"I wondered how this man could possibly cure anything, except maybe an overweight wallet"
— Dr. Sam Hawthorne: More Things Impossible, "The Problem of the Revival Tent"
The Fake Faith Healer, who combines elements of the Sinister Minister and the Phony Psychic, is one of the vilest types of Con Man.
Most con artists target the greedy, but this fellow targets the hopeless and desperate. The Fake Faith Healer will usually claim to heal through the power of faith, a.k.a Holy Healing Magic. The vilest will offer Psychic Surgery services. At best, they'll take your money. At worst, they'll persuade you to forego conventional treatment — and die.
Usually found traveling the roads and setting up a tent or table to pitch to people. Keeping on the move helps to reduce the likelihood of having to deal with disgruntled ex-clients. The most successful will have their own churches and will visit large arenas. They are, of course, Faking Faith in most circumstances, and are nothing like a true believer.
Note that this still counts as a con even if the person believes in their own powers. Fooling yourself doesn't mean that you're not fooling others.
On the other hand, the Placebo Effect suggests that phony healing treatments can sometimes actually improve people's health, since Your Mind Makes It Real — to an extent. As well, another tactic they use is to tell clients that the psychic healing may take several rounds of sessions to take effect. Since many minor aches and pains are temporary, if the "healer" convinces the client to wait a few weeks, by that time the aches may heal naturally (but the psychic healer will claim this was his "special powers" at work). Alternately, they may use a variant of the Heads I Win, Tails You Lose argument: Since the healing is based on faith, if you don't get better that only proves you didn't have enough faith.
Compare Snake Oil Salesman, who offers similar fake healing, but without the religious overtones. If the religious overtones are kicked up a notch, on the other hand, it may result in a False Prophet or even a Scam Religion. Or if they have a TV show, they’re probably a Greedy Televangelist.
Sadly, this trope is very much Truth in Television. Faith healing
is a controversial practice with little to no scientific evidence in support of it, and has led to deaths in situations where it was used in place of conventional medical treatment, such that many skeptics have a low opinion of it. But since we're here to document fiction, well... No Real Life Examples, Please!
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In the Death Cap storyline "Frontier Justice" in Judge Dredd Megazine, Judge Goya, making her way through the Cursed Earth, hears about a faith healer who claims to cure people's mutations. She's desperate enough to believe in him, but when she finally catches up with him, he takes one look at her fungal form and freaks out. Then the residents of the town he was fleecing realise he's a fraud and riot.
Fan Works
- Commandments of a High School God: Discussed. Although the Nahobino is a bona-fide god with healing magic, he knows exactly what that sounds like on the other side of the Masquerade.
Please do not advertise my healing powers. While it is entirely true that you are healed through the grace of your god, it still sounds like a scam.
- The Doctor Is In: Sunstorm is a genuine believer, but he's also Ratchet's biggest opponent in his quest to get the Decepticons proper health care. Not only does Sunstorm preach against sex ed and sex outside marriage, his 'holy healing water' is radioactive.
Films — Live Action
- The film adaptation of The Day of the Locust adds a scene where Faye and Homer take Harry to a scammer/fake faith healer called Big Sister, who is purely in it for the money.
- Leap of Faith (1992) is about a cynical fake faith healer who starts to develop sympathy for the people of a small town when he gets stuck there.
- Marjoe is a documentary about Real Life con artist preacher (he admits it on camera) Marjoe Gortner. Gortner is shown laying hands on people and crying out to Jesus for their pains and illnesses to be gone. One such sequence is followed by an interview clip in which Gortner matter-of-factly admits that he's a fake and that what he does is 90% psychosomatic.Trivia
- In Red Lights, a fake faith healer named Leonardo is debunked in a scene that closely follows the real-life debunking of faith healer Peter Popoff by stage magician and skeptic James Randi.
- Wake Up Dead Man (2025): Simone Vivane is a former cellist suffering from severe nerve pain; unable to be cured by science, she turned to Monsignor Wakes out of desperation for a miracle. Simone's checks are said to be keeping the whole church running, and Wakes openly insults her for trying to "buy" a miracle... that he promised to sell.
Literature
- Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021): After her older sister Maria suffers a traumatic head injury, Anna scrounges for money to pay for blessed healing water. Since this is 15th century Constantinople, nobody knows that mercury water drank from a lead cup is toxic.
- In the Dear America book Color Me Dark, the protagonist's parents take her sister Erma Jean to a faith healer after Erma Jean becomes mute following her uncle's death. When Erma Jean is still unable to speak after the "treatment" is complete, the healer claims it didn't work because Erma Jean didn't have enough faith, at which point their father calls the healer a charlatan and marches Erma Jean out of there.
- Dr. Sam Hawthorne: More Things Impossible, "The Problem of the Revival Tent" features a zigzagged version. An oily Snake Oil Salesman claims his seven-year-old son, who is too young to really know what is going on, is the faith healer. A patient or two visiting the tent have Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane recoveries, but the father has been conducting such revival meetings long before discovering his son’s supposed gift, and, even if the healing is real, his son being unable to resurrect him after his murder (when the father claimed that the weak in faith cannot be healed) may be rather telling.
- Patternist: One of the titular Psychics is a variant — the faith is fake but the healing isn't. She's a psychic vampire who draws in crowds with a charismatic preacher act, harvests their energy in a way that satiates her without harming anyone individually, and uses the excess to work genuine miracles of healing.
- In Revival (2014), Pastor Charles Jacob decides to become a fake faith healer after losing his faith.
- The Sellswords: A corrupt branch of a good-aligned deity gives out fake miracles via "illusionary" healing magic. Notably, this was not actually possible in Forgotten Realms because illusionary healing spells did not exist in that edition and priests who failed to follow the tenets of their god were stripped of their powers rather quickly. It consequently would have been easier for them to have used real healing magic.
- In Sunglasses After Dark, primary antagonist Catherine Wheele is a rich and powerful evangelist and faith healer. She is actually an extremely powerful psychic with Mind Control powers, but she doesn't have a bit of healing power — that part is pure con.
Live-Action TV
- One of these is featured on 1000 Ways to Die. Before one "show", he grabs an ungrounded mic while standing in water and gets electrocuted.
- Carnivàle has the titular carnival setting up one of these to turn a profit in a town where their usual acts would get them thrown out, having one of them act as a minister and "heal" another member of the carnival hiding in the crowd. Ironically enough the guy they pick for the minister actually does have Healing Hands abilities, they just require him to drain the life from something nearby. In the series finale, they set it up again and actually heal people in order to drain life from the villain nearby.
- In an episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Quinn challenges a fake faith healer, who weasels out of the test by insisting that they should combine Quinn's medicine with his prayer.
- One episode of Friday the 13th: The Series has a fake faith healer who finds a magical glove that temporarily gives him real healing powers. Unfortunately, it's one of the artifacts the team has to reclaim, and much like the other artifacts in the series, it carries an ugly price — the glove works by transferring the ailment upon its user, which the user can then transfer upon someone else.
- In Hasamba 3G, Elimelech's brother Zerah, a former embezzler, is now a fraudulent "energetic healing" guru known as "The Microwave".
- In one episode of Houdini & Doyle, the pair investigate a faith healer, and eventually establish that the faith was real, but the healing was not.
- One episode of House has a teenage faith healer who seemingly manages to cure one of Wilson's cancer patients. It later turns out that the faith healer just happened to have an infection that he transmitted to the cancer patient, and the infection attacked the cancer cells in the patient's body.
- One episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent involved Logan and Barack investigating a young woman who appeared to be able to cure people with voodoo. They managed to prove that she was a fraud, though not before she nearly convinced Logan that she'd put a curse on him.
- The Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Careless" has the rare sympathetic version. Not only does he believe in his own powers, but he also believes he's responsible for the death of a child — and he's wrong about that too.
- In the Little House on the Prairie episode "The Faith Healer", a faith healer named Reverend Danforth comes to town, and everyone is very impressed by his claims and his apparent faith until a young boy that he supposedly had healed ends up dying. Even with that, Danforth still maintains his grip on Hero Township until late in the episode, when Charles — along with several prominent Walnut Grove residents (Dr. Baker, Rev. Alden, and Mercantile owners Nels and Harriet Oleson) — successfully hatch a plan to expose Danforth as a fraud at another of his tent revivals.
- My Name Is Earl featured a rather young one after Earl fell into a coma. It turns out that when Earl was bad, he and Joy had gone to him for an injured leg and a facial blemish. After the kid cures those, Earl and Joy pull off a robbery that would have been impossible if they hadn't been cured, leading the boy to quit faith healing. Randy convinces him to come out of retirement to cure Earl's coma. It's then revealed that the boy doesn't actually have any healing powers and Earl and Joy were hired by his father to pose as clients.
- One Life to Live's Angela Holiday, who made her living as a traveling evangelist, and would often stage miracles in which she "cured" people of various ailments after fervently praying over them. Her former partner got suspicious upon overhearing her arguing with one of the people she'd "healed", who was demanding his cut of the donations her church had raked in.
- The Outer Limits (1995): In "Revival", Ezra Burnham travels the US with his revival preaching the word of God to a different congregation each week. He claims to be able to sense people's pain and heal them through the power of God's love. In reality, his daughter Sarah takes down the information of various people in the congregation and feeds it to him through an earpiece (similar to what Peter Popoff's wife did using his audience's prayer requests). Ezra then calls the relevant people up on stage and puts on a big song and dance about healing them. If they ever do feel better afterwards, it has to do with the power of suggestion rather than any supernatural powers on Ezra's part. Luke, who later joins Ezra's revival, can heal people but that is because he is an alien as opposed to him possessing any God-given powers.
- Perry Mason (2020): Sister Alice is accused of this by dissident former church members, as one wheelchair-using man whom she "healed" was only temporarily recovered before relapsing (depending on what his condition is, it might have been a placebo effect, which is known to happen from such "healings"-it's not said he's paralyzed).
- In Roswell, New Mexico, Max and Michael chase one down in Texas when they see she's using their alien symbol, thinking that she is an alien like them (as several of them have Healing Hands). She's completely unapologetic about it, saying that if people already dehumanize her as a Magical Native American and Nubile Savage she might as well get money from it. She knows nothing about aliens, but her mother does, as the tribe hid an alien on their reservation for decades until she died.
- Supernatural: In "Faith", the brothers investigate a preacher who appears to be able to invoke genuine healing miracles. It turns out that his wife secretly bound a Reaper and is forcing it to heal the preacher's clients by draining the life from people she dislikes.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Trance", Don becomes the business manager of a supposed faith healer in Panama after the strange voice in control of Leonard Randall exposes their claims about being able to channel the ancient warrior Delos as a scam.
Music
- The Boney M. song "Rasputin" presents the man as one, who convinced the Queen he would heal her son's hemophilia as an excuse to get closer to her. Ironically, in real life the Prince's status did improve under Rasputin's treatment... because unlike his previous doctors, at least he wasn't unwittingly making it worse by giving him aspirin!note
- "Evangeline" by Daniel Amos is about how God can use even a fake faith healer to accomplish good.
- In the video clip for Groove Coverage's song "God Is a Girl", a man in white tuxedo introduces a supernaturally-gifted girl to a congregation of devout people in a modern-looking church temple, with a Christian cross made of neon lights illuminating the stage. The man uses the girl to impress the churchgoers, when in reality he has a hidden operative/hacker discover everything about the person on his computer. Then, the believers are conned into donating funds for the false pastor.
- The televangelist from the Insane Clown Posse song "Hellalujah" is a con artist of this type. He wheedles six thousand dollars from his loyal followers in order to "heal" a kid with a twisted neck, tangled legs, and a crooked spine, and when the healing doesn't actually do anything, he then tries to assuage his followers by saying that the boy's spirit has been healed.
Tabletop Games
- In Pathfinder, priests of the fake god Razmir fill this role, feigning the powers of a cleric to heal people. However, while the source is a lie, it's possible the healing will be real - some use concealed items containing genuine divine magic, others have learned to use arcane magic to cast basic healing spells, and some sorcerers truly can cast divine spells, the power is just inherent to them rather than being from Razmir. This of course serves to lend credibility to the ones who are purely scamming people.
Theatre
- One Setting Update staging of Così Fan Tutte has Despina appear as one (in the original, she's disguised as a doctor throwing around loads of Techno Babble).
Video Games
- This is essentially the position taken by Assassin's Creed: Odyssey with regards to the prayer-based medical treatments of Ancient Greece and is contrasted with the historical figure of Hippokrates, who is considered the Father of Medicine. It's not entirely malicious, though: the game is set during the Peloponnesian War, before medical science as we know it really existed, and many healers in the world of the game are well-meaning but simply don't know any better. Naturally, it turns out that the Cult of Kosmos (read: the Ancient Greek Templars) are behind the parts of it that really are malicious, including efforts to stymie Hippokrates' research and teaching under the pretense of impiety.
- Honey, I Joined a Cult is a nefarious Cult simulator. While you can eventually get into occult matters, the day-to-day operation of the cult is a Scam Religion that fleeces money and influence out of gullible followers via "therapy". You start with sermons in your temple and mediation but eventually end up "treating" people with Spooky Séance, Mind-Control Device, "energy spas", and... burying people in a pool of maggots.
- Neverwinter Nights: When the city of Neverwinter is hit by the Wailing Death plague, several cultists working for the Big Bad infiltrate the city disguised as priests. They hide amongst the priests and healers that are trying to provide legitimate help, and offer "blessings" which they claim will protect people from the plague, but are actually helping to spread it.
- The Roottrees are Dead: Miracle Jr. was exposed as a fake healer when a woman he "healed" turned out to be his sister-in-law in disguise, who was in on his scheme.
Web Animation
- Mr. Men In Real Life depicts Mr. Impossible as having become a faith healer willing to present a sick and dying man, who is all but stated to be aware that Mr. Impossible isn't doing anything to actually heal him, to his worshippers.
Websites
- SCP Foundation: SCP-1521 ("The Most Holy Bank of His Holiness Pope Leo the Tenth, Saint in Waiting") is a Roman-style building that's only visible to certain people where Ambiguously Human entities use things like faith, prayers, and a bath in holy water to help people. It's all a scam and the treatments don't work.
Western Animation
- The Owl House: Played with. Master Waltrop uses his status as a prolific guru to convince Eda's mom to keep purchasing cures for her curse. It turns out that he's a group of goblins whose cures are all bogus. Mrs. Clawthorne is pissed when she learns the truth, and she comes to make the goblins regret it.
- The Simpsons: In "Faith Off", the family runs into a faith healer who slaps people to "cure" them and is believable mostly because everyone presents minor ailments (like smoking) heavily subject to the placebo effect. He and Bart successfully remove a glued-on bucket from Homer's head, making Bart genuinely think himself to having faith healing powers (Lisa attributes this to the hot tent melting the glue and expanding the bucket). He realizes he doesn't when he tells Milhouse his eyes are fixed, causing him to get in an accident.
- Xavier: Renegade Angel: Double Subverted in "Weapons Grade Life". Robbie's father runs a Christian hospital which runs on faith healing. However, when we actually see an operation, it turns out that God himself appears to be performing surgeries and actually saving lives (through prayer, God performs a heart surgery by levitating a scalpel and other implements). But then it's revealed that Robbie is secretly manipulating the instruments using levers connected to strings and magnets.