The Pilot's Daughter

The Pilot’s Daughter rides the prosperity gospel movement across the Texas panhandle to follow my family’s quest for a faith healer to save my father’s life. In 1997, my father, a healthy thirty-eight-year-old pilot, was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. He rejected medical dictum, joining my mother, a woman of spitfire and brimstone, in seeking divine intervention from such drifters as a traveling evangelist, a Romanian anti-communist huckster, and a local prophet who led services called “Miracles on 34th Street.” How did two white, college-educated adults come to plead holy for a miracle? I trace my family’s history and discover that my father, like thousands of military pilots, consumed drinking water tinctured by carcinogens from military-grade fire-fighting foams. Though we believed faith could earn my father’s survival, toxic water had already determined his fate. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my family was part of a sea-change in how over 40 million American evangelicals have come to view science as the devil even as the landscapes we call home erode and with them, our lives.