In Christianity, visions are supposedly divinely-granted peeks into the secrets of both the present and the future. But in reality, they work very differently. Let’s explore this exciting Christianese concept, see where it originates, and rightly divide the truth between what evangelicals in particular claim is the party line and what they clearly actually practice when it comes to visions.
(From introduction: That anime series I had to watch in its entirety last night; the meme that started it all – TAG YOURSELF! Kupffer cells in real life and in the anime; what if x had feelings; pet humanization; 9500-year-old burial of a guy with a cat (2004); Chinese domestic cats 5500 years ago (2013); domesticated cats were in Poland 8000 years ago (2016-2024); a very involved map of cats’ conquest of the Western world; speculation about why the Bible doesn’t mention cats.)
(This post went live on Patreon on 7/23/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too!)
Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions…
When it comes to visions, outsiders to evangelicalism usually have no idea what they are missing out on. And that’s a shame, because visions can be an absolute blast to experience whether you’re communicating one or listening or someone else relay one.
I’m sure most people are well versed in prophecies. We all know that evangelicals love to pretend Yahweh has told them something about the future, especially as touching the end of the world—which is still coming Any Day Now™!
But visions don’t tend to be well-known outside of evangelical circles.
Imagine it: You’re in church one Sunday. Finally, the pastor’s reached the end of a particularly loud and aggressive sermon. Suddenly, someone stands up and starts moaning and shouting about a vision. Maybe it’s Jesus riding into Armageddon on a pretty white horse. Or maybe it’s the moment after the Rapture whisks all the TRUE CHRISTIANS™ up to Heaven. Perhaps it’ll even be the seven years of Tribulation (intense government-led persecution fer jus’ bein’ KRISchin). Oh yeah, that’ll really impress the crowd!
Maybe you’ll get to hear about a vision in your prayer meeting. Maybe someone thinks Jesus showed them a vision of you moving to Cincinnati and starting up a service evangelism ministry based around a Jiffy Lube franchise. Or marrying someone who looks just like their younger cousin—want to go out with them sometime?
Perhaps your pastor will privately share with you a vision he had of you attending a particular Bible College. Or changing your major to something more grad-school- and seminary-friendly. Or giving him—er, um, your church home some of that inheritance he is guessing you just received from the grandma whose death you shared in your small group earlier.
The possibilities are endless! You’d think it was YouTube or something. Evangelicals get just deluged with little clips and videos of stuff they couldn’t possibly have thought up by themselves!
The party line about visions: What they are supposed to be
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions… [Joel 2:28, KJV]
In Christianity, believers think that sometimes their god decides to give one of his followers a little peek behind the curtain, so to speak. He wants them to enjoy a glimpse of either the future or some secret corner of the present. So he pops an image or phrase or movie clip into their heads with that information. In many ways, the process operates much like someone putting bread into a toaster.
Officially, visions are almost impossible for Christians to have on their own. They only derive from Yahweh. (Well, sort of. Sometimes, visions can also come from demons or the flesh. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit now. I just wanted to mention it here for accuracy’s sake.)
In the Old Testament, Yahweh grants visions to all kinds of people. In the New, they’re not so common. But they do occur, and they’re exactly the kind of flashy display that evangelicals love.
Evangelicals in particular consider visions important because they think the end of the world will feature way more of them than usual. In Joel 2, its author describes what evangelicals think is “the day of the Lord.” That always means the Endtimes.
And a big part of “the day of the Lord” involves visions and prophecies.
The power differential between direct orders, prophecies, and visions
Many evangelicals consider visions a type of prophecy (archive). Not all prophecies are visions, but all divine visions are prophecies. Otherwise, many evangelicals think that visions contain actual pictures or videos, sorta like divinely-sent dreams (which can definitely qualify as visions sometimes), while prophecies are usually messages in verbal form. More than that, though, official prophecies differ from visions in one important way: the power they grant those who think they’ve had one.
A low-level evangelical realizes very quickly that visions are great for bolstering their implied authority over others. They also notice almost immediately that if they can say they had a vision about something they want to do, it can justify their doing it in the absence of any other justification. That’s why so many of these visions involve something that evangelical already wanted to do.
For the rest, I bet outsiders pick up very quickly on the nearly identical nature of prophecies and visions. But to evangelicals, they are culturally different things.
First off, an evangelical who gets a reputation for prophecies often becomes known as a prophet. That’s a high-octane title in evangelicalism! Even if the prophet isn’t acknowledged as such, prophecies usually come from higher-level church members at least. Visions, though, can occur to just about anybody.
Evangelicals can fudge visions a bit. Others won’t necessarily consider it as a prophecy that’s going to happen very soon. For example, pastors often boast of visions of their entire city converting to their flavor of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. Hearing that, everyone will act awed and amazed and happy. They might even clap. But nobody’s going to rush out the church’s front door expecting to see crowds coming from miles around to get baptized. That vision represents more of an extended stretch goal.
Evangelicals often consider visions as potential future situations. In other words, they’ll for sure occur if TRUE CHRISTIANS™ don’t do this or that. In that sense, visions work like the vision of the future that Scrooge had in A Christmas Carol.
Likewise, if a pastor says he had a vision of someone handing him a check for $1200 exactly to cover a minor church repair, that’s not going to fall on anyone in particular. Someone already donating a lot of money might increase the amount to $1200 that Sunday.
Many pastors avoid direct orders. Their congregations aren’t completely broken to heel. For pastors who hold that kind of power, even they prefer to couch their demands in prophecies. With the power of prophecy, pastors force couples to marry or separate, the wealthy to give up their riches, and more.
So if that pastor points his finger at a particular person and says Jesus told that person to give their pastor $1200, that’s more like a direct order. And unlike a vision, which might or might not come true depending on how events unfurl, a prophetic order like that can’t be rejected without costing that pastor some of his control over the flocks.
The party line about acquiring and sharing visions (is purest horseshit)
Naturally, evangelicals believe a lot of stuff about how to acquire visions. Every bit of these beliefs are purest horseshit. For completion’s sake, we shall whisk through those beliefs.
Visions come from both Yahweh and demons, as well as the flesh, which means pulled out of the recipient’s butt. Indeed, megapastor (and pointer of the bony finger of blithering male rage) Kenneth Copeland teaches evangelicals that demons just love to send TRUE CHRISTIANS™ fake visions. Evangelicals should always pretend they totally tested their visions by praying about them and by making sure they don’t contradict anything in the Bible. They should also run their visions through their superiors at church to make sure nothing there would upset those leaders’ hold on power. Um, I mean, they should run everything past their leaders so those leaders, who know so much more about Jesusing, can provide a final quality check of the vision’s origin.
Visions always talk up Jesus’ “holiness, glory, and power.” Benny Hinn offers some coaching for evangelicals who need pointers to make their visions look extra-authentic. Among other hints, he advises that evangelicals should act all shaken up and humbled (yes, I somehow first typed that “umbled”) by their totally real vision experience. He also suggests they figure out a way to get someone to interpret their visions. If they can’t tacitly induce someone else to interpret it, then they’re gonna hafta do the honors. He ends by offering up his own vision: Those who give him gobs and gobs of money will totally be amazingly blessed “in the coming weeks and months!” What are you waiting for, scrub?
Visions totally really happen nowadays, but they’re super-rare. Got Questions cautions evangelicals that they need to be careful about not overdoing the frequency of their totally divine visions. Further, since evangelicals think the Bible is all Christians need, no visions should ever contradict it. Of course, since the Bible can support literally any interpretation, that’s never an issue. But evangelicals mistakenly think that the Bible can only support their own quirky li’l take on it—but no other take.
Other sites coach evangelicals in how to describe their preparations to receive totally divine visions. These tend to be the same everywhere. Evangelicals should talk up their prayer life, Bible reading, and other such Jesusing, describe their constant apologies for offending Jesus, and emphasize their obedience to evangelical rules. Nobody’s ever going to double-check assertions like these, so evangelicals can go absolutely bonkernuts haywire here to lay the groundwork for them seeming like a perfect recipient for a divine vision.
Just about every advice site talks up the danger of demonic visions. And oh, they all act so very, very earnest! In reality, evangelicals might as well fear visions from Doomsday, who killed Superman back in the early 1990s in comic books. But evangelicals love to titillate themselves with their very favorite boogeyman, Satan/Lucifer!
(I see why, though. That series was pure fire.)
These warnings can, of course, be safely disregarded. And they are. They’re just there to make visions sound badass. Despite these warnings’ near-ubiquitous frequency, I’ve never once personally heard of or encountered a single evangelical who even entertained the notion of any nondivine sources of their totally real vision.
Nobody will be testing these visions or holding vision-havers accountable for ones that don’t ever become reality. That goes without saying, of course. A vision simply needs to sound really Jesusy and 100% align with whatever evangelicals currently believe—especially about the culture wars. If these conditions hold true, then nobody in the tribe will dare speak against it—or its recipient. Some sites even blatantly teach that the vision’s effects on the tribe are all that matter.
The Steps to Having Successful Visions
Now let’s turn our attention from the party lines to reality. Here is how visions actually work in evangelicalism.
The topic of a vision is extremely important, of course. Visionaries should carefully read the room before revealing visions. The culture wars are always a great vision topic. But then, so are visions about the Endtimes. If one wishes to achieve more generalized fame, these are good. Otherwise, if one wishes to maintain a lower profile, look for more local topics.
Over the years, Hinn has described various totally real divine visions he’s had. Since he wanted to be a worldwide-level evangelical leader, they involve his idol, the alleged grifter and liar-for-Jesus Kathryn Kuhlman, “anointing” him to continue in her footsteps. Rank-and-file evangelicals tend to restrict their divine visions to glimpses of their future spouse or work opportunities Jesus totally wants them to take.
It’s best for visions to start out fairly minor and build up. The more the recipient shares visions, the more confident they get when they realize the tribe won’t ever investigate further!
Uh oh, speed trap: Cold and warm reading
Either way, visions tend to look a lot more like cold/warm/hot reading. These are parlor tricks used by disreputable tarot readers, so-called psychics and mediums, and palm readers.
To perform cold reading, the charlatan makes an educated guess about the person wanting their predictions. The charlatan has no other information available about their mark than what they can deduce from surface-level social and physical cues. With practice, the charlatan can get really good at cold reading. Most of us give off dozens of little cues about ourselves every minute without even realizing we’re doing it.
Hot reading involves having tons of solid, fairly deep information about the mark that the mark isn’t aware of the charlatan having. It’s what Peter Popoff famously gathered for his divine healing sessions. He had attendees write down their personal information along with their current concerns on cards. Then, his wife transmitted the cards’ info via radio waves to an earpiece he wore. Since the attendees had no idea he was simply reciting what they themselves had written on their cards, they all thought Jesus was feeding him this information.
Warm reading is mostly cold reading with a liberal sprinkle of what are called “Barnum effect statements.” These are statements that apply to literally anybody, like “Sometimes I just want to be alone.” Even the most outgoing person wants a little “me” time sometimes! But when someone thinks that a Barnum effect statement was tailored for them in particular, they tend to believe it uniquely applies to them and them alone.
Evangelicals tend to be surface-level and transactional, with a dysfunctional authoritarian culture that is completely cookie-cutter. As a result, warm reading tends to be very successful with them. A warm reader only needs to say stuff like “Sometimes, you really don’t feel like you fit in/are Jesusing as well as everyone else/are getting a handle on defeating this whole masturbation thing/etc.”
It’s okay to use any of these forms of reading to create visions, obviously, but vision creators need to be very careful about hot reading. It can go disastrously wrong if the information is inaccurate—or if the mark ever figures out that the creator obtained that info.
The place of visions in evangelicalism
Evangelicalism isn’t just surface-level and transactional. It isn’t even just the societal equivalent of Brutalist architecture.
It’s also a prime example of high-control Low Christianity.
When pre-1990 evangelicals fused with fundamentalists, the results featured the worst of both worlds. Though obviously many modern evangelicals consider themselves quite the scholars (and a very few might actually be so!), their overall membership is marked by an utter disregard for critical biblical scholarship. What they have now even at the college level—as we learned a while ago—looks a lot more like an apologetics tract at best. At its worst, it looks like an average Sunday night sermon with my former Pentecostal crowd.
In short, evangelicals reacted to fundamentalists back then the same way that Ian’s parents reacted to Toula’s parents in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It baffled us fundamentalists to no end that they accused us so often of extremism and disorderly, orgiastic worship devoid of all learning. And they got frustrated with us treating them like they were stupidly denying themselves all the best stuff about Jesusing.
Fundamentalists: We all nice to them! You see it! And they look at us like we from the zoo. This no work, Maria! They different people. So DRY. That family is like a piece of toast! No honey, no jam, just DRY. . . I try to put a little marmalade, but no! They don’t like that! They like themselves all dry and cracky!
As products of the fusion, modern evangelicals are very interested in dramatic, theatrical displays of faith. Though not all evangelicals speak in tongues even since the fusion, many now do. (None of my evangelical friends in college accepted the practice. It still startles me to encounter evangelicals who are all for it now.)
Those who don’t still often enjoy shouting, clapping, loud singing, or even jumping or sorta-dancing.
For those evangelicals who find even those practices to be a bridge too far, they may consider visions and prophecies to be some of the only acceptable ways to exhibit a totally divine touch on their lives.
Visions tell evangelicals that Jesus is still interfering with the laws of reality to help his followers out a little. He still loves them best. He still wants them to have a little heads-up about their situation.
The liminal, oogly-boogly factor of visions
There’s another reason evangelicals love to offer visions to their tribe—and to listen to one being offered.
Evangelicals love to feel what I’ve come to call that oogly-boogly feeling. It’s that out-of-place feeling of something having the wrong context or no context at all.
It’s why parents get freaked out when their very young children say things that sound like they came right out of a horror movie. And it’s also why that teenager who created “The Back Rooms” video series, Kane Parsons, is now well on his way to being a Hollywood moviemaker.
Humans are very carefully attuned to context cues in how we engage with others and our environment. When those cues are missing—or worse, wrong for the situation—it makes most people very, very uneasy.
So nice houses should not echo or feel foreboding. Cabinets should not slam shut on their own, and doors should not creak open in the middle of the night. Young children shouldn’t talk about previous lives. Cats should not stare at the very edge of the floorboards in that one cold corner of the living room. Oh yes, cemeteries keep being way too open, and yet they are way too intimate for comfort. (The grave is, after all, a fine and private place. But none, I think, do there embrace.)
When that exact feeling of something being seriously wrong here occurs in a religious situation, I call it an “oogly-boogly feeling.” To me, it manifests as a sparkly feeling across my upper chest. When it hits me, I freeze with anxiety and excitement, but I remain on the very cusp of running for cover.
On the plus side, though, visions’ intense liminality and misfiring cues work against them in one very important way. They can exist only in one context that includes both describing the visions and receiving those descriptions with reverential awe. When divorced from the context of religious belief and practice, visions and their supposed recipients look absolutely ridiculous: pretentious hucksters selling headlight fluid and snipe feed to the rubes.
Evangelicals have learned one thing over the years, at least, about maintaining visions’ liminality
Sure, Jesus could be straightforward. He could communicate with people in ways that can be objectively tested and measured. Oh, but where’s the fun in that?
Hmph, we heathens always do make these demands, don’t we? We’re such killjoys! We expect a real-world god to leave real-world footprints behind in the real world when he futzes around with it. How could we!
But we must. Otherwise, we could use evangelicals’ own arguments to support the existence of any god—or unicorns, for that matter, or Doomsday and Superman. Alas, not a single believer in any religion that has ever existed has managed to provide any real reason to believe that their god is the one and only real one who matters. And if we don’t psychically swear fealty to him and obey his self-selected leaders, he’ll set our ghosts on fire forever after we die.
Evangelicals comfort themselves in the face of our skepticism by telling themselves that even if they did provide any support for their claims, we would refuse to accept it. That’s been a standard-issue evangelical excuse for years.
See? So evangelicals’ lack of evidence becomes evidence—if you just look at it the way evangelicals do!
And then we laugh, and everything falls apart.
Mostly, though, evangelicals keep their visions to themselves and their own communities. It’s been a very, very long time since any of them tried to get my attention by claiming Jesus had shown them a vision about me. Maybe I don’t give off the most gullible vibes. I don’t know. Whatever it is, I’m glad of it. Evangelicals telling me about their visions have never liked my reaction.
They’d like it even less if I asked why their god keeps sending them such stupid visions when he should be warning them of all the predatory preachers, financial fraudsters, and assorted miracle fakers and testimony deceivers infesting their ranks from top to bottom. Somehow, that inept god of theirs always forgets the practical things, doesn’t he?
So we all win if evangelicals don’t make a big fuss about their supposed visions where we heathens can hear it.
NEXT UP: The utter failure of service evangelism as a form of recruitment. We’ll explore this newest way to totally fail to revive evangelicalism next time. See you soon!
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