I want to begin with a wonderful and mysterious story.
It begins badly. In September of 1995, when I was living in Nashville, I was diagnosed with chronic ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disorder with no known cure. The disease attacks your colon and can produce painful, dysentery-like symptoms, and they emerged right away.
By October I was in crisis. I’d lost more than 40 pounds, I couldn’t eat any solid food; every medical treatment was failing. I was hospitalized and met with a surgeon. Unable to ameliorate the symptoms, we started to consider surgery to remove my colon.
I was miserable. I was literally wasting away, in terrible pain. I was also a little frightened by the prospect of major surgery in my weakened state. I prayed, and I reached out to my friends and asked them to pray for me as well.
As the surgery date approached, I got a call from a dear friend, Ruth Okediji. Ruth was the leader of my law school Christian fellowship, and she’s now a professor at Harvard Law School. I’ll never forget her first words. “It’s over,” she said. “The Lord has healed you.”
My initial reaction was frustration. I was resigned to the surgery, and I wanted encouragement, not false hope. As a Christian, I believe that God is real and works miracles. But I didn’t consider that he would work a miracle on me. My prayers were of the conventional kind that I grew up with — prayers that doctors would have wisdom and that I’d have the courage to face the challenge of the surgery.
But Ruth’s prayer was different. She asked God for healing, and she said that God had granted her prayer.
I hung up the phone feeling no different at all. I was still in pain, except now I was also a little angry. In hindsight, I don’t even know why. Perhaps because I wanted to believe, but just couldn’t.
I woke up the next morning without any pain at all. I had no pain the entire day. The next day was pain-free as well, and so was the next. The doctors reintroduced bland, solid food to my diet, and I consumed it voraciously. By Thanksgiving, I’d gained most of my weight back, and a colonoscopy later showed no evidence of the disease at all.
My doctor was surprised. I was surprised (and overjoyed). I knew that ulcerative colitis could have remission periods, but this one stuck. And in the 29 years since, I’ve never had a recurrence.
I know that skeptical readers can offer alternative explanations for what happened. Perhaps I was misdiagnosed. Perhaps despite my initial frustrations with the call, there was some sort of powerful placebo effect. Perhaps there’s another explanation I haven’t considered.
And I’m cognizant as I tell this story of all the suffering people who haven’t experienced this kind of relief. I’m cognizant of my wife’s cancer battle. She’s now cancer-free, but not because she woke up one morning without symptoms because a friend prayed for her; it’s because she courageously endured every step of grueling treatment, from chemotherapy to surgery to radiation under the care of competent and compassionate medical professionals.
I’m sharing this story because America is at a counterintuitive spiritual crossroads. Organized religion is declining rapidly. The fastest-growing segment of American religious life is the “nones,” the people who don’t lay claim to any particular religious affiliation. At the same time, however, there remains an intense interest in all things supernatural, both inside and outside of organized religion.
Outside of organized religion, you’re seeing the explosive growth of psychedelics, including in parts of the American elite. Last year, Kirsten Grind and Katherine Bindley reported in The Wall Street Journal about the psychedelics that “power Silicon Valley.”
“Elon Musk takes ketamine,” they wrote. “Sergey Brin sometimes enjoys magic mushrooms. Executives at venture-capital firm Founders Fund, known for its investments in SpaceX and Facebook, have thrown parties that include psychedelics.”
And it’s not just the power elite. The value of the psychedelic drug market is skyrocketing. Grind and Bindley said it was quite likely to reach $11.8 billion by 2029, a startling increase from its $4.9 billion value in 2022.
Stories of paranormal encounters are popping up across pop culture. In October, Tucker Carlson claimed that he had been physically attacked by a demon in his sleep. Sohrab Ahmari, the former op-ed page editor of The New York Post and one of the founders of Compact magazine, wrote about his own psychedelic experience with the hallucinogenic drink ayahuasca.
“At its most intense,” he wrote, “the ayahuasca ‘trip’ felt like the closest I have ever come to waging a full-on spiritual battle, with the stakes being no lower than my life and fidelity to the one God.”
In my own life, I’ve encountered a number of people who’ve turned to psychedelics. Some have described micro-dosing as “lifesaving” and even beautiful. Others have described it as the most terrifying experience of their lives and talk about encountering “presences” or “spirits” that felt purely evil.
In the church world, the rise of Pentecostalism — and especially the rise of a Pentecostal movement called the New Apostolic Reformation — has led to intense interest in faith healing, prophecy and insights gained from dreams and visions.
Much of this spiritualism is taking place in independent charismatic churches, which are as far from “organized religion” as any church can be while still remaining a church. Independent charismatic churches aren’t accountable to any denominational superstructure. There’s no formal process for ordaining pastors. If a charismatic leader can gain a following, he can build a church, and many millions of people will follow self-described “prophets” and “apostles” when they claim to hear direct revelations from God.
Pentecostal Christians have also created an entire taxonomy of spiritual warfare. In the Book of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul wrote, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Many Christians take this passage to an extreme. They’ll pray against the demonic influences at work. They’ll engage in “Jericho Marches” during which they’ll walk around a school or government building, for example, to claim spiritual dominion over the place and to cast out demonic influences.
Why is this happening? Why would a less religious nation still be so spiritual?
Believing Christians have an answer to this question. God, Solomon wrote in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
In other words, humanity has always felt a pull toward the transcendent, a pull that persists even through the modern era of scientific inquiry.
Since I’m a Christian who has had his own mysterious and life-changing encounter with the unexplained, you might think I’d be enthusiastic about this surge of supernatural interest. But my feelings are much more mixed.
When I first wrestled with the role of the supernatural in my life, I turned to the wisdom of C.S. Lewis. In “The Screwtape Letters,” he wrote: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”
Scripture is replete with both stories of divine intervention in human affairs and with warnings against witchcraft and divination. One even wonders whether experimentation with hallucinogenic “trips” that can lead to encounters with an evil presence is permissible for Christians.
But I’m less concerned with outright demon possession (though the demand for exorcisms continues to rise) than I am with a more prosaic effect of the unhealthy interest in the supernatural — a kind of arrogant departure from the world of reason.
You see this in some of the ambitions of the Silicon Valley elite. In their Wall Street Journal report, Grind and Bindley spoke to Spencer Shulem, a chief executive who uses LSD, and said founders turn to psychedelics because “they don’t want a normal person, a normal company,” before adding that “they want something extraordinary. You’re not born extraordinary.”
It’s seductive to believe that you can hear from God. It provides a clarity that your reason might deny you. It provides purpose in the face of confusion. I’m reminded — in a very different context — of a conversation I had with a Pentecostal law school classmate. “I was with you about Donald Trump,” she told me, “until the Lord told me that he had chosen Trump to lead.” And just like that, the argument was over. I was skeptical, but she knew where she stood.
Second sight. Prophetic visions. Dreams. Mind expansion. The idea that one can gain supernatural insight as a means not just of achieving happiness, but also as a means of obtaining knowledge, wealth and power, is causing many Americans to create their own bespoke religions. It’s feeding the will to power of parts of the American elite and is spreading throughout our society. They’re trying to leverage the supernatural to become Nietzschean supermen.
What is the right balance between a cold scientific materialism that believes only what it can see, touch and discern through pure human reason and unstable supernaturalism, where a person dances at the edge of delusion?
You can see the answer hidden in the verse in Ecclesiastes I highlighted. Yes, God set eternity in our hearts, but also “no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” Our response to the supernatural should be humility and awe, not an arrogant grasp for God’s knowledge and God’s power.
In fact, that’s the biblical pattern. Time and again, when the people of God encounter the presence of God, they’re immediately humbled. They fall on their faces. They become acutely aware of their own sin. They do not rise and believe “I am extraordinary.”
I’ve shared my personal stories because I don’t want readers to dismiss the idea that God is real, that he loves his creation, and that he still moves in our lives. Yet an unhealthy pull toward the supernatural doesn’t just potentially expose us to dangerous darkness, it also tempts all of us toward far more common sins — including instability and arrogance.
I’ve reconciled myself to the supernatural by seeking God’s grace, not God’s power. I’m content with the idea that there are mysteries beyond human explanation, but if we separate ourselves from reason, our delusions will lead us astray.
Some other things I did
I wrote my Sunday column about the election. Was victory ever in Kamala Harris’s grasp? Or were the headwinds of inflation, illegal immigration and global conflict just too great for her to overcome? To make the argument, I used analogy from the wide world of sports:
Sarah Isgur, a longtime Republican campaign operative — and my friend and a senior editor at The Dispatch — has a brilliant sports analogy for the process of campaigning. She compares it to … curling.
For those unfamiliar with the sport (which enjoys 15 minutes of fame every Winter Olympics), it involves sliding a very large, heavy rock toward a target on the ice. One person throws a 44-pound disk-shaped stone by sliding it along the ice, then sweepers come in and frantically try to marginally change the speed and direction of the rock by brushing the ice with brooms that can melt just enough of the ice to make the rock travel farther or perhaps a little bit straighter.
The sweepers are important, no doubt, but they cannot control the rock enough to save a bad throw. It’s a matter of physics. The rock simply has too much momentum.
What does this have to do with politics? As Isgur writes, “The underlying dynamics of an election cycle (the economy, the popularity of the president, national events driving the news cycle) are like the 44-pound stone.” The candidates and the campaign team are the sweepers. They work frantically — and they can influence the stone — but they don’t control it.
The post I Believe in Miracles. Just Not All of Them. appeared first on New York Times.
