exam in his office about 10 weeks later.

“Something happened to that woman of a miraculous nature,” Goodley said. But he noted that he had not checked her thoroughly enough before the Hunter encounter to determine the full extent of her physical problems.

Phillips, who says she had also been “miraculously healed” of a throat and eye condition during a healing service in a Nazarene church 14 years ago, told Goodley and a reporter that the hip and back pain had ceased at the Hunter rally and that she had since discontinued her pain medication.

Although the Hunters’ ministry budget is more than $3 million a year, they do not appear to follow the high-rolling life style of some of the flamboyant television evangelists.

The Hunters say they each receive $1,000 a month in salary, “plus Social Security” and all expenses for their globe-girdling travels. They fly first-class and often stay in the best hotels. But they dress simply and outside of Frances’ 1984 black Lincoln Town Car, appear to enjoy few luxuries. They say they are away from home most of the time.

They own a four-bedroom home appraised at $237,000 in Kingwood, a suburb 20 miles north of Houston. And their headquarters, according to Julia Duin, religion writer for the Houston Chronicle, is “not lavish at all. It’s . . . semi-warehouse.”

Still, the Hunters are wary of disclosing financial details; they do not tell how the proceeds from their rallies and sales of audio and videocassette training tapes and their 33 books--10 million of which are in print--are spent, except to say the money is “plowed back into the ministry. . . . We spend all we take in.” Their expenses include a payroll for 45 employees.

When asked for an audited financial report, Charles Hunter, a former certified public accountant, declined, explaining: “Skeptics who want to pull you apart are the only ones who want them.”