Tory Shepherd: To lay your hands on someone and believe you’re healing them is something else

It matters when the PM believes he has a supernatural power and a God-given right to inflict it on people, writes Tory Shepherd.

The room was darkened, the murmurs of anticipation spreading through to the back seats. The star speaker – charismatic and famous in the Pentecostal community – started talking.

I lost an hour or so. The next thing I remembered was the lights coming back on as though it was 2am at a dodgy nightclub when everyone’s make-up is smeared and the magic has evaporated.

People were touching me.

Not in a sexual way. But it shook me up in a way that I still remember. The congregation at the Paradise Assemblies of God (as the mega church was known back then) talked about how I’d been filled with the love of Jesus, and they were doing a “laying on of hands”.

My best friends at a new school were from Paradise and we’d made some sort of deal that I’d half pretend to be interested, so we could stay buddies.

And it was pretty trendy. The Assemblies of God, which is now part of the Australian Christian Churches (ACC) network, hosted evenings populated by a bunch of cool cats.

It was before Guy Sebastian made it properly cool. There was lots of gel, lots of Jazz aftershave. It was a party with evangelism at its heart.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks at a national Christian convention on the Gold Coast.

Pastors would talk about how they knew there was sin in the room. Teenagers conceded those sins. A cheeky cigarette, a drink, sexual behaviour. The youngsters would out themselves, shame themselves, to be forgiven, absolved and welcomed back to the fold.

I’ve found out since – from a qualified psychologist – that I’m quite susceptible to suggestion, to hypnotism. That’s something that sits awkwardly with my idea of myself as a rational humanist, but there are tests that show it’s probably true.

I’ll never remember exactly what happened that night except for the bit where the hands were being laid on me and the murmurs about Jesus’s love and my apparent salvation. And I remember my utter panic.

I ran to the street and found a payphone (look it up, kids) and called my Dad, who jumped in his Datsun 180Y, scooped me up and took me home.

People thought they’d channelled supernatural healing powers, but it felt invasive. So, obviously, I baulked at the revelations this week that Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he’d hugged traumatised people while sneakily doing a laying on of hands.

Sure, they’d consented to a hug – but not a religious blessing, or “healing”.

In a video from the Australian Christian Churches, the peak Pentecostal body in Australia, the Prime Minister talks about how God called him to lead, and about a visit to the Pilbara to visit victims in the aftermath of Cyclone Seroja.

“I’ve been in evacuation centres where people thought I was just giving someone a hug, and I was praying,” he said.

“And (I was) putting my hands on people … laying hands on them and praying in various situations,” he said.

Many religious faiths use the laying on of hands. In Pentecostal churches, it’s done for healing. The ACC describes it as a “prayer for the sick upon their request with the anointing of oil and laying on of hands” (my emphasis).

To be clear, people thought they were getting a hug, and he’s conceding that, under the guise of a hug, he believed he was channelling a healing force into them. All this in the context of a national conversation about consent.

There are people who’ll pray for you, and that’s one thing. Some will ask for permission to pray for you, and that’s just polite. To lay your hands on someone and believe you’re healing them is something else – especially when Pentecostals have a history of “praying away the gay”.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t believe the Prime Minister has a supernatural power that he is beaming into unsuspecting parties. What matters is that he believes he does. That he believes he is doing God’s will, and that he has the right to inflict that on other people.

And this is from a Prime Minister who has previously been pictured forcing handshakes on unwilling people.

He doesn’t have to keep his religion to himself – just those “healing” hands.