Chapter 30

Answering the “Heaven Tourism” Critics

A. The Critic’s Argument

In January 2015, a sixteen-year-old boy named Alex Malarkey published an open letter that shook Christian publishing. Five years earlier, he had been the subject of a runaway bestseller. The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven was supposed to be the true story of his journey to heaven during a horrific car accident. The book sold over a million copies. Pastors recommended it. Bible studies discussed it. Churches showed the trailer. Then Alex wrote his letter. “I did not die,” he said. “I did not go to Heaven.” He had made it up.¹ Lifeway pulled the book from its shelves. Tyndale House pulled it from print.² The story had been a lie all along.

This is the kind of thing that makes Christian critics like Raymond Lawrence and Jim Osman lose sleep. And honestly, they have a point. Heaven tourism—that is the term Osman uses for a whole genre of bestselling books in which someone claims to have visited heaven, written a memoir, and made a lot of money in the process—is full of this kind of mess.

In Blinded by the Light (1996), Episcopal priest Raymond Quigg Lawrence Jr. argues that the near-death experience (NDE) movement—an NDE is what some people report after their hearts have stopped or they have come close to death—is not just sloppy but spiritually dangerous. He had personal experience. As a young man he was part of what he calls an “NDE cult” led by his own uncle.³ The uncle taught what he called Christian theology, but it was really New Age theology with a thin coat of biblical paint. Lawrence’s worry is not that one or two books are bad. He thinks the whole NDE phenomenon is being used as a vehicle for serious spiritual deception. The God of NDE-land, he argues, is not the God of the Bible. The “light” people meet is not Jesus. The teaching is universalist, sentimental, and morally weightless.⁴

Jim Osman, in Selling the Stairway to Heaven (2015), takes a different but related angle. He goes book by book through three of the biggest sellers in the genre—Don Piper’s 90 Minutes in Heaven, Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is for Real (the Colton Burpo story), and Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven—and shows that each contains specific theological claims that do not match Scripture.⁵ Piper describes a heaven where time does not pass; Revelation says otherwise.⁶ Burpo’s son says things about Jesus that cannot be reconciled with biblical doctrine.⁷ Alexander’s “Om” experience sounds more Hindu than Christian.⁸ Osman’s case is patient and detailed.

Both critics’ core charge is the same. NDE accounts are unreliable. They often contradict the Bible. And they have become a profitable industry that trades theological seriousness for emotional impact. A great many Christian readers cannot tell the difference between real evidence and a well-told story. Christian publishers do not seem eager to help them. The Malarkey retraction is exhibit A.

If we are going to make a serious case from NDEs for substance dualism—the view that human beings are body and soul together—we have to deal with this. Honestly. Without flinching. Because if all we have is heaven tourism, then Lawrence and Osman are right, and there is nothing more to say.

But heaven tourism is not all we have. Not even close.

B. Identifying Weaknesses

I want to grant the critics what they have rightly earned. Some popular NDE books really are sensationalized. Some really are theologically careless. Some really are made up. The Malarkey retraction is real. Burpo’s book raises real questions. Embraced by the Light by Betty Eadie really does teach a kind of New Age universalism that does not match Scripture.⁹ Lawrence and Osman are not inventing problems. They are pointing at real ones.

But two weaknesses run through both of their arguments.

The first is a category mistake. Lawrence and Osman treat “the NDE phenomenon” as if it were a single thing—roughly the same as the books on the bestseller shelf at the airport. But the NDE field is not the same as the heaven-tourism genre. Heaven tourism is one slice of a much larger and much more rigorous body of work. 90 Minutes in Heaven is not from the same universe as The Lancet. Todd Burpo’s son is not in the same conversation as Bruce Greyson, M.D., chairman emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, who has spent fifty years collecting and analyzing NDE accounts under a research microscope.¹⁰ To critique the airport bestseller and conclude that you have refuted the Greyson NDE Scale is like critiquing a tabloid headline and concluding you have refuted the New England Journal of Medicine. The two genres do not even share an audience.

The second weakness is what I will call guilt by association. Both books, but Lawrence’s especially, treat the failures of certain authors as if those failures contaminate the whole field. Lawrence’s uncle was in an NDE cult. Therefore Raymond Moody is suspect. Therefore Kenneth Ring is suspect. Therefore the entire research enterprise is suspect.¹¹ Osman, more carefully, focuses on three specific bestsellers, but his concluding chapter draws sweeping conclusions about all “heaven visitations.”¹² Yet most of the cases that matter for the dualism argument are not visitations at all. They are short, specific moments of veridical perception—cases where an experiencer accurately reports something they could not have known by ordinary means. The patient who sees the dentures the nurse put on the cart in another room. The patient who describes the surgical instruments she could not see. The blind woman who reports details of the operating theater for the first time in her life.¹³ These cases are unimpressive as theology, because they were never trying to be theology. They are impressive as evidence, because the patients accurately reported things they could not, on a brain-only model, have known.

Both weaknesses can be summed up in one sentence: the strongest evidence for substance dualism is not in the books Lawrence and Osman are critiquing. You can grant their critiques in full and still have a powerful empirical case left over—because the empirical case rests on data the critics, by and large, never engage.

This is not a minor oversight. Lawrence’s book has no serious treatment of van Lommel’s hospital data, no engagement with the AWARE study, no discussion of Holden’s 92 percent accuracy finding. (To be fair, much of that work was published after his book; but his framework leaves no room for it.) Osman’s three reviewed books are all popular memoirs—he does not claim to be reviewing the academic literature. So when their conclusions get used by other critics to dismiss the academic literature too, the work being done is rhetorical rather than evidential.

C. The Pro-NDE Response

Here is the distinction I want to insist on. There are two very different things that can both, technically, be called “an NDE account.” The first is what I will call a book-length narrative. Someone has a near-death experience. Years later, with the help of a co-author, they publish a memoir. The memoir is shaped by their theology, their personality, their publisher’s expectations, their cultural setting. It runs three hundred pages. It is full of dramatic scenes. The selling point is the journey: what heaven looked like, who was there, what was said.

The second is what I will call a clinical report. Someone has a near-death experience. Within hours, days, or at most weeks, a researcher interviews them—often using a structured protocol like the Greyson NDE Scale, which assigns numerical scores to specific reported features.¹⁴ The report is short, narrowly focused, and—crucially—often includes elements that can be checked against the medical record, the operating room logs, or the testimony of staff. The selling point is not the journey. The selling point is the data.

These two genres serve very different purposes. They can include the same person; Don Piper, for instance, has spoken to researchers and not just to publishers. But the standards of evidence are radically different. Heaven-tourism critics have done excellent work on the first kind of account. They have not seriously engaged the second.

To see why this matters, consider three short examples.

In 2001, the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel published a prospective study in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. He and his colleagues followed 344 cardiac-arrest survivors across ten Dutch hospitals. They interviewed each patient soon after resuscitation. Eighteen percent reported some form of NDE.¹⁵ Among them was a man whose dentures had been removed during emergency intubation. The nurse who removed them had placed them in a drawer of the “crash cart” that the unconscious patient could not have seen. A week later, the man recognized the nurse, told her exactly where his dentures had gone, and accurately described the room and what had happened during the resuscitation. Chapter 4 treats this case at length. For now, just notice: this was published in The Lancet. Not in a memoir. Not on a Christian bestseller list. The Lancet. Lawrence does not engage it. Osman does not address it. It is not heaven tourism. It is medicine.

Or consider Maria’s tennis shoe—a 1977 case in which a migrant worker named Maria, recovering from a cardiac arrest at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, told her social worker, Kimberly Clark, that during her arrest she had floated up out of the room and seen a man’s tennis shoe on the third-floor ledge of the hospital’s north wing. The shoe, Maria said, was worn on the little-toe side and had a lace tucked under the heel. Clark, skeptical, went to look. The shoe was there. Worn spot exactly as described. On a ledge no one in Maria’s room could see from the inside.¹⁶ A patient described an object she could not see. The skeptic who went looking found it. This is not theology. This is not a vision of heaven. This is verifiable perception while the brain was not perceiving.

Or consider the work of Janice Holden, professor at the University of North Texas. In 2009, she published a chapter in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences in which she analyzed every documented out-of-body NDE perception report she could find in the published literature. There were 93 cases. Of those, 92 percent contained no inaccuracies. None at all. Only 8 percent contained any inaccuracy, and those inaccuracies were minor.¹⁷ This is a stunning statistic. It is also not a memoir. It is a meta-analysis. It is the kind of work the academic field actually does. And it does not appear in the heaven-tourism critique books.

I could keep going. The AWARE study and AWARE II are large, multi-hospital, prospective studies of cardiac-arrest patients.¹⁸ The IANDS Journal of Near-Death Studies is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that has been publishing rigorous research for over forty years. Bruce Greyson’s After draws on five decades of disciplined clinical work. Critical-care physician Laurin Bellg’s Near Death in the ICU collects accounts from her own bedside practice—accounts that include verifiable details and were recorded without any commercial pressure.¹⁹ Rivas, Dirven, and Smit’s The Self Does Not Die documents over a hundred cases of veridical perception drawn from medical and academic sources around the world.²⁰ None of this is heaven tourism. None of it is what Lawrence and Osman were critiquing.

So what do I make of the Malarkey retraction? I think it is, oddly, good news. Here is why. If the NDE field were what its harshest critics describe—a credulous gang of true believers willing to swallow anything—Alex Malarkey’s lie would still be in print. Instead, it was caught. It was caught because of the very kind of scrutiny Lawrence and Osman are calling for. Christian critics looked at the book and said, “This does not match Scripture.” Tyndale and Lifeway eventually listened. The book is gone. The system worked. What the case actually shows is that the genre is policeable—and that careful scrutiny of NDE claims is exactly what we need more of, not less. The serious researchers have been calling for that scrutiny for fifty years. The peer-reviewed literature is harder to fake than the airport bookstore.

There is one more thing to say in this section, and it is theological. Lawrence’s deepest fear is that the NDE message is replacing the gospel. He worries about what happens when a Christian reads Embraced by the Light and concludes that all paths lead to the same loving Light. That is a real worry. But it is a worry about interpretation, not about evidence. We treat the theological compatibility question fully in Chapter 28. Here it is enough to say that conceding bad theology in some NDE memoirs does not concede the empirical case. The veridical evidence stands. And, as J. Steve Miller has carefully shown, when you actually count up the elements present in NDE accounts as a whole, the surprising presence of Jesus and the scarcity of anti-Christian elements is striking—hardly the picture a uniform New Age propaganda would predict.²¹

What does that mean for the Christian reader? It means we can hold three things together. First, we can take Lawrence and Osman seriously when they critique a popular memoir. Second, we can refuse to let those critiques stand in for an engagement with the academic literature, which is a different conversation entirely. And third, we can let the data tell us what it tells us—that human consciousness, on multiple well-documented occasions, has operated when the brain was not in any position to be operating it. That is not heaven tourism. That is a fact in search of an explanation.

D. Counter-Objections

Two objections will come back at me here.

The first: “Even academic NDE researchers have New Age sympathies. Raymond Moody has dabbled in past-life regression. Kenneth Ring has written sympathetically about reincarnation. Pim van Lommel speaks the language of nondual consciousness. Are these really safer guides than Don Piper?” That is a fair concern. But it misses what we are using these researchers for. We are not asking Moody for theology. We are asking him for data.²² Moody himself does not claim that his case files prove any particular religious doctrine; what he claims is that something happens during clinical death that does not fit a brain-only account. That much, the evidence shows. From there, the Christian reader is free to ask theological questions on biblical ground. Lawrence’s worry, which I share, is what happens when readers do not bring a framework and simply absorb whatever the popular author hands them. The answer is to teach a framework, not to refuse the data.

The second: “If you grant that some of the most popular NDE books are theologically suspect, haven’t you already conceded too much? Doesn’t that taint the rest?” No. Consider an analogy. The Shroud of Turin has attracted plenty of frauds, exaggerations, and sensationalist documentaries. None of that touches the question of whether the actual cloth in Turin is, or is not, what its defenders claim. The popular literature around a topic is not the topic. Critics often—and Christians especially should—need the discipline to distinguish between the popular claim, the academic claim, and the empirical fact. Heaven tourism critiques the popular claim. Out of Body, Into Truth engages the academic claim. The empirical fact, by the time we are done, will be left intact for anyone who wants to look at it.

Lawrence and Osman have done Christians a service. They have warned us, rightly, against reading popular memoirs as if they were Scripture. They have asked good questions about specific theological errors. But they have not—and never claimed to have—closed the larger empirical case. That case rests on the Lancet, on AWARE, on Holden, on Greyson, on Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, on Bellg, on the cumulative weight of fifty years of careful clinical work. To that cumulative case Chapter 31 will return.

Heaven tourism is not the evidence. The evidence is the evidence.